A former developer of Star Wars: The Old Republic spills the beans. He reveals what went wrong with SWTOR and what goals were pursued.
Did SWTOR fail? Although BioWare’s MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic has held up solidly over the years, the game had to switch to Free2Play early on. Many goals and wishes of the developers were not achieved, and now the MMORPG more or less leads a shadowy existence with only small updates.
The former lead developer Daniel Erickson has spoken out on Reddit and revealed plenty of details about what went wrong during the development of SWTOR.
How SWTOR was originally supposed to be
The original plan was “more BioWare”: Even when BioWare was working on the game Dragon Age: Origins, there were initial plans for an MMO. However, the first visions for a game were “much more BioWare than MMO.” The idea was to create a large, ever-expanding game with a rich storyline.
Multiplayer aspects would then be limited to marketplaces, “social interactions,” and PvP.
The thought was that it would be “like Netflix; it’s not so bad if you don’t have a subscription for a while. When you return, there is a lot of new content.”
The pressure for a mega hit was high: However, these plans for Star Wars The Old Republic apparently changed after BioWare was sold twice and ultimately ended up at Electronic Arts. The pressure to make SWTOR a mega hit was high. Then all fingers pointed to WoW.
Erickson says: “When you are in a situation where you have to say `Okay, first we copy the most successful MMO of all time, and then we do …` you have already set the course for failure.”
EA wanted a better WoW clone: According to Erickson, SWTOR fell short of Electronic Arts’ expectations mainly because they wanted to beat World of Warcraft at its own game.
In summary, a lot went wrong with SWTOR because the standards were too high and the goal was wrongly chosen. At least that is what former employee Erickson claims.
What’s your impression of SWTOR? Do you agree with this opinion? Or do you enjoy the game as it has become?
They wanted to defeat “the king” of the genre with a similar game rather than with the things that BioWare did really well. That would have been a more intense story and less “forced MMO.”
The Collector’s Edition was a loss: It’s a bit bizarre that the Collector’s Edition of SWTOR was a loss for BioWare. The reason for this was that they never properly determined the price for the statue of Darth Malgus included in the Collector’s Edition. Those who purchased the CE indirectly harmed BioWare.
Action combat was discussed for SWTOR: It is also interesting that BioWare seemingly toyed with the idea of giving SWTOR an action combat system.
The lightsaber duels were said to be great, but only as long as it remained a duel. Once a third party joined, the game no longer functioned. There were simply too many fights, so they moved away from action combat to a safe tab-target combat system.
In summary, a lot went wrong with SWTOR because the standards were too high and the goal was wrongly chosen. At least that is what former employee Erickson claims.
What’s your impression of SWTOR? Do you agree with this opinion? Or do you enjoy the game as it has become?
