No companion character deaths in Star Wars MMO

There will be no companion character deaths in BioWare’s upcoming MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, according to a recent Q&A panel at San Diego Comic-Con 2011.

Senior creative director of BioWare James Ohlen addressed the audience question of whether companions can die, stating:

“Well the answer is, we wanted to do that and had that in prior games like the Knights of the Old Republic series where you had to choose between companion characters. In Star Wars: The Old Republic though because it’s an ongoing game that you’re going to have a companion character for possibly years, we have kind of avoided that as a storytelling mechanism.

“We don’t want to take away your companion character forever because unfortunately what we found through testing was that players would make that choice just to see what happens and they would get really mad that their companion character is gone forever, you can’t reload the game.”

He added: “Our original strategy was if people are dumb enough to kill their companion, they’re just going to have to deal with it but there were just way too many people who were saying, well, ‘are they really going to kill my companion character?'”

There is still no official release date for Star Wars: The Old Republic despite rumours of BioWare announcing the date at this year’s Comic-Con.