Tis the season for surprising announcements! The latest is from BioWare, who has officially let the cat out of the bag: Star Wars: The Old Republic will indeed be launching in Australia and New Zealand in 2012.

In a post on the game’s forums, community manager Stephen Reid has revealed plans for a “spring” launch.

Right now we are targeting March 1st, but that could change as our number one priority is making sure that customers have a great service to play on.

For those of you who may have already imported the game, we will be investigating solutions to allow you to continue to play on a local server once they come online in March.

…yep, you read that correctly: Local Servers.

Star Wars: The Old Republic is one of the most eagerly-anticipated games of the year – a massively multi-player online roleplaying game based in the Star Wars universe. The game officially launched in Europe and the U.S. on December 20th.