EA: The Old Republic has 200+ hours of play per class

Star Wars MMO The Old Republic will feature over 200 hours play for each class, according to EA Games’ Frank Gibeau.

In an interview with gamesindustry.biz, the EA Games manager downplayed suggestions that the publisher had overspent on the game.

“I don’t pay much attention to that talk, I get a lot of questions from analysts and press about it,” he said. “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.”

[We assume that by “multiplayer” Gibeau is referring to the Warzones – PVP arenas.]

“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.”

In short, Gibeau’s line is that the huge development costs will pay off.

“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?”

Rumours have suggested that EA may have invested as much as $300 million in The Old Republic, although the publisher has largely kept quiet on the matter. However, last year EA’s chief financial officer Eric Brown described the game as “the largest R&D project EA has ever undertaken in terms of total dollars that we expect to spend bringing the title to market.”

On paper (well, screen) “200 hours of gameplay” for each class sounds impressive, especially given that there are eight classes (Gibeau got that wrong). While it’s hard to be definitive about these things, that seems to measure up well against the volume of content offered by WoW.

All the same, there’s no doubt that this number is less important than the anonymous (and no doubt huge) budget figure. EA is going to need a hefty subscriber base to make its money back, but with the Star Wars license and the BioWare name attached, it’s certainly got a roll of the dice.