Star Wars: The Old Republic Preview

Another preview of Star Wars: The Old Republic comes our way from Level Up News, where the author brings us some firsthand impressions from the Star Wars Celebration V event.
This brings me to the biggest question I had about TOR: How are the individual character stories going to intertwine with the group stories? It's always seemed to me that BioWare bit off more than they could chew with their goals of how the story will play out. For months now I've had visions of team members coming across a specific character only to have half the team say, (Wait, I already killed this guy!)

But that's not the case, according to the writers. We were given the analogy of Star Wars IV: A New Hope, specifically the Death Star scenes. Han, Chewbacca, and Luke team up to go rescue Princess Leia, Obi-Won Kenobi disables the tractor beam, while C-3PO and R2-D2 deal with Stormtroopers. Then later, Han and Chewbacca go one direction, Luke and Leia a second, Obi-Won a third, and C-3PO and R2-D2 a forth. Eventually they all wind up back together, but have individual adventures along the way that contribute to the overall story. I got a sense of what they were referring to with the analogy, but I still would like to see a demo to experience the storytelling for myself.

After the writers finished, the artists stepped in. There is a (ton) of artwork that needs to be created, and they have plenty of artists to help. The goal of the artists, like the writers, is to give fans the Star Wars experience, and make sure the overall look of the game matches the story and gameplay presented.