SWTOR Classic - an Attempt at a Realistic Assessment

The idea of a classic version of Star Wars: The Old Republic is something I talked about on Ivano's podcast last year, and ever since then I've been thinking about writing about it in more detail on the blog too. There are mainly two reasons for this: One is that I honestly thought I'd already written something about the subject ages ago but when I dug through my archives to check, all I found was a post called "Would You Want To Go Back?" from 2017, when SWTOR was only five years old - so not quite the same thing. The other reason is that I'm a big fan of World of Warcraft Classic - I was hugely excited by its initial announcement, followed its development with interest, and it eventually got me to resubscribe to World of Warcraft again in 2019, years after I'd written the game off as no longer interesting to me.

So, SWTOR Classic: Would it be a good idea? How could it work?

Let me start off by saying that in a world of unlimited time and resources, I think a classic version of SWTOR, presumably based on one of the later patches before the first expansion, would be a fun thing to explore. The thing I'd personally be the most curious about would be how hard the levelling content and heroics would turn out to be, since people often complain about how faceroll easy the game is these days and how things were sooo much harder back in the day.

As someone who was around back then, I have no doubt that this is at least partially true, but looking at WoW's example, a lot of those memories may also be coloured by the fact that we were all new to the game back then and didn't know how to play (yet). When WoW Classic came out, people who had played on private servers beforehand were all very shocked by how easy the "real" classic version of the game was, as private server owners had massively overtuned some of the content to align with their memories of how tough they remembered the game to be. This turned out to not match reality at all, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was true for SWTOR as well.

That said, I'm kind of afraid that's where the appeal would already end. With WoW Classic, a big draw for players was that Blizzard had decided to literally destroy the original version of the world and all its quests in the Cataclysm expansion, only six years after the game's release, meaning that content and whole zones that millions of people remembered fondly from the game's early years were no longer accessible. SWTOR never underwent anything like that - there are some side missions that were shortened or culled in 2015's Knights of the Fallen Empire expansion, but that's not even remotely close in scope. This game has always been about its fully voiced storylines; both devs and players recognised that as its greatest asset, and accordingly these things have been looked after and maintained faithfully over the years, which means that they can be played in the live game just as well in 2025 as you they could in 2011 (arguably better, because the game launched with its fair share of bugs even in the class stories, and there were a lot fewer quality of life features back then, especially in regards to travel).

"But the gameplay was so different," some of you will say, in response to which I would press X to doubt. Yes, we had old-school talent trees and no level scaling, but again, all things considered I would still argue that even the gameplay hasn't changed that dramatically over the last decade. I would again make the comparison to World of Warcraft, where I loaded up my max-level holy paladin in both Classic and retail (the modern version of the game). Ignoring things like spell ranks, passives, and the fact that spells may have retained the same name but work very differently twenty years later, I counted their abilities and while the Classic pally had 39, the retail character had 35. Only 15 of those were shared between the two game modes. The Classic character had 24 spells that no longer existed in retail, and the retail character had 20 new ones. For comparison, if I look at the screenshot I took of Shintar the trooper in SWTOR when she first hit the level cap in February 2012 and look at her action bars now, there's remarkably little difference. Yes, a few abilities were removed and a few new ones added with expansions, but comparatively, the Commando's core toolkit has changed remarkably little over the course of over a decade.

Okay, so we've established that there wouldn't be a lot of actually different content to revisit in a potential SWTOR Classic other than certain details, but let's consider effort vs. reward. Surely simply rolling the game back to an older version wouldn't take that much effort compared to something like building a whole new patch worth of new story? Ehhh... it's not that simple!

I'm no developer myself, but from what experience I do have dealing with these kinds of things, it's not that straightforward. While developers always take backups of things before changing the game in a major way, they won't necessarily keep absolutely everything forever. When the idea of WoW Classic was first being seriously considered, even Blizzard admitted that it wasn't as simple as pulling an old copy of the game out of a hat and that a fair bit of actual rebuilding would be required. When they eventually committed to the project, it actually required a fair bit of work, some of which they explained in this interesting dev blog from the time. And even with a dedicated team working on that project, it still took almost two years for WoW Classic to actually be released.

Aside from the potential difficulties involved in untangling SWTOR's old spaghetti code, there's also the matter of resources. We don't know the exact numbers, but the WoW dev team is supposedly made up of several hundred developers, with something like thirty dedicated to Classic in specific. Comparatively the SWTOR dev team has a number presumed to be a little larger than that of the WoW Classic team to take care of the entirety of SWTOR as it is. Even assuming that it could be done, would you really want them to stop work on the live game for two years to build a SWTOR Classic client? I know I wouldn't!

The final argument I can think of at this point is that some people might point at classic modes in other MMOs and say that Blizzard were kind of being perfectionists in building Classic, and that it's quite possible to cobble together something less perfect and accurate with less time and fewer resources, akin to Everquest's progression servers or the way Rift had its "prime" server. Neither of these aim(ed) to faithfully reproduce the experience of the game's early days, but count(ed) on evoking nostalgia by simply restricting the content people have access to as well as applying some other old-school limitations. The problem when applying this notion to SWTOR is that as per what I wrote earlier in this post, the game's old key content is still all there and relevant, and the only things that would make the idea of a classic server worthwhile at all are precisely the little details like gameplay differences, so this approach just seems like a dead end to me.

To summarise, I don't think we'll ever see see a SWTOR classic mode as there's comparatively little content and gameplay that would really be different to the current live game. This means that to make it an experience that's actually noticeably different and truly "classic", a lot of dev work would be required to faithfully rebuild old systems (assuming they have all the required backups to begin with), all for something that would probably be appreciated by only a very small minority of players (such as PvPers that want to relive their glory days with a particularly powerful build from 2012).

I understand the appeal of nostalgia, but I think Broadsword is better off having the devs continue to make the live game the best it can be.

Also, a tip for any readers who might miss the levelling content being harder: Try re-rolling on a server on which you don't have a legacy and be surprised by how much weaker you are without all those stat bonuses from your legacy built up over the course of a decade. And if your healer companion still makes you feel too OP, try challenging yourself by questing without your companion for a bit. You'll find that past the starter planets, it's not all quite as easy as you might think.