The idea is that even though in the films etc, the Empire is bad, that doesn't mean everyone is bad, since some might help people in need etc, and same on the flip side where the Rebels/Republic are the good guys, but doesn't mean that some might not be bad and randomly kill people in the name of justice.
looks like it might be an interesting game, however they are listing "Flashpoints" as a major new feature.
basically a flashpoint is an instanced event, which you can do in any MMORPG, with a few cut scene's thrown in (eg like Guild Wars 1), and the only probable new thing they added is that the cut scene's are determind by what you do in the instance/s. So in other words, it's alternative ending so players can have a certain amount of replayability.
if instances are a major feature, this game will probably be shit as hell, and even then it's gonna be heavily influenced by what George Lucas commands. I used to play Star Wars Galaxies in the early days when it was an original MMORPG and fun to play, then Lucas stoved his fat arse in and commanded that the rebels are the good guys and are supposed to win and forced them to make the game unbalanced so that rebels would win 9 out of 10 times. that's when i stopped playing cos i was Empire and i couldn't be arsed to get raped or restart from stratch (only 1 character was allowed at a time, unless it was a jedi character, but they had permanent death after 3 resurrections)... then they realised their fuck up and changed the game further so it was more like a 3rd person shooter.
so i'm prob still a bit bitter from one of my favourite games being hacked to death, but when you have a game that allows you to make a user created city, full of hospitals, political buildings and peoples houses they can go in and out, as well as military buildings, and have hundreds of people running around trying to destroy an outpost like some massive war against 2 player cities, and then have some nob come along and say, "nope, denied, you all fail cos i made star wars and you didn't so i say what goes", meh, you don't trust the franchise of games anymore
will be a game worth keeping an eye on but is likely to be released a similar time as guild wars 2, so they can suck it as far as i'm concerned