In an interview with PC Gamer, BioWare Director James Ohlen shared an interesting nugget about the recently launched Star Wars: The Old Republic: that in the early stages of development, before they had nailed down the Star Wars license with Lucasarts, the doors were wide open as to which story-rich property they might attach their game to.

Obviously all went well and they ended up building on the experience garnered from their original Knights of the Old Republic RPG, but some of the alternatives they were considering are very intriguing indeed:

“We had backup plans,” said Ohlen. “In all the design team was like three of us at that point, in total. So we were looking at doing a Lord of the Rings MMO, a Silmarillion MMO, a kind of a Gunslinger-esque Dark Tower MMO, a Game of Thrones MMO.”

“Each setting has different strengths, ” Ohlen added, describing the 10 page documents that the team drew up at an early design stage. “If we were going to do a Game of Thrones MMO, what kind of rules and what kind of gameplay elements would really bring that world to life? Each one had that, but we always focused on the story at the fore.” In those early stages, a compelling narrative was more important than the setting. “When we were first were deciding on what kind of game we were going to build, I really wanted to do a story-based massively multiplayer game because hey, it hadn’t been done before,”

To find out how their Star Wars venture turned out, swing by our latest review

Star Wars: The Old Republic launched yesterday in North America and Europe, but is not due for a local release in Australia until Autumn 2012.