Building a Galaxy Far, Far Away
Star Wars: The Old Republic was one of the boldest attempts to bolt a fully voiced, story-heavy RPG onto the framework of a traditional MMO, and its long road to launch says a lot about the scale of that ambition. When it finally arrived in December 2011, it did so after years of planning, heavy investment and more recorded dialogue than most single-player RPG series manage across multiple titles.
BioWare had been interested in making an MMO for some time but waited until it had what it considered the right combination of licence, team and partners. The success of Knights of the Old Republic in 2003 made the Star Wars setting an obvious candidate, and once the Old Republic era was secured, the Austin studio was spun up specifically to build an online follow‑up. James Ohlen, whose credits included Baldur’s Gate and the original KOTOR, was installed as game director with a brief to fuse BioWare’s narrative style with the persistent, social nature of an MMO. That meant working out how to deliver personal, fully voiced storylines in a game where you were never entirely alone, and where your choices had to coexist with those of thousands of other players.
The money and manpower involved were unprecedented for the genre at the time. Analysts and later reporting put the development budget somewhere in the region of 150–200 million US dollars, with one Los Angeles Times piece and follow‑up coverage citing a figure of around 200 million, making it the most expensive MMORPG project then on record. BioWare and EA never published an exact number, but did confirm that hundreds of staff across multiple studios and continents were involved over a six‑year period. Writing started early and ran long: by late 2008, previews were already noting that a team of around a dozen full‑time writers had been working on scripts and dialogue for more than two years. Daniel Erickson, the game’s lead writer, has spoken about the decision to license an existing universe partly to avoid the overhead of creating everything from scratch, and the team assembled extensive documentation on everything from Sith architectural styles to the background culture of individual planets.
The feature set expanded as the project evolved. Full voice acting for every class storyline and most quest content was not a given at the start, but BioWare eventually committed to recording hundreds of hours of dialogue across three languages, something no MMO had attempted at that scale. Companion characters, initially envisaged as a relatively small cast, grew into a stable of dozens of fully voiced companions with their own quests, approval arcs and romance options. Each of the eight player classes received its own three‑act narrative, with Erickson noting that the bounty hunter’s first chapter alone ran longer, in terms of word count and play time, than the entire KOTOR campaign. All of that sat on top of the shared planetary content, flashpoints and operations that were needed to make the game function as an MMO rather than a set of parallel single‑player campaigns.
BioWare and EA began stoking community interest well before launch. Rumours and leaks preceded the formal announcement on 21 October 2008, and when beta sign‑ups opened in September 2009, the response was strong enough to cause intermittent website outages. Player feedback occasionally fed back into design decisions: the much‑mocked “Jedi Wizard” advanced class name, for example, was quietly retired in favour of “Jedi Sage” after a community poll showed how poorly it went down. Other points of contention, such as the controversial “giant hilt” lightsaber designs, were left in place, a reminder that the developers were listening but not always inclined to compromise on aesthetics.
A trio of high‑end cinematic trailers helped define the game in the public imagination. Deceived, unveiled at E3 2009, showed an assault on the Jedi Temple with a level of choreography and visual polish more reminiscent of film than in‑engine footage. Hope followed in 2010 with a desperate Republic stand on Alderaan, and Return in 2011 tied those threads together with a flashback to the earlier stages of the conflict. None of these cut‑scenes appear in the game itself in exactly that form, but they framed The Old Republic as a “cinematic MMO” and set expectations for a story‑first approach well before anyone could log in.
The live rollout reflected both the excitement around the title and the logistical challenges of something this size. Official launch in North America and Europe was on 20 December 2011, with early access for pre‑order customers beginning a week earlier and further regional releases following in early 2012. EA and BioWare brought more than a hundred servers online to cope with demand in the opening weeks, but players still encountered queues and registration hiccups as the population surged. Within three days of launch the game had passed one million subscribers, a milestone EA trumpeted as making SWTOR the fastest‑growing subscription MMO to that point. The business model at launch was subscription‑only, a deliberate choice described by BioWare leadership at the time as the best fit for the game’s scope and ongoing support plans. Localisation into English, French and German was a major undertaking in its own right, with Ohlen and others describing it as one of the largest localisation projects attempted in games up to that point.
Critically, the initial response was strong. Review aggregators put the PC version in the mid‑80s range on average, with a Metacritic score of 85, and outlets such as PC Gamer and IGN handing out scores in the low‑to‑mid‑90s and 9/10 bracket respectively. Praise tended to focus on the quality of the voice acting, the orchestral score, and the way each class story gave you a distinct take on the overarching conflict. Not all coverage was glowing: some critics, including a notably harsh re‑score from Eurogamer, pointed to familiar MMO quest structures and repetitive mission templates underneath the dialogue and cut‑scenes. Nevertheless, the game collected several awards, including recognition for its online gameplay and narrative at industry ceremonies such as the Interactive Achievement Awards.
Post‑launch, The Old Republic went through the now‑familiar cycle of rapid expansion, adjustment and business‑model change. Early patches in 2012 added new operations and PvP content, along with systems such as Legacy, which linked your characters into a shared family tree and unlocked cross‑character perks. Subsequent updates brought conveniences like group finders and server transfers as the population settled and EA consolidated servers. Subscriber numbers climbed to around 1.7 million by March 2012 before beginning to fall; by the end of that year EA confirmed a significant drop‑off, prompting a shift towards a hybrid free‑to‑play model with optional subscriptions and a microtransaction‑driven Cartel Market. That change, introduced in late 2012 and bearing fruit in 2013, proved lucrative: research cited by EA and industry analysts estimated that Cartel Market sales alone brought in about 139 million US dollars in 2013, on top of continuing subscription revenue. By 2019, EA was telling investors that SWTOR was approaching one billion dollars in lifetime revenue—comfortably justifying its hefty development costs.
Star Wars: The Old Republic is best understood as a large‑scale experiment in bringing BioWare’s story‑centric design into a live, persistent environment. Its development history is full of creative risks, from betting on wall‑to‑wall voice acting to maintaining eight fully fledged class narratives, and its post‑launch evolution shows how those ambitions had to be reconciled with the realities of the MMO market. Fifteen years on from its announcement, the game’s legacy lies less in subscriber counts and more in the way it tried to merge cinematic storytelling with a shared online world, all while playing in one of the most recognisable universes in popular culture.
