SWTOR Turns Twelve Today

I always count from the official launch day, ignoring early access. And gosh, what a year it's been! If you'd asked me at the end of last year what I expected to happen in 2023, I would not have been able to predict anything like this. Who expects exciting stuff to happen in an MMO's twelfth year of running?

Thirteen images for my annual collage were a pain to fit into a grid. Damn prime numbers.

First of all, the dev team continued to shore things up behind the scenes to prepare SWTOR for its next decade, first by updating the game to 64-bit and then moving it to Amazon Web Services, which eventually enabled them to launch the game's first brand new server since 2012.

All of that would've been pretty exciting on its own, but the biggest news of the year was of course the studio transition from Bioware to Broadsword, the news of which first broke in early June. And I've got to say: for me at least, that was one hell of a wake-up call. As I detailed in last year's year-in-review post, 2022 had not been the best year for my relationship with SWTOR, and while things seemed to be improving again as we went into 2023, I was still feeling a bit down in some regards.

Then the Broadsword news broke and everybody panicked, because it just didn't sound good at all at first. "Is SWTOR dead yet" is a long-running meme at this point, but in that moment, the threat of no more development or worse suddenly loomed larger than it had in many years. The sheer agitation I felt in those first couple of days was a stark reminder of just how much I still love this game and want it to do well - and the comfort I found in talking to other content creators at the time made me feel closer to the community than I had in a while. I also appreciated the current and former devs speaking out on the matter in so far as they were able to.

Since then I feel I've really been approaching the game with new-found vigour, because I'm glad it's still here, there are so many things I love about it, and I want to support it so it'll still be here tomorrow. And so far, things have been working out surprisingly well. Updates have continued to roll out at the usual pace, and the dev communications that we've been getting have actually seemed somewhat more liberated and happier (to me anyway).

You could say that it's only been less than six months, and we'll see what things will look like next year, but at some point we're just talking about the general uncertainty you get with any big business making decisions at the top that may change things at the bottom in unexpected ways. The important point is that the sky didn't fall and things look stable enough for now, if not slightly improved.

In fact, I would say that in general, the team seems to have found a rhythm again towards the end of last year, after Legacy of the Sith's rocky launch. They appear to have settled into a schedule of releasing two major content patches a year, with two Galactic Seasons and three PvP seasons running primarily in-between to fill the gaps - which, you know, works for me? Seasons are not the same as new content, but they provide a way to keep busy, and whatever theoretical cynicism I might feel about endlessly recycling content (go back and read my original reaction to when Galactic Seasons were first announced), I can't deny reality and that I have been having fun with them.

As I was writing this, I looked back at my previous "happy birthday, SWTOR" posts over the years - here are links to all of them:

Happy Birthday, SWTOR!
Happy 2nd Birthday, SWTOR!
Happy Third Birthday, SWTOR!
Happy 4th Birthday, SWTOR!
Five Years of SWTOR
Six Years of SWTOR
Seven Years of SWTOR
Eight Years of SWTOR
Nine Years of SWTOR
Happy 10th Birthday, SWTOR!
Eleven Years of SWTOR

And the one thing that seems to be a constant with this game is that nothing is constant; that it's an endless roller-coaster of ups and downs. I thought we were over that after the "Knights of" expansions (and admittedly nothing has been that bad since then), but we do seem to have had another cycle with Onslaught being a really great expansion that in turn generated hype for Legacy of the Sith, but that then had a horrible launch - for whatever reasons - and now we're once again in the "crawling our way back up" stage. With all the big things happening in the game that I mentioned in the first three paragraphs, we still managed to get two story continuations with new open-world zones and a new flashpoint this year, and my impression has been that it's all been pretty well received.

So hey, hopefully we have some more nice things to look forward to next year! In the dev interview I highlighted the other day, Keith said that we should soon expect a roadmap from him, and Ashley and Caitlin shared that they are incredibly excited about what they'll get to show us soon (even while keeping in mind that they are always excited to be sharing their team's work). To more good stuff in 2024!