... and I'd totally forgotten until other people reminded me on social media. I feel bad because I usually have this post prepared quite some time in advance, but the Christmas period is often stressful for me and this year has certainly been... something. Anyway, it's not too late to celebrate!
But first, the usual collage of my main character with a new image added for 2024!
2024 was the developers' first full year under Broadsword instead of Bioware, and as I already noted in June when it had been twelve months since the original announcement, not much actually changed from a player's perspective. Contrary to some people's expectations, the game did not go into maintenance mode. (Seriously, the way I see people throw that word around on social media - also when talking about other games - just makes me roll my eyes at this point. I feel like it's becoming the new "[game] is dead" in terms of how utterly meaningless the phrase is becoming.)
As it stands, Star Wars: The Old Republic continued the last couple of years' trend of releasing two major patches per year, with smaller patches which are mostly tied to seasons added in-between. Major highlights from the past year included the new world event added in spring, a meaty story update that came with a new planetary map added to Hutta, the venture system giving us a new companion with a story to earn in game, Twitch drops becoming a thing (again), the addition of the Mac launcher (which is now in open beta!), and with the most recent patch a new operations boss and a new public event system. Aside from that we had more seasons (one of which included a new stronghold), date nights, plus all kinds of new art modernisations, not to mention my favourite bug fix ever: the return of non-combat pets. Not too shabby when you add it all up like that, eh?
Here are my birthday posts from years past if you want to make comparisons to what I thought of years gone by at the time:
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
SWTOR Turns Twelve Today
To many more! I'm looking forward to seeing the story content that was meant to come with 7.6 and had to be postponed, as well as seeing what else the devs have in store for us in the new year. I know I wrote a post back in September about when we'll get a new expansion, in which I was not very optimistic about that prospect, but I've actually changed my mind about that a bit since 7.6. I'm not sure 2025 will be the year when it happens, but I'll just say that I've got a hunch that the devs have got something bigger planned again for the future. I can't wait to find out!
I agree that maintenance mode is kind of a meaningless term. For example, FFXI has been in "maintenance mode" for something like a decade and got some new quests last year. On the other hand, many games that supposedly aren't in maintenance mode haven't gotten any new content in years.
ReplyDeleteI think I was one of the ones that was most skeptical of Broadsword, mainly because they handled DAoC so badly back when I was playing that a few years ago. In the time I was active in the game, I watched them cut the PvE content roughly in half for no good reason. They deleted a ton of quest lines from the game entirely, and even breaking some of the DAoC equivalent of class quests in the process. They then went on to kind of bone the launch of the free trial version of the game by including a major restriction on it that was pretty much insane. You can never sub and have access to your characters whenever you want forever, or sub and lose access to them for three months if you ever let the sub lapse. Other changes that came with the launch completely broke the pure PvE server, which was already struggling with population. I have no idea if they ever backed off of that, but they did pretty much everything they could to make sure I would never contemplate giving them sub money again before I wandered off. It was a strange situation where I honestly felt the game would have been better off in maintenance mode than letting that team change things.
I have never been more delighted to be mistaken. The existing developers seem to have just stood aside and let the SWTOR devs do their thing. I am not sure if the SWTOR devs are running Broadsword now, or if they are in the same studio as the other devs in name only. Regardless, I have not see any of the batshit insanity that the team managing DAoC engaged in. DAoC does also seem to have started to move in a good direction this year, so maybe the former.
Yep, I remember your words of warning very well, and I appreciated that you at least had some first-hand experience with the studio to bring to the table. Fortunately it looks like the "reverse takeover" theory came to pass, or at the very least Broadsword leadership gave the SWTOR team the freedom to just keep doing what they were doing (and probably raised the studio's public profile in the process!)
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