Star Wars: The Old Republic, or otherwise known as SW: TOR, is a massive-multiplayer online game, having been released back in December of 2011, it has grown a sizeable fanbase. However, many have started to quuestion it's future in regards to content. I play the game casually, usually on whatever down time I have, and I am certainly not playing the game without forming my own various critiques.
As of February 2018, it has released six expansions, four of these are story-based. The stories expansions in these expansions have been hit and miss, in my opinion at the very least. Bioware, the team behind the creation of the game as well as the expansion packs that have released, have made some creative choices in recent years in regards to the game state. Rather than seeing them as something innovative and interesting, they come off more as solutions to a larger problem within the game.
These include making the game Free to Play, introducing an in-game market which requires real-world currency, as well as most recently a massive fusion of multiple servers. Now, on the surface, one can write off all of these as attempts to keep the game fresh and interesting and trying to reach a wide range of players.
However, each of these choices is routed in one single source, a lack of revenue for the game. Free to Play is ultimately a means to end to encourage more people to try out the game, in hopes of achieving a subscription in the long run, while the in-game market is a clear attempt to gather more currency, and lastly the fusion of servers is to deal with a lack of a player base, which results in some servers becoming ghost towns in a sense. So the game's largest problem is a lack of revenue, and the company is attempting to create new ways to bring in revenue. This ranges adding additional subscriber-only content, which includes two of the most recent expansions, this content itself isn't the best in terms of quality and results in the current fanbase, who pays for it to be turned off and feeling disgruntled by not getting their money's worth. Which, is fair to several degrees. We want content that is fun to play and gets us hooked on the story that is being told, however when this doesn't happen, it results in the people who play the game to turn off their subscriptions and not look at the game for a long time...
So, from this perspective, we can see the game starting to take a walk towards its grave. I don't see the game lastingly that much longer, with even it's most recent content not being that fun to play, or even anything new, exciting, or challenging to play anymore. If one becomes a subscriber, the content because almost hilarious easily to play through when playing solo, in a group, it's even easier.
Thus, the game has literally turned in a poorly written single player game, that isn't even that fun. I get most of my enjoyment from the game from interacting with other players, but that, of course, is assuming they are online in the first place. While a majority of players are nice and helpful, with several creating guides all over the internet, shows that a larger amount of players love the game still love the game for whaever reasons, however at times we run into trolls or others who poison the entire community, and these are the people who get noticed, and become associated with the game.
When you get down to it, SW: TOR isn't a fun game anymore, it can be fun if you are a first time player, but even then it's a gamble, with some of the earliest content being incredibly boring and unfulfilling depending on where you decide to start. Whatever it's future is at this point, I don't know. But as a lover of the franchise, I am desperately hoping for some new life to be injected into the game, or for something new happen entirely.
