The Devs Speak

It's been three months since Star Wars: The Old Republic was transferred from Bioware to Broadsword, and I've got to say, at this point it almost seems kind of silly how worried I originally was about this development. Seeing the recent news coming out of Bioware, I'm honestly glad that the SWTOR devs won't be impacted by all this stuff anymore.

From a player perspective, nothing has really changed yet, and I actually don't really expect to see any noteworthy changes until the new year either (for better or worse). There is one small thing that I've noticed out of game though: that the devs seem to have become more talkative.

Now, the SWTOR team has had a reputation for not being very chatty for quite a while now. It wasn't always this way - for example when Keith first took charge, I wrote about how excited I was about all the communication we were suddenly getting. However, at some point that died down again... I'm not really sure when and why, but I suspect it may have had something to do with a certain part of the fan base that likes to take to social media any time plans for upcoming content change, just to announce to everyone that the SWTOR dev team are clearly a bunch of lying liars. This is why we can't have nice things I guess.

Legacy of the Sith's launch didn't go too well either, which caused the devs to clam up even more. I'm not gonna lie, I too would have liked to hear some sort of explanation of just what went wrong for them to have to cut this much content out of 7.0 for example, but I get that a business doesn't like airing its dirty laundry, so I can understand that whatever happened simply wasn't something they wanted or could talk about. However, that doesn't change that it was a bit sucky from a player perspective!

Since then I would describe the communication that we've gotten as adequate, no more and no less. What I mean by that is that we get timely updates about things like server maintenance and patch dates, basic explanations of new features and acknowledgements of particularly egregious bugs, but not really a lot outside of that. Most of the time we don't really know what's coming in the next patch or what sort of greater plan the devs have for the next few months and years.

So it stood out to me when only about a week after the official move to Broadsword, Eric Musco suddenly popped up on the official forums to give a detailed breakdown of what had gone wrong with the legs of a piece of Cartel Market armour. I mean, this wasn't a particularly important bug (in my opinion anyway, I'm sure some fashionistas would disagree) and his explanation went into much more detail than usual.

As the weeks went by, I noticed more "unusual" dev responses like this on the forums that deviated from the rather minimalist communications style that we've mostly had for the last few years. I already mentioned how quick they were to change the way you unlock the Galactic Season 5 story missions on alt characters. The other day, Musco ended up making a massive post in a thread called "Features and improvements that do not need a lot of money" to clear up some misconceptions about just how much effort is involved in certain kinds of development tasks. Not something any player particularly needed to know, just something that provided an interesting look behind the scenes. Finally, I even spotted Narrative Designer Ashley Ruhl jumping into a Vette appreciation thread to give a bit of insight into how they pick which companions to feature in a story update. Again, not something that was desperately needed, but just something that's nice to know.

I don't want to read too much into every single word the devs post on the forums (after all, that kind of scrutiny might well be another factor contributing to their past shyness), but I find it hard not to at least feel a little bit encouraged to see them open up again a bit, daring to tell us a little about what's going on behind the scenes and what they're thinking about. I don't know if there was anything or anyone at Bioware in particular that would've discouraged these sorts of interactions, but I'm once again hopeful that this will mean good things for the future of the game.