One of the first Q&As has shown up. Popular website Tentonhammer managed to sit down with Daniel Erickson, Lead Writer for BioWare Austin and put some decent questions to him.

Here is a snippet -

So what's this about Typhon? What occurs on this planet?

Daniel: Tython is actually where the Jedi will train and start out in the game. The Jedi Order actually opposed the signing of the treaty with the Sith Empire, because they thought that it was an obvious trap and something awful was going to happen.

After the events occurred with the treaty, the Jedi pulled back to Tython so they could do their own thing.

You can read more by visiting Tentonhammer (http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/47137)

I find this somewhat troubling:

"The level of writing and quest building that was acceptable in Knights of the Old Republic would not be accepted in SW: TOR. Mass Effect came out and absolutely set a new bar for this. We're coming out and saying that we can push that even further.

I always tell my writers, imagine the first response you can ever choose in any quest you write is, "Excuse me, I'm saving the world. Is this important?" And then, does it fit?"

I have a hard time reconciling his assertion that Mass Effect raised the bar when it did exactly what he just said he tells his writers not to do. The main plot was focused on the galaxy-ending threat of the Reavers, yet you spend a large portion of the game searching for minerals, scavenging corpses and miscellaneous wreckage for worthless loot, and doing various random quests that had no relation to or impact on the main plot. It was padding, plain and simple. While I enjoyed Mass Effect, it's hardly the best RPG of all time, and I find it disturbing that he holds it up as the gold standard.

I have a hard time reconciling his assertion that Mass Effect raised the bar when it did exactly what he just said he tells his writers not to do. The main plot was focused on the galaxy-ending threat of the Reavers, yet you spend a large portion of the game searching for minerals, scavenging corpses and miscellaneous wreckage for worthless loot, and doing various random quests that had no relation to or impact on the main plot. It was padding, plain and simple. While I enjoyed Mass Effect, it's hardly the best RPG of all time, and I find it disturbing that he holds it up as the gold standard.
Sounds exactly like an MMO so far. So, if we get an MMO that holds that Mass Effect style it could turn out to work a lot better in the MMO format than the Single-Player format.

The Mass Effect style is a good standard to work towards because it felt much more like a multiplayer game missing the other players than a single player RPG.

Just a thought.