Steven Crews of the MMOGamer got a chance to sit down with BioWare's Blaine Christine, Producer on Star Wars: The Old Republic for an interview that sheds some light on some of the game's more controversial aspects.

One of the major points the interview hits on is the rampant speculation by many MMOG fans that The Old Republic seems more like an online single-player game than a true tradtional MMOG, and Blaine Christine took some time out in the interview to address that:

The MMO Gamer: From the beginning, BioWare has always pitched story as the centerpiece of the game. But you’ve also said that this is going to be a true, “traditional” MMO—and in a traditional MMO you spend about 99.95% of your time engaged in killing things.

So, is story really the centerpiece of the game, or is it combat?

Blaine Christine: That’s a great question, and another important point: Essentially, if we break it down, and this is really rough in terms of percentage…

We’ve talked a lot about story as we’ve delivered demos over the course of the summer, but a very important message is in terms of time spent, you’ll spend more time in story in our game because we have the fully voiced system, and we have the conversation trees instead of just getting a quest from a quest-giver that is text on screen…

But in terms of how you play the game, it’s going to be a relatively small amount of time that you’re going to spend in these conversations. Let’s say roughly 10-20%. Whereas the rest of the time, we’re assuming, you’re going to be running around.

There is exploration, there is combat, it is a wide-open world. Going to have crafting and harvesting, going to have guilds and social activities…

We certainly expect you’re going to spend a lot of time doing that. We don’t want to mislead people into thinking, there’s been speculation out there, “It just looks like a single-player game!”

We’re trying to really get the message out, all of the other stuff is there, it’s just a little harder to demo that. Of course we want to demo the coolest stuff, and things that we feel is new into an MMO, but all of the other stuff is definitely going to be there.

Find out more about the single player speculation, and why anyone would want to play anything other than a Jedi in the full interview over at MMOGamer.

Thanks go out to user mrroboto40 for the tip!