“I felt a great disturbance in the gaming community, as if a million souls cried out in sarcasm ‘No, REALLY? I never freakin’ GUESSED!’.”

Bioware’s mystery MMORPG is Knights of the Old Republic Online.

I have a bit of a public relations background, and I’ve been knocking around the MMO community for several years now, so let me lay out the scenario for EA/Bioware/LucasArts as it has stood up until today.

• They’ve had an MMO in the works for quite some time at Bioware.
• They’ve stayed characteristically closed-mouthed about exactly what it is.
• The internet has been tossing the “Bioware’s making Knights of the Old Republic Online” rumor around for quite a while.
• Bioware previously said that the release window for their MMO was “late 2010 or early 2011″.
• There was no announcement of specifics at E3 about the MMO, to the extent that, when asked by a Massively reporter “How’s KOTOR Online coming?” in a Q&A session, developer Dan Tudge said “I…don’t know what you’re talking about,” which was followed by a PR rep for EA/Bioware saying “Good answer.”

A well-planned and well-executed Imperial plan, designed to keep the MMO community in the dark as long as possible.

And then along comes Jar Jar John Riccitiello, Chief Executive of Electronic Arts, in an interview with the well-known platform for breaking MMORPG news, the Conde Nast Portfolio.

“We’ve got two of the most compelling MMOs in the industry in development,” said Riccitiello. The first title, based on the Warhammer property, will launch soon. “And the one that people are dying for us to talk to them about — in partnership with Lucas, coming out of BioWare, which is, I think, quite possibly the most anticipated game, full stop, for the industry at the point when we get closer to telling you about it.”

Does Riccitiello mean the oft rumored Knights of the Old Republic Online? “Yes,” he said.

Okay, sure. This is how they planned on announcing KOTORO. Nothing on the Bioware site. No mention at Lucasarts.com. Zip over at EA.com. Just a three-sentence comment and a one-word answer.

This is either the best tease in history, or one of the bigger heartburn-inducers I’ve ever seen for a PR department.

I mean, how do you call the Chief Executive of the company on the carpet for a good old-fashioned butt chewing? However, let’s ponder a result of this announcement that hasn’t really been discussed since this was revealed:

The clock is now running on Star Wars Galaxies…the only question remaining is “How long until it sunsets?”

I can’t see LucasArts allowing two Star Wars MMOs to run simultaneously; of course, as I said above the projected release date for KOTORO would most likely be in early 2011 at best, which means that SWG doesn’t have to vanish by the end of the month. But SWG has been hurting for a while now; how many new subscribers can they actually hope to attract to a game that now has a fairly definite shelf-life?

It will be very interesting indeed to see what effect this has on SWG, both short-term and long-term.

And could someone please run by Smedley’s house and check on him? If he was eating dinner when he heard about this, he may need the Heimlich.

Tags: Bioware, games, gaming, mmo, mmorpg, Star Wars