With the recent announcement of Star Wars: The Old Republic, the newest Star Wars MMORPG based in the Knights of the Old Republic era, much speculation has been made towards the future state of Star Wars Galaxies. In a recent interview with Massively, SOE CEO John Smedley showed that he too was in the dark about this project. The future of SWG according to him is unknown. At least, that is what he wanted the fanbase to believe in that interview. Thanks to my many industry connections I’ve gotten insider info leaked to me about the future of SWG. It’s future is based entirely on an upcoming expansion slated for 2009. Details after the jump…

Our trustworthy source at SOE Austin has told us that the TOR announcement caught the entire SOE dev team offguard. They knew that SWG would be retired eventually, but not this soon.

“We were pissed. SOE Austin only works on SWG. With all future games slated to other studios, here at Austin we were left with one clear possiblity to where this was going: closing down SOE Austin and laying off the staff,” my source told me during a phone conversation.

LucasArts had agreed to release one more expansion within the following year as a “last hurrah” for the game. Both companies knew that dwindling subcriptions would mean much downsizing for SWG. TOR would be a devastating blow for SWG, so devastating that the resources required to keep the game running would be greater than the funds garnered from active subscriptions.

“We’re fighting back. We’re gonna give TOR a run for it’s money. And the only way to do that is to bring back a significant majority of the former player base,” my source said.

And here’s the kicker. The next expansion is going to be so tempting that current and former SWG players will think twice before jumping ship to TOR.

“We’re bringing back pre-CU servers.”

The conversion process of all current game content to pre-CU standards has begun. In early 2009 there will be a server merge, where the low populated servers will be shut down and players from those servers will be given free character transfers to select servers. The shut down servers will then be later reworked to pre-CU standards and relaunched with new names for the expansion. According to my source, they’re not allowing character transfers from NGE to the pre-CU servers. Everyone will start with a clean slate.

“Everyone here is very optimistic at this plan. We feel that this will keep SWG alive for another 5 years. We’ve got people working around the clock re-coding the current game.”

Features already being tested are the return of DoT weapons, battlegrounds, and buffs. I was also assured that the combat queue would be brought back along with a special badge for gullable people like yourselves who read this article and got a chubby. Haha fuckers!