At least two or three times a year, my heart turns back to Star Wars: The Old Republic. I may only revisit for a few days or a few weeks, but no matter what the length, it’s always a welcome visit back to an MMORPG that once was a consuming passion of mine and took up hundreds of hours of playtime.
Play SWTOR for freeI’ll try out a new character or revisit my Chiss Agent I’ve had since launch day. It’ll be good — and I’ll still lightly mock the way that everyone holds their side when they’re injured — but I won’t stick around for too long. It’s never a long-term return, and there are probably a few reasons for that. At the top of that list is the fact that I feel that I’m waiting. Waiting for a fresh start. Waiting for this dev team to rewind the chronometer and call the faithful back for another ride through SWTOR’s glory days.
Sometimes there’s a patch or an expansion that breaks a player’s back — or spirit. It’s one change too far and too much in the wrong direction, and we cannot continue with that journey. For me, and I suspect a whole lot of SWTOR players, it was the debacle that was the Eternal Throne saga.
Initially it seemed exciting, this KOTOR throwback-type experience that took us forward five years in time and threw a bomb into the middle of the storyline. It was a reboot of sorts for the MMO: more solo, a different narrative, a new faction. But that initial excitement wore off quickly as the storyline felt off in a way that’s hard to explain unless you’re totally familiar with how SWTOR used to be. Plus endless skytrooper attacks got old, fast.
The two Eternal Throne expansions, as high-budget and slick though they were, was what really pushed me away from SWTOR. The game seemed to have abandoned its prior format and was trying to awkwardly retrofit a new one. And even though the devs seem to have rejected this retrofit since then, it feels like a different game than what I once knew.
It’s also hard to overlook the fact that this isn’t EA BioWare sinking tons of money and devs into this game any longer. This is a much smaller team operating in a smaller venue, doing its absolute best to field patches and stories. Almost heroically so, I should add. The Broadsword era’s been a difficult but healing shift for SWTOR, and I have hope that it’ll be a positive move in both the short and long run.
That said, it doesn’t look like we’re ever going to see another true expansion for this MMO. A story-saturated patch with dailies and perhaps even a dungeon or a raid is a tall order for this team, and that takes a while to field. The last “expansion” was kind of a joke, and there’s no way that we’ll see that mistake repeated.
Yet this doesn’t mean that Broadsword is without options. Yes, it can continue to slowly and gradually add on to the game’s content, milking the faithful playerbase with drip-fed adventures. It should do that. But there are people like me, the old guard who loved SWTOR and wouldn’t mind being wooed back into its arms — if it did something that genuinely appealed.
Since a new expansion is out, that really leaves one really powerful tool that’s within the reach of Broadsword. If done right, it could rally the community and call lapsed players back to action.
Obviously I’m speaking of cranking out a new server or two — but not merely a fresh start realm. After all, we got one of those a year or so ago when Broadsword happily opened the doors of an Oceanic realm and in the process gave all players a chance to begin anew.
What I’d like to see is a genuine legacy server. “Come back to the Star Wars: The Old Republic you first loved!” No expansions, no Eternal Throne, just the launch day or launch year class stories and original endgame. All side quests should be reactivated, and perhaps the landscape difficulty bumped up in the spots where players feared to tread alone.
Depending on how those servers are received, Broadsword could follow Classic WoW’s model of slowly adding features, phases, and expansions onto these realms. This would let a community restart and then progress through the game together at a measured pace, enjoying every step along the way without feeling as though one had to rush to catch up to the current endgame.
If this were completely under my control, I’d even stop right before Eternal Throne and then keep the game there — perhaps with the modern character creation options, including the mix-and-match classes. It might stagnate, but it might also have a very long shelf life of people who liked how the game used to be far more than what it’s become.
The idea of a legacy or progression server for SWTOR won’t leave my mind. It’s been bouncing around in there for years, and I genuinely think it could be one of the very few things this dev team could do to put a big spotlight on this game again. It might even be an onramp to the regular servers, a way to entice players back, get them caught up, and then keep them for good.
What do you think? Is this something worth pursuing or the worst idea you’ve read this hour? That’s why we’ve got the comments, folks.
Every other week, Larry Everett jumps into his T-16 back home, rides through the hypergates of BioWare‘s Star Wars: The Old Republic, and posts his adventures in the Hyperspace Beacon. Drop him a holocom on Twitter @Shaddoe or send him a transmission at larry@massivelyop.com. Now strap yourself in, kid — we gotta make the jump to hyperspace!
