Star Wars: The Old Republic goes dark in preparation for launch

It's as if a million gamers cried out in... you know what? We've done that joke too many times, as has everyone else. We're officially declaring it off-limits for the remainder of this game's history. It's a trap, trust us.

And you thought that intro smelled bad... on the outside!

OK, it's all out of our system -- as is Star Wars: The Old Republic. As the game nears its official December 20th launch date, BioWare is bringing down both the servers and the website in preparation for the momentous event. From 7:00 p.m. until 12:01 a.m. EST, SWTOR will be inaccessible.

BioWare says that as the game comes back online at midnight, the studio will be adding "a large number of new servers" to facilitate the influx of launch players. Even so, the studio predicts that queues on popular servers will be present and urges players to consider rolling characters on lesser-populated realms.

Because of the recently instituted grace period, early access players have until 3:00 a.m. EST on December 22nd to register their product codes or be cut off from gameplay.