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

Are people still playing this?

[crazyjj]

I'm not being sarcastic, I really am curious. There was a HUGE amount of hype around the release (the usual "WoW killer" stuff that seems to accompany any major MMO release these days). Reviews seemed generally positive. Everyone was talking about it for a week or two after release. But then I stopped hearing anything about it. Don't think I've heard anyone mention it for a while. Considering this was supposed to be the game that finally fixed Sony's Galaxies fiasco, I expected more enthusiasm.

I do like the free-to-play stuff, though. And this might lead me to try it out. I just hope they don't cripple it to the point where it's hard to get an idea of what the paid game looks like (like some MMO's do--some that have initials like "W.O.W.," maybe).

Re:Are people still playing this?

[angelasmark]

Enthusiasm died off because there "endgame" is pretty bad. The class story lines were the best part of the game. Did not live up to hype. SWG was a better game in some regards.

Re:Are people still playing this?

[Sir_Sri]

The end game is an was terrible. Bad balance between professions and loot drops. Bizarre itemization and gearing requirements as you move past the first tier of raiding. Buggy content (floors not spawning, interactive objects not working properly). Dailies take an excruciatingly long time to do not because the dailies themselves are bad, but because there are so many load screens etc.

Then the population started dropping and the game became a shell. They've moved just about everyone onto about 10 or 12 mega servers, which is actually a good idea, generally, but they implemented it poorly.

The game has a series of hard DPS checks, which is fine, but then it didn't provide tools to asses dps. Problems like that basically plague the game. You can't ask players to reach a benchmark they can't see, or understand (gearing is especially guilty of this). And the game performs badly on loading, which by itself is forgivable, except they didn't design the game to be bad at loading, (which would mean doing things like giving players free teleports to group or the like) they just... expected you to put up with it.

It's interesting how much the 'convenience' stuff in WoW matters. Having a calendar, so you knew who was going to show up to a raid in game was a whole lot better than trying to use and outside tool. Being able to summon everyone in the group to a summoning stone, again huge improvement. WoW didn't start with those things, but they make a huge difference to how much time you can spend actually playing the game versus how much time you spend getting to the content. I think the difference is that as WoW has evolved the people who make the game want time to be able to both play the game, and have jobs and lives at the same time - so they've molded the game into something they can actually approach as adults. SWTOR didn't get that initially, and to some degree still doesn't. So it's not approachable.

Making a game accessible doesn't necessarily mean making it easy. Hard mode Ragnaros was a fucking hard boss (in Firelands not molten core), and I never did manage to kill him with my group. But I didn't have to spend 15 minutes running between 3 or 4 loading screens to get to him. And Rag is a long run back by modern WoW standards.

Re:Are people still playing this?

[hairyfeet]

Well my oldest was in the beta and subscribed to it for about 5 months afterward before quitting and he said by the time he quit it had become pretty badly unbalanced. He said the empire could just camp and slaughter the jedis at the spawn points. But other than that he said the same thing, front of the game was nice but once you got your character up there really wasn't much to do.

Kinda a shame, the Star Wars mythos has enough there you could build tons of new stories out of it but I just can't believe they spent a couple of hundred million on an MMO and thought they could take on WoW. With WoW its got network effect, where many i know play it because that's where their friends are, so trying to compete with that is kinda stupid. Its like FB in that it won't go down until they seriously fuck it up, just like how MySpace got greedy and turned it into a giant ad ridden spam dump and ran everyone off. As long as they keep adding new content WoW will have the big numbers although the F2P games do seem to be slowly lowering their stats but not by much.

With those MMOs they are such time sinks that people rarely play more than one at a time and I just can't see enough Star Wars nerds willing to shell out a monthly fee to make up a 200 million dollar development budget.

Re:Are people still playing this?

[kenp2002]

It was an embarrassment to EA to say the least. They lost over 50% of their subscription base within 90 days actually surpassing the industry's worst launch\retention Warhammer. It was a single player game with an MMO bolted on and after everyone beat it in 30 days. less then 1/2 people bothered to subscribe.

Think of this as a resturant: 50% of the customers didn't like the food enough to come back. Doesn't sound good. Prior to Warhammer, retention at 90 days was about 80% by estimate with players usually averaging 6 months before attrition. The problem is with the market saturation the demographic changed when WoW came into the picture. The Old School MMO players (pre-WoW players) had a much longer attention span in regards to rewards. The pacing, the very core was a longer experience. A novel. WoW came along and transformed that experience into a Short Story. Both enjoyable in their own right, but with the advent of the Theme Park and Sandbox styles (rather then the Virtual World model of Everquest in contrast to say WoW or Eve respectively) and the addition of a structured tread mill. The demands to engage this new demographic are not, IMHO, sustainable via a subscription model.

The problem with F2P is without safeguards, every troll douche and his inbred cousin can just script up and troll, ban, repeat. F2P is a recovery and long tail approach to MMOs and I see the industry needs to change.

MMOs should be more like muds and Counter Strike servers. More intimate, targeting 200-300 people a shard and allowing people to "roll-their-own" shards much like a counter strike server. Transform the MMO industry into a hosting industry where a few of you "Roll-Your-Own" and throw in what mods you want then invite people. Open it public, set a level cap, or an age limit, customize some rules, or make it invite only. Oddly I am seeing an uptick in Muds once again courtesy of CoffeeMud and newer Diku\Merc\Rom derivatives. Maybe a second golden age of MMOs is coming, perhaps the MMO will die and the GMUD will be revived. Who knows.

What I can say is that the original demographic of EQ players are as a majority, parents (statistically, they should all now mostly be about 35 years old) and the time commitment for old school MMOs (you know Virtual Worlds rather then Theme Park\Sandbox MMOs) means devs are left with the ADHD FPS converts that can't stand waiting more then 4 seconds before something spawns.

Re:Are people still playing this?

[flimflammer]

I wish more game studios saw and understood this. There's too many games out there that feel like they should be fun but suffer in some way by control and by association, character animation. Movement in wow is precise. The character goes when you want it to, stops when you want it to, and manages to do it while looking good, as opposed to just swapping animations which is what a lot of games still do. It's also rather jarring when you play a game where a character is moving but his feet animate either too fast or too slow for the speed they're actually going and the character slides across the ground. It's one of those touches that I see often overlooked in games, but it seems so obvious when you consider it's the most common action you will ever see as a player.

Re:Are people still playing this?

[jxander]

The one thing WoW did best was make themselves mod-friendly.

Most of the little 'convenience' stuff wasn't originally a part of wow. The Calender, a much-improved Auction House interface, the ability to switch between specific gear-sets, the more intuitive quest interface, even the clock under the map,.** Originally provided by 3rd party tools because Blizzard didn't have them. The key is that Blizzard embraced that functionality. When you install the game, there is a folder called "AddOns" by default. And not only do they allow such additions, butthey take the good ones and run with it, including them as full-fledged features. Now, instead of having to download all those, and hoping that my clock addon is compatible with my yours, or manually adding each calendar item, we all get the standard clock, and can easily pass appointments between each other.

** There are a TON more, but I've been clean and WoW-free for just over a year now (after being a serious raider for many years prior) so you'll forgive if I don't recall every add-on that graduated into Feature status, or what was added when.

Re:Are people still playing this?

[Anachragnome]

" It's one of those touches that I see often overlooked in games..."

And it shouldn't be. Game designers should be taking "The Uncanny Valley" into account when working on such things as animations, facial expressions and such.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

I think the focus is more on fluidity then accuracy. I honestly don't understand why motion-capture isn't used more often then it is. Maybe someone can explain why it isn't used in 3d modeling (based on the animations I've seen in games so far), but is used often in motion picture CG. Seems to me that technology could be applied, but perhaps I am unaware of a crucial limitation inherent to 3D modeling--I don't do it for a living.

Speaking of "The Uncanny Valley", does anyone besides me think that people that have had a lot of cosmetic surgery are back-sliding into that Valley? Some of that shit is getting a little creepy. Michael Jackson is the first thing I think of when I hear the words "uncanny valley".

Re:Are people still playing this?

[nitehawk214]

Sorry, I know this is just announced, but wouldn't it be more newsworthy (and useful) to ignore this for now and report it in November when it is an actionable news item?

No worries, it will be duped a couple of times before then.

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.

Dear Bioware

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't want yet another free-to-play mmo. Lord knows there are enough of those. I (and many others) just wanted KOTOR 3. Now that your little mmo has jumped the shark, can we haz?

Re:Dear Bioware

[Hatta]

That's what I came to say. Add a single player scenario, playable offline, and you'll get my money. Don't, and you won't. Simple as that.

Some are but not many

[Sycraft-fu]

Hence the whole "free to play" thing, they are trying to salvage it.

There were multiple problems with it, but the big one is a lack of endgame. It was basically an online single player game. The questing was pretty good, and the story was way better than your normal MMO. However then you hit the top level and there was fuck-all to do. PvP was very bad, dungeons were poorly done and finding groups was problematic, there was just little reason to keep playing.

I bought it and enjoyed leveling, I'm not sorry I spent the money on it I was entertained. However there was nothing worth staying around for. Hence it has been dying off. Well that is particularly problematic to EA given how incredibly much was spent making it.

It is a reaction to mass-exodus

[AlienSexist]

I've played SWTOR for a while. It is a pretty game and does a great job immersing you into the Star Wars universe. If you're really into story, the problem becomes that it really does feel like the most expensive single-player game you'll ever play. It is as if other players only exist to chat and trade with. It is very easy max out a character of each class to burn out the story lines, then there is nothing to do but grind away endgame gear for PVE or PVP. That is my biggest complaint is that levels 1..49 go by rather quickly (so quickly that it is barely worthwhile to equip properly) and all that is left is to grind and raid for prettier shineys.

The PVP Warzones were really neat and quite frankly the best PVP activity I've yet seen in an MMO. However there is presently a rash of cheating going on that BioWare is having difficulty combating.

The entertainment value wasn't worth the subscription price and naturally players have been leaving in droves. This exodus was exacerbated by the fact that BioWare did not have a tool to help find groups after 7 months of going live! Whereas most MMOs start with one nowadays. To make matters worse server populations were crashing and it took BioWare a considerable time to effect character transfers. The first waves of consolidation did breath new life into the game temporarily... but even those servers are in decline now.

There was some press release or statement from BioWare a number of weeks back that described subscription levels. At launch there were something like 1.5 million and in recent months had dropped to like 700k or so. 400k was stated as the minimum to retain profitability. Since then, I imagine, subscriptions continued to plummet and now they are offering F2P. Some might consider that desperation but in fairness I'd say that the true market value of the game is being established.

If you like Star Wars it really is worth a look. The F2P offering may actually be very attractive for Story players.

Same points of failure most "WOW" killers have

[Shivetya]

that being, no real diversity in where you level. It was worse in Star Wars. You could not even start a new character with a friend and play together unless you both chose the same type character, force user or non force user. Afterward you could meet up but then that is where the problem surfaces.

TL;DR - Game was release three patches too early and seemed to excel in having every bad feature WOW discarded, if not all games discarded. As if their design document was completed ten years ago and never changed.

Beyond the two starting worlds all progression through levels is always the same worlds, the same quests except for class specific quests. However the absolute worst part was the punitive travel. Oh I mean overly convoluted maps; especially palaces; where you had to run mostly empty areas around and around to meet a quest giver/target locked in the end of some crazed maze. For a game that provided you a star ship by level 15 they could never quite explain why you could not land where you wanted or worse, had to wait till 25 to buy a land speeder. Really? I have a star ship but no land craft?

The game did have some good highlights. The voice acting and stories were pretty good, but many were space bar skip them as it could become tedious and if you were on your second or third alt it was a bit much. The sounds of the game were pure star wars, the ships, the npcs, about everything looked right. The companion system was good but got a bit creepy with the romancing a computer avatar bit. Far too many players would dress their female companions, if not characters, in the absolute skimpiest outfits imaginable. Serious declaration of idiocy amongst the players.

Yet you were trapped in a world were far too many mobs were "strong" or had eight second stun attacks. Where your characters could do AWESOME moves and demonstrated AMAZING powers but only in cut scenes. I kid you not. Force users rending blast doors - only in a cut scene. By the time you were mid level you had so many abilities the game became an exercise in cool down management than playing for fun.

The game was released three patches to early. From a woefully unpolished interface to horrid zone loading times for many. Very bad and in some ways incredibly obvious exploits that rarely if ever went unpunished to an Auction House that was nearly unusable. Even mirror classes; each class had an exact copy on the other side, the effects were different; were not truly mirrored... and early raids were bug city, as in luck let you beat them more than skill.

A great idea saddled with poor execution and far too much investment in voice acting over content. Best of luck, but with Guild Wars 2 coming at the end of the month and WOW's next expansion in September their chance is basically over

I think what angered me most about it...

[twocows]

I think what angered me most about it was that it purported to continue the KotOR storyline. Instead, it tramples all over it. Revan is a low level boss that drops pants, everyone and their mother is a Jedi or a Sith, and it pretty much retcons everything from KotOR 2 (my favorite game of all time, speaking of which the community restoration mod "The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod" went into its final release version about a week ago, definitely check that out). Maybe I was naive to expect something more along the lines of SWG in this day and age. Still, I was pretty upset.

The best replacement for SWG....

[DL117]

is SWG. SWGEMU is in a playable state now, it will be perfect once they put in the faction missions.

F2P is a sign Bioware still doesn't get it

[SmallFurryCreature]

The class story line is pretty much the only reason to play. It is a classic black and white Bioware storyline complete with all the standard plot elements and binary characters that have become the staple of recent Bioware RPG's.

Limitted access to flashpoints? Only the first one is anything like what was shown in the teasers, a story rich, choice rich, not endlessly long instance. The rest? One moral non-voiced choice in the middle, that is it for story telling.

Travel was never that hot to begin with, for F2P, you can make do without it.

Fewer space missions? Oh NO! Those were like the best part of the game!!! Not! The only value they had was that for people with an insane boredom treshold, they were a way to level up with ease. Just very very boring. Mind you, there are bots for them. Anyway, since the class story is the best thing about the game and you would miss that if you just auto-levelled to 50 and there is no end-game... I can't quite see the point.

Bioware screwed up. They already become something of a joke once they started releasing more RPG's because they all had the same story and the same support characters but that was okay in a 60 then 40 then 20 hour game. Then you can ignore that one support character gets upset if you don't kiss a kitten while saving the world, the other gets upset you don't kill said kitten while saving the world and the third says he has meaningful advice on saving the world but never actually gives it.

This can carry a single player story but a MMO that is supposed to have infinity playing hours? Not so much. Bioware and indeed many single player RPG's already suffer from dungeon creep. The Bard's tale was extreem in this. In the beginning you get 70% story and 30% dungeon, near the end you get 1% story and 999999% dungeon. 3 fucking levels of endless monster slaying without a single story advancement for the Bard's tale.

For SWTOR, actually getting from class story point to class story point is a very long slog. At one point I was already level 50 I was just passing all the side quests and getting really fed up with yet another dungeon crawl having to defeat mindless mobs randomly played along copy and paste hallways I had already defeated a thousand times before.

SWTOR for story is as if someone took Kotor and increased the non-skippable fights by a factor of 10 and at the same time increasing the "didn't I meet this side character before" by three.

Bioware has never made games with really good combat systems. This has been true since the Baldur Gates series where a wizzard has to take a nap after every fight to be of any use. Might be true to the table top game but in a computer game with endless dungeon's it just gets boring.

MMO's typically have trash mobs who come in groups, regular mobs who can be pulled alone or come in 2-3 groups, harder mobs that usually are alone or two and elites who represent mid bosses.

SWTOR contained far to many hard mobs. Hard isn't hard as in good AI but as in use every skill on your skill bar three times before they finally run out of hit points. THAT IS NOT FUN!

It is Quake all over again with its shamblers requiring 3 rockets to the face. Except it ain't 3, it is 30 with a lenghty reload cycle every 5th rocket. It isn't fun, exciting or a challenge, it is WORK!

The reason realistic military shooters are now completely dominating FPS is that other people apparently too got tired of emptying clip after clip into enemies. One shot, one kill is just more rewarding.

For MMO's the same goes, ONE high health mid boss is a nice challenge. An entire hallway filled with them, is not.

For me, I stopped with SWTOR when I saw yet another hallway with a ten or so single hard mobs and just didn't want to fucking do them just to get another cookie cutter story bit.

In the days of quake, the only way to make a hard monster was to make it have lots of hit points, same with Everquest. But single player games have advanced, MMO's often haven't. Even new games like TSW a