Star Wars: The Old Republic
has a big show at E3: gameplay demos, new cinematic trailers, and
revelation of the first raid, etc.. But Star Wars fans are also eager to
hear some info about the beta, unfortunately, they may be disappointed
again, as Daniel Erickson, lead writer of SWTOR reveals that there will
be probably no Open Beta for the game.
It may be a disaster for those 1.5 million people who have registered
for SWTOR beta. OK, if there's no Open Beta, what about Closed Beta? On
talking about CBT, Daniel Erickson says that if there's a closed beta
it'll be released close to release date, thus, you may know both CB date
and final release date at the same time. As for the release date, it's
still slated for 2011. In that case, the rumor of the release date has
been pushed to 2012 is obviously not true. All the information about
beta testing is included in the interview below. Besides, there are
other questions regarding on the gameplay and some footage in the video.
Daniel Erickson doesn't clearly tell why there will be no OBT
although he mentions the game's large fan base and everyone wants to
come and play. It seems that BioWare is confident of the game's quality
for they have been running small scale test quite a while and keep
inviting new gamers into the testing. Another reason, as swtorstrategies points out, may be that "BioWare wants to preserve their storyline as much as possible."
Source