SWTOR: Setting part 2

Daniel: One of the things we had to do – we had to humanize the Sith Empire. We had to make sure that people understood that every evil regime that's ever existed in history had good people in it. That the majority of people were good people trying to do their thing. We always laugh at some of the really old Star Wars products where you got to play the dark side and you'd come in and the guy goes, "Dark greetings! It's a good day for evil!"

It was really important that you couldn't play a game and have a community and have friends if that's how you saw yourself. You didn't want to be a cartoon. So now you're 60 hours in, you're playing light side, you come up to this huge choice – because we still have all of the very big choices we've always had in BioWare games that are going to change your story – so you're a big BioWare fan, and you're playing this, and you get to that choice and you know exactly what you want to do, and you look for the save button ... and you realize there is no save button.

Daniel: You think, "I'm going to make this choice, and it's going to be my choice forever. I'm never going to know what would have happened if I'd have gone down the other route." It makes not only the individualism of the Sith story, but the power of making these choices stronger than they've ever been in any BioWare game.

You said these are the original Sith. Does that explain the dark skinned characters we've seen in some of the screenshots?

Daniel: Let's do a little nerdism here. Many, many, many years ago on the planet Tython (which is also another planet in the game) there was a group of Force users who began to develop the very early moments of what would become the Jedi code. There was also a group of people who said, "Man, you guys are really uptight!" These two groups had a great conflict. The good guys chased the bad guys off the planet. The bad guys fled out into space – this happens a lot to the poor Sith. So the dark Jedi found the actual Sith race, who were a red-skinned group of people that were very, very highly Force sensitive. They interbred with them – you do still get some of the blood of the old Sith in there – but then "Sith" then began to mean the culture, as the group of people who were actually from the original race is actually a much smaller group than the people who then colonize them.

The two planets we're talking about are Tython, the ancient home world of the Force users that become the Jedi – and this is actually where Jedi will start out and train. There was a very large portion ... the Jedi council actually objected to the signing of the treaty with the Sith Empire and they thought, "Hey, it's a trap! They're the Sith and they're going to do horrible things!," Ackbar was screaming, nobody would listen to them. In the history of the thing, all of these people went to sign the treaty, they got killed, Corusant got sacked, and then they got forced into a much, much worse treaty. The Jedi left Corusant, saying, "Hey, you guys aren't really listening to us anyway, we're going to back up and do our own thing." They went to Tython – that's where you start training – and Korriban obviously was one of the first worlds the Sith were like, "Uh, that's ours, give it back."

Will we see Mandalorians or Mandalore in the game?

Daniel: Not stuff I can talk about. I can say that I love Mandalorians. I'll leave it at that.

With thousands of years in the Star Wars timeline, what made you guys decide to go back to the Knights of the Old Republic era instead of picking something that hadn't yet been explored?

Rich Vogel, Co-GM BioWare Austin: We're actually basing it 300 years after the Knights of the Old Republic games. 300 years is a long time. Think of 1708 ... the Napoleanic wars hadn't even happened yet. That's how much time we're talking about in 300 years. We still have a lot of freedom. At the same time it allows us to pull from a lot of the things that people enjoyed from those games. We might be able to do some cameos for some characters from Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2 ... the ones that could live for 300 years. There are some in there.

We can also take some of the themes from Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2 and explore them more in our game. There were quite a few questions that weren't answered at the end of Knights of the Old Republic 2 that we can answer in The Old Republic.

James Olen, Studio Creative Director: Also to add to that, in the video it showed we are interested in exploring that era. It has tremendous appeal, and on our side we definitely wanted to return to that. These guys at BioWare created that, and that was a big deal for us.