A major part of all MMORPGs is the death and respawn system.  Each game has a somewhat unique take on being killed in its living, breathing world.

For example, Star Wars Galaxies has a cloning system, where you die and then are cloned at the nearest town with somewhat damaged items and wound damage (damage that does not heal over time).

World of Warcraft has a corpse running system.  When you die, your ghost spawns at a graveyard and you need to run from the graveyard to your body in the ethreal space.  The alternative in WoW is ressurecting at the graveyard, with more severe damage done to the durability of your items and a ressurection sickness debuff that makes your character nearly useless for ten minutes.

In City of Heroes, you would simply respawn at the nearest hospital with “experience debt” that crept backwards into your experience bar.  In order to continue progressing towards the next level you would have to clear away all of your “experience debt.”  To make matters worse, if you die with “experience debt,” more gets piled ontop of the old.

In addition to death, almost all MMORPGs that I have encountered have had a sort of ressurection system where certain classes would have the ability to, at a cost, raise their comrades from the dead in the field.  Ressurection is a very important aspect of raiding in World of Warcraft as it allows for guild to always be at full strength and moving, not having to wait for dead comrades to rejoin them.

In Episode III, Darth Sidious made mention of Darth Plagueis’ obsession with immortality.  What was not mentioned in the movie was that Darth Plagueis was experimenting with ways to create life using midi-chlorians.  Now certainly the events of The Old Republic occured thousands of years before the time of Darth Plagueis, the manipulation of              midi-chlorians to produce life can be another plausable excuse for ressurection in the world of The Old Republic.

How will Bioware tackle this important issue of death and respawning?  The Star Wars galaxy certainly does lend itself to the idea of clones, so perhaps they will try an alternate take on cloning.  Or hopefully, they will be creative and devise a new system all together.