SWTOR

Star Wars: The Old Republic launched in December 2011 with a promise that sounded, at the time, close to impossible. Eight class stories. Fully voiced. Every conversation, every quest handoff, every throwaway line from a random NPC on Nar Shaddaa. An MMO built like a BioWare single-player game and stretched across a whole galaxy.

I bought that promise immediately, and I want to be clear that it delivered on it.

Here's why it hit me so hard specifically. Eight class stories is altoholic catnip of the purest kind. You want to know how to get a man with a documented inability to main one character to buy your game? Tell him there are eight completely different narratives and he has to roll eight characters to see them. That isn't a game design, that's a personalized trap. I made a Sith Inquisitor. I made a Jedi Knight. I made a smuggler because the smuggler's dialogue was the funniest thing in the game and I have never once regretted that choice.

And the class stories were genuinely good. The Inquisitor arc, going from a slave in a collar to somebody the Dark Council has to take seriously, is a better power fantasy than most of what I've played anywhere. The agent story, which I got to later, is the one everybody talks up and they're right to. When SWTOR was doing the thing it was built to do, nothing else in the genre was close.

And that's not even getting to the part where you could choose between two Advanced Classes for each of those eight, with different play styles for each.

So where did it drift?

The first crack was the one every 2011-era MMO ran into. You can pour years into eight voiced stories, and players will finish them in weeks. Then they look around for what's next, and next is a much thinner thing than what came before it. The endgame didn't have the weight the leveling did. That's not a knock on the people who built it. It's the arithmetic of making content that can only be consumed once.

Then it went free to play in late 2012, and the model they chose was restrictive in a way I found genuinely tiring. Not the concept, I have no problem with free to play. The specifics. Bars on things that felt like they should be basic, unlock tokens for pieces of the game I already thought of as the game. It made every session feel like it had a turnstile in it somewhere.

But the real drift, for me, came later, when the story went from eight to one. The expansions moved to a single shared narrative with your character slotted into it, rather than eight parallel ones. And I understand the decision completely. Eight fully voiced storylines forever was never going to be affordable. It was the correct business call and it also removed the exact reason I was there. The thing that made me roll eight characters was that they were eight different games. Once they became one game with a costume change, I had no reason to be an altoholic in it anymore, and being an altoholic is most of what I do.

So I drifted too. Not with any drama. I didn't quit SWTOR, I just found myself logging in less, then rarely, then not, in that slow way an MMO leaves your rotation without ever announcing it.

It's still running, which is not nothing. Fourteen years is a long life for a game people were writing obituaries for by year three. And the class stories are still sitting there, still voiced, still good. If you've never played it and you like Star Wars even a little, go make an Inquisitor and just play the story and quit whenever you want. Nobody will stop you.

I think about it more than I expected to. It's the only MMO I've played where I can remember specific conversations, years later, the way you remember scenes from a movie. Whatever else drifted, that part stuck.

Cheers,

Joar