Star Wars: The Old Republic Isn’t On The Decline, BioWare Says
A whole lot of hype led up to the release of Star Wars: The Old Republic late last year, but all of that fan interest seemed to die out rather quickly after more and more of the game’s playerbase hit the level cap.
This led some analysts to speculate that Star Wars: The Old Republic had already peaked, and that its subscription base–reportedly in the 1.8 million range–was already starting to show signs of a decline. Not so, says BioWare.
“Although the Internet loves to pronounce the doom of all things, what we’re seeing is a huge increase in activity with [update] 1.2 as people return to see all of the new content,” SWTOR lead designer Daniel Erickson told Rock Paper Shotgun.
“The community has generally been excited about the direction the game is going as we finish up our last must-have quality of life features (group finder, etc) and can start concentrating full-time on creative things like the world events.”
Erickson went on in the interview to touch on lessons learned at BioWare during the Star Wars: The Old Republic beta, and the first few months after release, and how those lessons influenced how the developer plans to tackle future content.
“Although we had not originally planned the game to be heavily PVP-focused, the ease of getting in and playing the Warzones combined with their fun design gave us the highest PvP participation of any modern triple-A MMO,” he said. “At that point we turned a huge amount of our resources to PVP development, but we’re still playing a bit of catch-up, and that is understandably frustrating to our most advanced PVP users.
“The second [lesson] was that the better your leveling content, the longer people would play in single sessions, and that when people are playing an average of five-or-six-hours-a-pop, they devour your content at an amazing pace. That meant moving more teams to end game content earlier than we had expected.”
Are you still enjoying Star Wars: The Old Republic? If not, what would it take to draw you back in?
