Date Night Data

Earlier in the year, Narrative Director Ashley Ruhl gave a talk at 2025's Game Developers Conference, on the subject of SWTOR's date nights. I believe it's technically available to view online, but only if you have an expensive subscription to the GDC website. So I was quite pleased when /Jawaface pointed out to me last week that at least the slides for the presentation were now freely available to view for everyone.

Slides alone obviously don't give you the whole picture, but they do give you a pretty good idea of just what was discussed. It being from a conference for game developers, the talk was obviously primarily targeted at that audience and covered things like the technical side of setting up certain cut scenes for example. If I as a layperson had to sum up Ashley's message to other developers based on these slides, I'd say it's to not give up on passion projects for your game because your time will eventually come, and that you can get a surprising amount done by repurposing existing tools.

What I as a player found the most interesting though was the below slide, clearly added to show that date nights were a success. It shows the completion rates for the new main story added with patch 7.5 (that was Desperate Defiance) compared to the four date nights that were added in the previous patch (for Lana, Theron, Arcann and Koth).

It shows that 30 days after release, more players had completed at least one of the available date nights than 7.5's story. Now, you could argue that maybe that's not an entirely fair comparison, seeing how date night missions only take about five minutes and are available to anyone who's completed the "Knights of" expansions, while 7.5 required your character to be all caught up with several years of additional story updates added since then (plus it also took more time to complete). Nonetheless...

I thought this was quite impressive. As someone who's generally less interested in the romance aspect of the game compared to others, I was kind of surprised just how popular these were. Also that Lana looks to be about twice as popular as any of the other three companions in this comparison, but then I guess she's the only woman running against three men. I guess this is why those of us who aren't that crazy about Lana will never be able to get rid of her... (I'm joking. Mostly.)

I suspect that the numbers for the date nights released after that must have been less exciting, considering that all the other companions are limited to specific classes as opposed to being available to everyone. Personally I still haven't done any beyond Theron and Arcann, as I just don't have the right combination of characters far enough progressed through the story. One day I guess...

Anyway, I just thought that was an interesting little insight into content performance, of the type that devs usually don't share with players (while at the same time we as players love to get our hands on it - as was also evidenced by all the excitement about John Hight's leaked slide about WoW subscriptions from his GDC presentation last year).