Jeff Hickman, one of the key guys behind World of Warcraft: Space, er, Star Wars: The Old Republic, has revealed some of the plans that BioWare have for the game, this year.

In his "State of the Game" announcement, Jeff chose to be cryptic about the upcoming 1.7 update, only revealing that there are going to be some changes about a "special" PVP area and some news about Gree Enclave (no idea what that is, but that sound potentially stupid). He also added that there's a lot of interesting stuff added to the Rise of the Hutt Cartel digital expansion that will appear this spring.

Some more vague love was directed towards "elder game" – that's SWTOR for "end game" (it barely won against "autumn levels" and "senior playtizens") – content. This is supposedly the number one priority for this year and level 50 can expect new Operations, new Flashpoint, new difficulty modes and PVP areas – and the whole Rise of the Hutt Cartel being targeted at them. There will be more activities to do with your companion, more group challenges, more reasons for guilds to recruit, more itemization and so forth. This should not only attract new players, but also please the high level ones – probably those who played this game since the beginning and are more likely to keep spending money on it.

The second issue was open world PVP – surprise, you're not getting any this year! They will focus their energy towards PVP Warzones and Seasons. They will be testing a new organic approach to Open World PVP – probably something to do with shooting space hippies, I assume.

While were talking about issues that are hard to code... Gay marriages! Or, to use the space politically correct term, Same Gender Romances (because when you shorten it to SGR, it sounds like some sort Assault Doom Murder Squad).  Yeah, they're on the way, but it appears that coding gay NPCs is harder than just making 10% of Wookies pink. Jeff also says that transition to Free-to-Play also comes between us seeing hot Twi'lek babes making out in the streets. You have to understand them, though: putting all those limits on F2P players and adding all the text saying "avaunt, ye smelly peons" was really hard. They also stated that they're adding SGR NPCs to Makreb, proving once and for all, that being a weirdo who wants to marry a game character is not exclusive to straight gamers.

Also, I don't know why they placed such high importance on gay marriages in the first (read: some time before the release of the damn game) place. Everybody knows that the greatest amount of slash fiction was written about Captain Kirk and Spock.

So, what's your take on the New Year resolutions from BioWare? Are your Space-Coffindodger characters eager for some fun? What do you thing about the importance of open world PVP and the ability to marry the Rodian that you love? Discuss, ye masses!