We haven't had any more official statements on how things are progressing with SWTOR's potential move to Broadsword, but there have been two bits of commentary I wanted to highlight here.
First off, game developer blog Ask a Game Dev chimed in on the conversation about a week after the IGN article. I've linked to them before, because while the author is anonymous, they seem to have either worked on SWTOR in the past or at least know someone who did, since they've casually thrown around some very interesting insider info in the past, such as that SWTOR turned its financial fortunates around after the free-to-play transition (which also had a follow-up post years later explaining how profitability for an MMO works in general) or that SWTOR's companion system had to be re-written from the ground up around Shadow of Revan to accommodate players being able to gain new companions.
On the subject of the rumoured Broadsword transition, the author's focus seems to be on hiring, and how it's probably been hard for Bioware to deal with turnover considering that maintaining a decade-old MMO isn't really the kind of thing people specifically apply to Bioware for. They don't really express an opinion on whether the move is likely to be a good or a bad thing, but they do seem to see it as something very normal that makes sense to do when enough parties (players, devs, EA) are still interested in maintaining a game but the original studio might not be.
Perhaps more importantly though, Game Director Keith Kanneg took to the forums again on Tuesday to reassure players once again, while also being willing to go into more detail this time (which to me indicates that things may have progressed behind the scenes even if they're not quite ready to make an official announcement yet).
He stated repeatedly that absolutely nothing will change from a player's perspective in terms of how their accounts are maintained, what with EA still being the publisher and so on and so forth. He also stated that the game is "absolutely not" heading into maintenance mode, while also going into a bit more detail about what's to come in the near future. We're supposed to get 7.3.1 towards the end of summer, and 7.4 in time for the holiday season. They're still looking into moving the servers to AWS, evaluating the possibility of opening a new APAC server, and are working on upgrading the game to DirectX 12. The latter is something that doesn't mean a whole lot to me, but according to people more knowledgable on the matter it seems to be another positive sign, as similar to the 64-bit client, it's back-end work that has no real immediate benefit to players but makes the game more future-proof.
Keith also revealed that the SWTOR team will not have to relocate - this was a concern that only dawned on me slightly belatedly once I realised that Broadsword's headquarters are in Virginia, which is quite far away from the team's current office in Texas. I was initially seeing some mixed messages among the speculation on Twitter, so I'm glad to have this point clarified. This means that nobody should have to leave the team for reasons related to where they live.
All in all, lots of positive news in my opinion. Sure, if you want to be cynical you could always accuse Keith of lying, claim that he's only saying these things to prevent people from unsubbing etc. but I don't think it's healthy to go through life expecting lies everywhere, plus Keith in specific has given me no reason to distrust what he says. In fact, I think the shaky launch of 7.0 has demonstrated that he and the rest of the team are very good at clamming up and not saying anything when shit hits the fan in a way that they don't want to talk about, so I definitely see the fact that he's feeling confident enough to tell us all these things as a good sign.
EDIT: A mere hour after I posted this, Ted Gegoux, (formerly) Director of Live Services at Bioware, announced on Twitter that today was his last day at EA/Bioware, he's now moving to Broadsword and in favour of the transition.
All the comments from current and former Swtor team members are positive about the move. While they may not be shouting with joy, they all seem to be happy to be moving out from under the EA/Bioware structure to Broadsword. While I don't expect miracles, it will be nice to see what they can do when they have much more control over their direction.
ReplyDeleteThe Ask A Dev posts were nice to read/revisit. There were bits of information there that I didn't know and learning something new is always a good thing. :)