In October BioWare and LucasArts finally took the wraps off their MMO project Star Wars: The Old Republic, much to the delight of BioWare and Star Wars fans everywhere. The game still does not have a confirmed release date, but today BioWare and MMO middleware firm Simutronics revealed that The Old Republic is being built on the HeroEngine platform.

According to Simutronics, "HeroEngine allows for development in real-time, enabling teams in different geographic locales to build the world and play the game live on the server simultaneously. Updates and changes to the game environment are instantaneous, negating the need for nightly builds and code crunching, which significantly reduces the notoriously long MMOG development cycle."

"The team at BioWare is creating an incredible experience, and we're honored that they've selected our tool to help them build this epic world," said David Whatley, Simutronics' Chief Executive Office and HeroEngine Chief Designer. "We've invested years of experience and our passion for virtual world entertainment into developing HeroEngine, and we're confident that fans and online gaming enthusiasts alike will be happy with the finished product."

"Our goal was to partner with a platform developer that knows online gaming and virtual world development, and the team at Simutronics has an excellent track record in that respect," said Gordon Walton, Co-Studio Director at BioWare. "Their HeroEngine was specifically created for building MMOGs and it allows for a great amount of flexibility in the way our entire team collaborates."

While BioWare could have built up the engine and tools it needs in-house, going to an external company for the game's engine also seems to be more cost effective. Neil Harris, Executive VP at Simutronics, told GameDaily BIZ, "BioWare saw HeroEngine as a time saver as well as a money saver. Rather than spending several years building the tech they could launch right into pre-production. They were able to dive right in and prototype online game-play collaboratively. This is one if the most important features of HeroEngine -- your team is all online together in the same environment that will eventually host the players. All the tools are online and you can build rapidly from day one. HeroEngine represents the essence of agile game development."

He added, "BioWare has been very public in telling people how much more cost effective it was to license HeroEngine than to build their own tools. The economics are clear -- by licensing our engine developers are only paying for a small fraction of the development and support, which is shared with many other teams. The cost savings amounts to millions of dollars on a major project and the game can get to market much sooner, too."

Star Wars: The Old Republic will be a unique MMO in that it will be heavily story-driven – an aspect that BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk believes will ultimately give the game far more consequence. "It's actually a neat concept compared to what typically you see in story-based games where people can explore all the choices. In this one, once you make a choice, you're done," he remarked in a recent interview.