The Queue: What ever happened to Star Wars: The Old Republic?

Yes, this is a Queue about another game. But at the same time it’s about WoW and what sets it apart from the rest of the industry year after year.

I stared at my screen with an intensity burning behind my eyes. The reflection in those eyes is of my dead character’s body in Alderaan, gnawing at the core of my being having wasted the last four hours on an attempt to down the final boss in the quest chain. I failed. Everyone was failing. I was in a top 100 raiding guild and I knew how to play these games, at the time I was making a living by explaining to millions of others how to play them. Many others died too, at different points unable to progress or find a path forward that wasn’t rooted in 2004 mechanics. But it didn’t matter. I rage quit for the first time in my life. I delete the game, unsubscribe, and left in the comments a simple phrase uttered by a Jedi Master in a galaxy far, far away: “You were supposed to be the chosen one!” It was late December 2011, and it was already the beginning of the end. Star Wars: The Old Republic had become unstuck in time.

The above is true.

I have been, I am, a fan of what BioWare makes. I know that the company has undergone some crazy changes over the years, but whatever — I enjoy their stories, even when friends of mine sound off against them. They might not always be the best, but they keep me entertained. When Star Wars: The Old Republic was going to be released I was excited that WoW was finally going to have some legitimate competition. WoW was an MMO that dominated the marketplace and no one had really been able to crack the egg open yet and provide it with a real competitor. This lead to Blizzard getting lazy with things like Cataclysm and other expansions; sometimes the content was too routine, and other times the game felt stale. Blizzard was, I thought (and still do), resting on its laurels. What could possibly dethrone the king?

Star Wars. The Republic vs The Empire. Good vs Evil. A game that had a backbone of lore, story, and universe with more complexities and depth than Warcraft.

I had followed its development for years. Many of us did. We had all though it, even started a blog in anticipation of it; SWTOR had a shot at being the chosen one to provide WoW with a competitor.

And then … it released. Three primary problems existed with SWTOR:

1. Poor systems at launch. When you played SWTOR you expected things like the group finder and the other systems to be present because they were in WoW. They were not, and that generated an initial huge problem for the game. The group finder wasn’t released until patch 1.3 in mid 2012, and the talent system was more-or-less a carbon copy of Classic WoW’s system. Neither of these things held a candle to the way the industry was trending then for the past several years; the dungeon finder in WoW was introduced in 2009. SWTOR lagged from the start.
2. The content was not tuned. In my opening remarks I went through my own experience in getting through the game at the early stages of its lifecycle. I admit that others found ways around, however I was by no means the only person to jump on the SWTOR bandwagon only to abandon it shortly after when the content was either completely laughable in difficulty or so much harder than it needed to be. No game is fun on a mass scale if the boss can’t be killed.
3. Grinding. The mechanics of the game encouraged you at points to grind out XP the way that WoW did in 2004. People were literally hunting mobs for experience, killing a ton to fill gaps in the leveling curve to open up the next batch of new quests. This experience is something that was completely foreign in modern AAA game titles after Burning Crusade launched (don’t quote me here, I’m sure there’s an exception or two); but SWTOR living seven years in the past resurfaced this poor mechanic.

These three basic problems created an environment where the game crashed shortly after launch. It shortly went free to play, and then entered a strange timeline of major system overhauls and introduction of new content. Enter 2015 and the Knights of the Fallen Empire expansion releases and the game, more or less, goes through it’s Cataclysm phase to reset. Things look up. The story content is good, there’s new characters and systems that are introduced which are modern and feel like a game worth investing time and money into, and generally life is ok.

In mid-2016 the current expansion, Knights of the Eternal Throne, is announced and launches at the end of the year. Everyone is thinking that this is great, Bioware has their head on straight and is going to be releasing episodic content at a regular schedule that’s going to keep the fanbase happy and engaged. No one was clamoring for a graphics overhaul or much more than new content, raids, and PVP (and okay, people wanted the original companions back, but that’s another story). But here are where the cracks start to show.

Two big issues come up:

1. A lack of meaningful new content. The key word here is meaningful; there has been level bumps, there’s been new stories, but there hasn’t been a whole new raid tier, new bosses, entirely new content to explore in quite some time. Granted the last expansion has seen a continual development of the story take place, with new chapters of the story coming out every few months, but that’s not all there is to a game. There’s very little to keep people around after the story content is released; so there are a ton of people that do just what I do — pick it up for a bit, play through the new content, and then drop off.
2. A lack of commitment from BioWare and EA to continue the game’s development at a meaningful pace. It’s been almost two years since the last expansion, and while yes, the story has advanced, the ways in which the game has moved has returned it to feeling stale and route, much like Cataclysm was for WoW. While BioWare and EA would correctly claim that they have resources dedicated to SWTOR, I don’t feel that they can rightly claim that there is meaningful commitment to developing the game any further.

A lot of the above statement will hinge on what comes next. It’s rumored that a new expansion will be announce sometime before the end of the year, and if that happens, wonderful — but it will need to take on a gameplay that diverges enough from what exists right now to keep a base of players entertained for any length of time beyond a dive back into the story and a cursory glance at other systems. Given EA’s lackluster support for the game and a the continual churn and iteration on base systems (I’m looking at you, Galactic Command), I seriously doubt that this expansion will be anything more than the current game extended another five levels and ten or so chapters.

Take a look at WoW in comparison to this. They have also gone through major system changes, but rarely do they undertake major iterations in the middle of an expansion; and their system changes are generally well thought out and make sense. That doesn’t mean we all have to agree with Blizzard’s decisions and direction, but no one can say that WoW is just a system that’s designed to encourage constant use of microtransactions and that Blizzard doesn’t care about the story and core gameplay.

Where SWTOR was supposed to be the chosen one, in many ways WoW realized this and took up the mantel. After Cataclysm’s end game issues, things go better for the game overall. Yes, even everyone held up in their Garrisons during WoD wasn’t nearly as bad as the end of Cataclysm (I am saying this from an overall perspective of the community’s feeling towards that timeframe, I didn’t personally find it that bad). I’m not saying that SWTOR is responsible for WoW’s continued success, the timing might just be coincidental, but I do see a fundemental different philosophy in game development and corporate change between BioWare and Blizzard. One embraces it with thoughtful actions and long introspective, the other is more reactionary and undisciplined.

At the end of the day what happened to SWTOR is what could have happened to WoW if Blizzard didn’t learn from its mistakes and make some hard decisions. Entire systems have come and gone, but the addition and removal has always served a purpose — to enhance the player experience in both major and subtle ways. SWTOR tries to do this, but ends up falling short as it creates more problems for itself.

I don’t want this Queue to sound like a hit piece on The Old Republic, it’s not. I’m critical of the way both Blizzard and BioWare have developed their games, and I love playing all of their titles. I get the Star Wars itch about once every six months, and I’ll happily pick up the subscription again and level another class, complete with a unique story that intertwines into the whole narrative. Don’t get me wrong — there’s a lot of great things about SWTOR, it still has huge potential, even to this day. But it is important to ask what happened to The Old Republic, because in doing so we can look at the paths of two great stories and games, and how one went down into the dark side, while the other took the brighter path.