SWTOR's Golden Launch Days

A couple of weeks ago an old podcast made me muse on SWTOR's pre-launch hype, and this post in turn got Asmiroth reminiscing about his early days in the game. That post in turn made me thoughtful due to how it reiterated the pretty popular narrative of how SWTOR was an utter failure at launch, but managed to correct its worst mistakes and is a better game for it now. Aside from a few nitpicks which I brought up in the comments to his post, I didn't actually disagree with most of the specific issues he brought up... but it made me think about how two people can look at the same thing and still come away with very different impressions of it based on their experiences and priorities. (Also topical: Azuriel likes Fallout 76 and is utterly bewildered by all the negative press it gets. Welcome to the world of being a SWTOR player at launch!)

For example, there's no denying that SWTOR's open world PvP was broken from the beginning - the things going on on Ilum even made the news on several gaming sites back in the day. However, to someone like me, who was a) still levelling at the time and b) not particularly interested in open world PvP, that was barely even a blip on the radar and certainly had no noticeable effect on my own ability to enjoy the game. A year after the event, Ilum was nothing but an infamous and weird zone for most of us who were still around.

And sure, there were bugs. Few games launch without them. But unless they are literally game-breaking, making it impossible to log in or progress, or are particularly prolific, nobody quits over a couple of bugs if they are otherwise having fun. I ran into them too, and have blog posts to prove it, but ultimately they didn't stop me from enjoying the game because I was always way too eager to see what was waiting around the next corner.

Simply put: For me, SWTOR was simply a fantastic game from launch, for multiple reasons:

- To this day you'll find people arguing both that SWTOR should have had fewer MMO elements to begin with and should have focused more on its single-player aspects, and that it was too solo focused while not being enough of a "proper" MMO. For me however, the balance at launch was literally perfect. I wanted an MMO and I got it, with all the bells and whistles that entails, but the class story was more involved than anything else that had been seen in that space before and provided strong reasons to identify with and care about your character.

- The promise of being able to level at least eight different alts, have it be a totally different experience, and then receive continued updates for all of those unique class stories sounded absolutely amazing. That those plans ultimately weren't sustainable is another matter, but the amount of content to play through at launch was huge. And yet the game ended up with loads of players who just speed-levelled one class to cap and then complained that there weren't enough raids. I don't even know. Though speaking as someone who did raid once I hit the level cap, the first few months were good times for me too. While there was only one operation at launch, Bioware had added three more by the end of the year. It was a golden age of constant content additions.

- The group conversation system was a hugely unique feature, and I absolutely adored it. There's just something about the whole idea of rolling off with your group mates to decide how a quest is going to continue. To this day, even with most people skipping the cut scenes in flashpoints, the ones with the big choices still get players talking, even in pugs (usually to complain about other people in the group voting for the opposite alignment).

- The levelling game in general managed to be fantastically accommodating to grouping, despite of the solo story arc. Everything that wasn't your class story was designed to make sense whether you were alone or with friends, and I loved how quest givers would even insert little comments about you having company. Coming fresh off WoW, which had decided to deal the final death blow to open world group quests in its Catalcysm expansion (the odd exception not withstanding), I loved loved loved all the heroic quests that encouraged you to group up with randoms while out in the world. I certainly didn't feel like the game needed an automated group finder or anything.

Pugging heroics in January 2012 on my agent.

- Combat in general was fun. It was traditional hotbar MMO combat, which is something I like, and having come straight out of WoW's Cata expansion as mentioned above, I was glad to see that fighting mobs was a decent challenge. It wasn't super hard or anything, but if you didn't upgrade your gear every few levels or didn't use utilities such as crowd control or interrupts, you would pay the price, so putting that extra effort in made a noticeable difference and that felt very satisfying.

- Doing PvP as a levelling character was another thing that stood out positively to me, again because of the inevitable comparisons to WoW, which at the time featured no level sync of any kind, but put you into tiny levelling brackets instead, which could result in long waits just so you would end up in a match where you could still barely hit your opponents. SWTOR's Bolster system seemed amazing to me in comparison, plus tanks actually having a role to play in PvP beyond flag carrying was cool too.

- Story and lore were treated with respect and attention to detail. I loved discovering all the little connections between different class stories for example that made it possible to put all the stories together, like a giant puzzle, and see a coherent larger image emerge. (Not to rag on WoW again, but storyline consistency was another thing they messed up big time in Cata.)

I could probably come up with more points, but these will do for now. What I'm really trying to highlight is how my view of SWTOR's development over time is almost the opposite of the common narrative of failure and then stabilisation. Again, I'm not denying that the game had issues from a financial point of view. However, to me the reason this happened seemed to have everything to do with Bioware and EA vastly overestimating the size of the niche they were catering to, and nothing with the game's inherent quality.

I'm not really trying to say that SWTOR is an all-around worse game now than it was in 2012 either. I sure am grateful for all those bug fixes and for the fact that the game doesn't crash on me every hour anymore, not to mention the many bits of content as well as quality of life fixes that have been introduced since then. However, as far as those big bullet points go that originally drew me to the game, things have got worse in almost every respect. To go through them in order:

- The (for me) perfect balance between MMO content and solo story started to crumble back in 3.0, and the last two expansions went all out on focusing on the solo player. Recent patches have backtracked on this a bit, and to me it feels like the game is now on the right track in terms of regaining some balance... but I still miss the questing content for flexible group sizes. These days it's all either solo story or fixed-size group instances, with nothing in-between.

- Class stories were abandoned quickly, but we still got updates at a decent pace for quite a while. The last two years things have been pretty slow though.

- While the group conversation system hasn't been removed from the game, Bioware effectively stopped utilising it during Shadow of Revan. The only new content added since 4.0 that has you roll off against group members to make a decision is the cut scene where you blow up the shield surrounding a Star Fortress, but the following cut scene only shows a single person running outside, regardless of whether there were other people in the party. It's almost as if the developers who originally worked on the system aren't with the company anymore and nobody else knows what to do with it.

I wasn't playing alone when I did this, but you can't tell.

- In 4.0, heroics as a concept were effectively removed from the game by being turned into just another type of daily quest and yes, I'm still bitter about that. Rumour has it that 5.10 is supposed to see the return of some open world content that you're actually encouraged to group up for, but I'll believe it when I see it.

- The overall combat system hasn't exactly changed, but the way they sped up levelling combined with the introduction of level sync and multiple buffs to companions has led to combat while levelling being quite boring as everything dies in a couple of hits unless you make a point of staying underlevelled, which is actually quite tricky to do if you actually enjoy playing your character and doing things.

- In general I would say that PvP has maintained its quality, but the levelling brackets took a huge hit from the increased levelling speed and the removal of all worthwhile rewards from sub-max-level PvP, which makes it much harder to get into lowbie and midbie matches these days than it used to be.

- Bioware also still loves its story, but Knights of the Fallen Empire certainly played havoc with the established order, and all classes being funnelled into the same personal story meant that the beautiful puzzle essentially broke down, as canonically, all your alts of different classes couldn't co-exist anymore as only one of them could really be the Outlander. I suspect a lot of people would also agree that KotFE and KotET took the game off into a drastically different story direction from what we had seen before, which didn't gel too well with the existing content.

So what's the tl;dr of all this rambling? That I honestly thought SWTOR was great as it was at launch (bugs not withstanding), and from this long-term player's point of view it's been less of a story of a failure finding success and more of a succession of weird ups and downs as Bioware tried to appeal to different types of players in turn who hadn't been satisfied with the launch game for whatever reason. It's only more recently that they finally seem to have remembered what made their game so great at launch (and I'm really thankful for that and am excitedly looking forward to the next update).