Never Knowing What Comes Next

When the news about the Broadsword move first broke and everyone was worried and confused, I did something I usually never do: I went and watched some SWTOR streamers. I just had this urge for some reassurance from the community, to be reminded that there were other people out there who cared and that we were all in this together. It worked surprisingly well!

Somehow I ended up on the channel of Kat, one of my competitors from the Galactic Championship, and we got onto the subject of SWTOR's content release cadence. I actually don't remember what exactly she said about the subject, but I do remember this one thought that stuck with me as a result of that chat: that in some ways, even with all the uncertainty of the Broadsword move, not much is changing for SWTOR players in the sense that we rarely know what's coming next anyway.

I mean, whatever you may think of World of Warcraft for example, it's undeniable that Blizzard has been churning out new content for it at an incredibly predictable rate for more than fifteen years now. You basically get a new expansion every two years, with each one being announced about a year in advance. This generates a nice hype cycle where an expansion only really has to keep people truly enthralled for about a year. Then you announce the next one, and as the old one winds down, people get engaged by the hype for the new one instead.

The content of each expansion is also very predictably structured, with each expansion consisting of three major patches that will contain a new raid and a new dungeon season each. There has been the occasional exception to this rule, such as with Warlords and Draenor and Shadowlands, but these then immediately generated complaints precisely because people have been conditioned to expect more by years of routine.

Then you look at a game like SWTOR, and while it's had a fair amount of content added over the years, it's always been all over the place in terms of direction and with limited communication. I think the most advance notice we ever got of new content was with Makeb, which was released in April 2013 after being announced at E3 in June the previous year. Ever since then, it's basically been lots of surprises with relatively little notice given beforehand. Even Knights of the Fallen Empire, which I think was the expansion with the most pre-launch hype around it, was only announced in June for an October launch. I guess the gap between the Legacy of the Sith announcement and its eventual launch was a bit longer than that, but only because it got delayed.

Basically, the SWTOR devs have generally kept their cards close to their chest and have refused to develop any kind of truly predictable content cadence. At one point it was all story and no group content, but then group content eventually came back. I also remember there was a time after KotET where they wanted to stick to just having ongoing content patches without calling anything an "expansion", but then they changed their minds about that again, presumably because people were actively clamouring for something they could call an expansion.

At the point of me writing this, patch 7.3 has been out for a bit less than two months, and we have no real idea what's coming next, other than Keith mentioning on the forums that 7.4 is being worked on and should arrive before the end of the year.

To be honest, I haven't always minded this. A static content cadence like WoW's often comes with a sense of FOMO and a feeling of planned obsolescence, which can be pretty off-putting. There is something liberating about not knowing that my gear will need upgrading again in exactly x months and about being genuinely surprised by every patch announcement.

On the other hand though, there's also something to be said for being reliable when you want people to pay you a subscription. With a game like WoW, you always know that if the current patch isn't to your taste, there's going to be a new one that'll introduce something different soon. If you're into an activity like raiding, you can count on being catered to at regular intervals, so even if you unsub due to feeling "done" with the current tier, chances are good you'll remember to check back in later.

For SWTOR, things have been a lot more muddled, and in a way I can't even fault people for not necessarily having faith that the next patch will interest them, or perhaps even having doubts whether it will ever come at all, considering how little we've been given to work with in the more recent past. I sometimes see people talk about "the next expansion" and all I keep thinking is: Why do you even think there'll be one? That's not meant to be me dooming about the Broadsword move either, I'm just thinking of the fact that the game's leadership wanted to discard the expansion concept once before, and since Legacy of the Sith hasn't exactly gone too rosy, I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to do so again.

I've been trying to figure out whether SWTOR is unique in the MMO space in terms of being this inconsistent and secretive about its content updates. Most of the larger western MMOs, such as Final Fantasy XIV and Elder Scrolls Online, seem to be on a pretty regular cadence with their patches and DLCs, with players having a good idea of what's coming next well in advance. But you don't even need to be one of the big hitters to be consistent: both the Everquests for example still churn out yearly expansions like clockwork. (I seem to remember reading that they did go through a phase where they wanted to give up on that concept but I don't think it lasted very long.)

The only major long-running MMO I'm aware of that I think can match SWTOR in terms of the sheer chaos of its vision over the years is probably Guild Wars 2, which has also changed direction in terms of how it wants to release content and just what that content should be multiple times over the years.

I don't really know where exactly I'm going with this post... I guess the bottom line is that my own personal hope in regards to the Broadsword move is that it will allow the game to develop a bit more consistency in terms of its releases and how they are communicated. Of course, that assumes that all the wild swings in the past had something to do with Bioware's leadership, which is something we don't really know.

If you're reading this and are someone who's spent significant amounts of time playing other MMOs (especially ones I haven't already mentioned here), I'd love to hear your own thoughts on how you feel those MMOs handle their expansion/DLC cadence and how that affects your relationship with those games.