Star Wars: The Old Republic Adding Free-To-Play Option In November

EA and BioWare announced today that Star Wars: The Old Republic will be getting a free-to-play option later this year. Players using the F2P option will be able to reach the level cap and play through the full class stories, but their access will be limited for other parts of the game; they will only be able to play a certain number of Warzones (their PvP battlegrounds), Flashpoints (their instanced dungeons), and space missions each week. Access to travel functionality and the game's auction house will be limited as well. F2P players won't be able to participate in Operations, the end-game raids. Subscribers will retain access to all of these features. There will also be cosmetic items sold through the 'Cartel Market' using a virtual currency.

Comments

Re:Are people still playing this?

[Opportunist]

The "gradually" part is the problem. WoW kinda killed that possibility for MMOs now.

WoW was terrible at launch. And I mean terrible. By today's (WoW's, ironically) standard, it would sink in less than 6 months. Days, not hours, of downtime, bad enough to convince Blizz it's maybe an idea to give people a few WEEKS of free play time. Bugs that prevented you from completing class defining quests (and quests that gave you a class defining, critical skill). Class balance that was SO shot that a single shaman could solo encounters that five paladins couldn't overcome. And while we're at paladins, their complete and utter uselessness in endgame. Couldn't heal worth jack (and there was near zero plate armor with heal stats), couldn't hold aggro and hence completely useless as a tank and his damage was so sub par that even a shadow priest (who lacked sensible damage either) could outdamage him. And let's not get started about the skill trees.

But then again, there wasn't really that much endgame to speak of. Molten Core, Onyxia and ... well?

Few people remember that pre-2005 WoW time. Those that do were mostly used to other MMOs, and how other MMOs were quite similar at launch. Frequent crashes, random bugs, lack of endgame content, no sensible class balance. That was the norm with the launch of a new MMO. That actually IS the norm, still, for the obvious reason: It takes a lot of time and try-and-error to find those minimal, but crippling, issues. You cannot sensibly iron out those kinks on the drawing board, these things have to be found out during testing. But what company can afford having its players play through a year of testing for free, 'til they start raiding and see the endgame? How many of them would still buy the game if they've already seen everything?

The main issue here is now that people are used to the post-2009 WoW. A world that had over five years of development and redefinition. A world where the developers had a load of data to draw from and millennia of playtime from its players to find the problems. This is an advantage no other MMO can muster, and most certainly not at launch. Hell, not even half a year after launch.

But we came to expect that from an MMO because we're used to it from WoW. We don't accept daily downtimes for patches anymore, we don't accept crooked class balance for a few months anymore, and we most of all don't accept buggy class quests and lack of content anymore. We don't, because we're used to the way WoW handles it.

But such a game cannot exist at launch. Simple market rules dictate it. You cannot develop a game for 10 years, blow a billion bucks on it and offer a "finished" MMO. Yes, you could do that. But you will NEVER be able to recover that investment. Not to mention that you will most likely not find anyone willing to risk that money on a venture like this.

This is, though, what WoW has behind its success. I would wager that a billion easily went into development so far, of course that is something WoW did easily regain.

Repeating this seems quite impossible, though. And I guess the chances to ever see a game like WoW again surface is close to zero. WoW pretty much ruined the market, by "spoiling" the players. Measuring a new MMO against WoW will make it appear in a bad light, because it simply can NOT be as polished as WoW is.