EA: 200 Hours of Content for Each Class in The Old Republic

While there are reasons to be skeptical of these numbers, it’s worth noting that the president of Electronic Arts’ Game Label, Frank Gibeau, told GamesIndustry that each class in Star Wars: The Old Republic will have 200 hours of gameplay content, not including elements such as crafting and raids. It’s difficult to say whether these 200 hours include branching dialogue, different story paths and other such things, but, at the very least, it’s safe to say that it points out to a wealth of content being available right from the start. Here’s the entire quote, in which Gibeau also mentions that Ultima Online is still “widely profitable” for EA:

Q: Speaking of Star Wars, there has been a lot of speculation on the game in terms of the cost, and EA has said itself that its one of the most expensive projects its ever been involved in. Can you clear up any of the chatter that suggests you’ve over spent on the game?

Frank Gibeau: I don’t pay much attention to that talk, I get a lot of questions from analysts and press about it. What I try and concentrate on is, is it a good game and is it ready to go? You look at a game that has 200 hours of gameplay for each of the six classes, and that doesn’t include the crafting, the raids, the multiplayer. It’s vast. It’s a gigantic game. And that costs money. But when you get one of these launched they persist for a long period of time. Ultima is on its first decade and it still has tens of thousands of subscribers and is widely profitable for us. It’s just the nature of the beast that you have to build this amount of content. Do I wish it wasn’t this expensive? Absolutely, but I think everybody does. At the same time it doesn’t really do us much good to comment on how much it costs. Ultimately what matters is whether it’s a good service and do people really like the game?

Thanks, Eurogamer.