Technological Advancements: 64-bit and New Regional Servers?

I didn't really comment on the release of patch 7.2.1 last month beyond the fact that it kicked off two new seasons, but it was an important patch from a technical perspective as it upgraded SWTOR's game client to 64-bit. As I said when this move was first announced, I'm not an expert on these things so I had no strong opinions on or expectations of this change. It just sounded like a good move in terms of keeping the game running and functional for years to come.

When 64-bit finally launched, I was hoping that I'd have more to say about it, but I had to hold off on commenting because to be honest I didn't really notice much of a difference. I'll qualify this by admitting that I'm the kind of person who isn't very observant when it comes to game performance... for example I always hear people complaining about FPS drops, but personally I don't even know what my FPS is most of the time and certainly won't notice it changing in any way unless my game lags so badly that it literally turns into a slide show.

I heard some people say that graphics looked a bit better somehow after the update, but I wonder whether that wasn't just the game resetting some settings. For example I soon noticed that something seemed off with my shadows. I wrote a post here once about how I actually ended up turning my shadows down because they made everything too dark. However, it was only while fiddling with the settings after the patch that I noticed that having enhanced shadows off also makes the shadows that characters and objects cast in the world look like utter crap. So it seems to be a choice between either having nothing but a blob shadow under you with the enhanced settings turned off, or cut scenes being super dark. This probably isn't new though, so I digress...

In terms of actual performance, I saw some people say that the 64-bit upgrade reduced lag and desync in warzones for them, but after at first getting excited about these comments, I have to admit I still encountered quite a bit of desync myself, so... About the only improvements I can attest to myself are that interactions with certain objects like cargo bays seem to be a smidge faster than before, and that performance in 16-man ops seems to have improved a bit. My guild's been working on 16-man master mode Dread Palace this past week, and in the past when we used to kill a boss and a bunch of people had achievements pop up, the whole game would literally freeze for everyone for several seconds. This time the "boss kill lag" was still there but felt significantly reduced.

Either way, I guess it's still a win that the update seemed to go relatively smoothly overall. Sure, there were some people that had problems immediately after the patch (something that seemed pretty inevitable) but from what I saw their numbers didn't seem too high and the Bioware team seemed to be on the case to get their issues fixed as soon as possible.

Another interesting development that happened the week after the patch was that Bioware temporarily opened an APAC test server called Shae Vizla to continue their testing as part of a previously announced initiative to move the game's hosting to Amazon Web Services. I didn't take part in this testing, but I thought the news that they decided to launch this test server in the APAC region was very interesting.

Having a server local to your region so you get a decent ping is another one of those tech things I've never really had to think much about, but I know that US players were not happy when during the last round of server merges in 2017, Bioware got rid of their west coast server farm, meaning that all US servers are now located on the east coast. Australians and other players from that region have had it even worse, as SWTOR's APAC servers were shut down a full ten(!) years ago. At the time, there were still three separate servers for that region, but Bioware didn't want to merge them into a single one because they didn't want to force PvPers, PvErs and roleplayers all onto the same server - how times have changed, eh? (Both dedicated PvP and RP servers no longer exist.)

From the sounds of it, moving to AWS will allow Bioware to rent a smaller amount of servers in different locations as needed, which could mean that we might see the return of a dedicated west coast server for the Americans and an APAC server for the Australians. The latter would be extra exciting because it would presumably involve opening a whole new server, something that I don't think we've seen since 2012.

This does of course raise the question of how viable adding another server would be in terms of population - after all the game's much smaller now than it used to be. However, I'm thinking that with most APAC players residing on the US servers now and Star Forge in particular being the largest of all servers by far, you could probably take a bite out of that without harming the existing player base there. The resulting new server would probably be small-ish and might not see all queued activities popping all the time, but it could still be viable, similar to the Leviathan right now. Either way, I'm excited to hear what comes next.