BioWare’s James Ohlen, project lead on Star Wars: The Old Republic, believes their upcoming MMORPG might be “the biggest online launch in history.” A bold claim indeed, yet who knows, it might just be.

“The thing about a massively multiplayer game is that it’s different from any other game out there, because you have this vast online community all over the world online at the same time, and you have to make sure there’s no way for your game to be hacked,” Ohlen told Gamasurta in an interview, in which he also said that the devs are currently polishing tiny little things such as tutorials and menus and the like.

“You have to have very strong security, your game has to stand up if you have hundreds of players in one zone at the same time. There’s a lot of things that we’ve never had to worry about at BioWare before.

“And the fact is, because of the hype around the game right now, our launch numbers are predicting something really huge, which means we have to be ready for the biggest online launch in history essentially, which has made it really tough. We’ve been running a lot of tests, just making sure we’re going to stand up when we launch.”

BioWare recently announced that Star Wars: The Old Republic, their upcoming MMORPG, will be releasing on December 20 2011– and that is a confirmed release date.

BioWare has released a new video for their upcoming MMORPG, Star Wars: The Old Republic, showing another one of the playable classes in the game, Smuggler, and its progression.

Be warned- if you play TOR as a Smuggler, you will have to rely on your “wit and guile just as much as the blaster at his side.” The description also elaborated that the more your- the Smuggler’s- bounty grows, the higher threat your enemies will pose.

However, as the Smuggler progresses, he/she will gain more skills and “utilize more powerful weapons and armor ” to trounce over his enemies, and, of course, “to survive.”

Other classes for The Old Republic, like Trooper, Bounty Hunter, Jedi, Jedi Consular, and more have also been revealed till now, and more are soon to come. The Old Republic does look pretty good right now, and the analysts believe it’ll be so good, it can sell 3 million within its first year.

BioWare, however, does not want to rush their MMO’s launch. They say they do now want a repeat telecast of what happened to Blizzard with World of Warcraft, with its somewhat spotty launch. The release date of the game, they say, is ‘tied to the beta’.

It will release within this year though, exclusively on the PC.

EA Labels boss Frank Gibeau told CVG that while EA does have a general release window in mind for the upcoming MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic (Holiday 2011), the fans’ reaction to the beta, which has seen two million sign-ups till now and will be launching in a couple of days, will be what decides the game’s actual release date.

“We’re driving towards a date, but the very issue you raised is why we’re not announcing a date yet because you want to make sure that these services can last a decade,” Gibeau said.

“It is definitely tied to the beta test feedback that’s ongoing and so far, so good. We feel good about the date that we’re heading towards but you’re right, you could have a Crazy Ivan show up in the September/October beta test and be like, ‘wow, I’ve got to fix that’.”

EA is looking to avoid the technical errors that marred the launch of Blizzard’s MMO, World of Warcraft.

“You’ve got to have a great launch and as more and more user feedback comes in we make those polishing decisions on what we’re going to get right and nail.

“The other thing is, the technology of standing these things up and then getting all the server farms to work together, talk to one another, store character records… it’s extraordinarily complex and so we want a very stable experience.

“We don’t want to happen to us what happened to WoW and a couple of other services where in the first week there were queues trying to get on to the servers, the entire service crashed – we don’t want that to happen. So we need to nail and make sure that it’s up 24/7 and it’s high quality.

“We’re totally focused on quality, so whatever the beta test tells us is what will be the determining variable on when we will hit.”

BioWare announced at PAX over the weekend that they will be starting a beta for Star Wars: The Old Republic starting September 2- this Friday.

BioWare will be emailing random invites to some of those who have registered on the game’s website. Doesn’t matter if you’ve pre-order the game or not- as long as you’re registered, you can get the code.

Star Wars: The Old Republic will release at the end of this year.

Thanks, Massively.