Now take a look at the other side of the credit. Let's say extremely hypothetically that suddenly in the middle of The Force Awakens, Luke Skywalker namedrops Revan, even if only as a 'legend from the past', or there's some other extremely minor reference to a BioWare-created location or character. The internet would lose its collective marbles for the entire next month, for one thing. Once you canonize even a little bit of the Old Republic era, that pretty much brings it all in. What that would open up are doors to merchandizing. Instead of three or four Lego sets, we could have one for each ship (Imperial Agent's next, please!), two Fleet playsets, all kinds of things. There could more readily be SWTOR merch at Disneyland and Disneyworld. Eric Musco would be able to stop answering the canon question at every Cantina Tour event. It would dampen the worries that the game might suddenly vanish in a puff of illogic at Bob Iger's whim.
Of course, there's a dark side for being canonical. Yes, that joke had to be made. The negative side about being canonical is that stepping over the line is no longer permissible. Those fun Halloween outfits and the TRICK-R Treatment Chamber would be a thing of the past. The thinly-veiled Christmas-themed mounts would no longer be available. They might even take Life Day away (gasp!) - remember that the Star Wars Holiday Special is NOT canon. The day-to-day oversight of story will be far more strict under a fully-canon operation, which in turn will lead to more focus on known locations and races and less on creating new things out of whole cloth like BioWare did with Taris in KOTOR and Makeb in SWTOR. That then leads to the question of whether the Lucasfilm Story Team has time to fuss with this MMO when they have movies and cartoons and comics to shepherd that admittedly are even more in the public eye than SWTOR. This isn't like a decent-sized game studio where you have teams for various projects within the same game whose work doesn't impact the others.
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Do I think that there's a possibility that SWTOR will be declared canon? Well, it's not impossible, since no one has made an official statement saying yes or no, either from BioWare or from Lucasfilm or Disney. You'd think that if the answer was 'no', they'd just say so up front and be done with it and focus on other things. Community Manager Eric Musco skillfully dodged the question at last year's PAX East Cantina Tour by saying that it doesn't matter and that what matters is whether or not it's Star Wars. Studio General Manager Jeff Hickman likewise declined to answer when I brought it up to him at the PAX South Cantina Tour just last month. BioWare's famous tenacity in not answering questions that they cannot answer for whatever NDA-driven reason is firmly intact here. However, one can speculate what it might mean to know that the April Cantina Tour will be at or around Star Wars Celebration – an event they were noticeably absent from two years ago, although that was prior to the creation of the near-monthly events. It might be little more than their usual 'rent a bar near a major con' thing like they normally do around the PAXes, ComiCon, and GamesCom – the PAX South one being an anomaly that required a con badge to get in – and it simply being a coincidence that it's a Star Wars convention.
On the other hand, speculation hat firmly in place, it might be the time to announce something big. With the sad cancellation of BWA's Shadow Realms, all the folks who were doing double duty on both games or single duty on SR can now rubber band back to SWTOR unless they've already been reassigned to help with Mass Effect 4 and the Dragon Age: Inquisition DLC mentioned in Jeff Hickman's cancelation post on the Shadow Realms site. That fits very well with the fact that James Ohlen said straight up a few months ago that there would be a SWTOR 4.0. Hickman's post seems to strongly imply even bigger news than we were already told about in Bruce Maclean's Producer's Letter that had been revealed at PAX South and formally published this past Monday. There's a lot of hype going on, certainly, but things seem to be building toward something. Celebration would be the perfect time to drop a few bombshells on the SWTOR fanbase, so we'll have to see.
Personally, I'd love to see even the tiniest reference in the new movies pointing back to SWTOR, or any kind of official statement of canonicity, if only to see the internet lose its mind.
