REVIEW: Star Wars: The Old Republic F2P

Review: Star Wars: The Old Republic Free To Play 1.5 Expansion

By: Christopher “Synther” Wilson

Oh, SWTOR, we all want to love you.  And I do mean love you.  We want to hug you and slowly grind on you as we cuddle and watch the original Star Wars movies, not the Attack of the Clones trilogy abomination or the Han Solo Shot First raping that George Lucas forced on us.  We want to love you.  Tell us you’re our father…

Unfortunately, Star Wars: The Old Republic has been full of promises and more than a bit lean on delivering.  The game promised to be full of story content, frequent updates, and end game action.  What’s been actually delivered has been received by most fans as lack luster.

I, however, am not one of those fans.  Unlike most of the plebes in the gaming community, I have realistic expectations for a game.  Most have wanted to compare the game to World of Warcraft, let alone claim that the game will be a WoW killer.  This didn’t happen and it is mostly due to the players wholly unrealistic expectations on a game that is only a year old.

It is simply unrealistic to expect any game that is only a year old to kill a game that literally has over five years of content and updates.  SWTOR actually almost pulled it off, though.  However, the numbers that have been claimed over the last year are highly suspect.  I’ve had a lot of questions on how Electronic Arts/Bioware can claim that 2.5 million copies were sold at launch, but then EA only claims that, at its height, SWTOR had a maximum of 1.7 million subscribers.  If that is the case, then there are literally 800,000 people that bought the game and never installed it, since the game came with one month of free service.  Or is EA not claiming the free month?  If that is the case, then surely their subscriber numbers must look better than that, or at least different.  Or are they simply inflating numbers to appeal to the investors?

In any case, their numbers are highly suspect and somewhere in between the confusion and the truth lies why we are at the point we’re at now.  The truth is that with the current gaming market, there is no more room for the monthly subscription based model.  There are simply too many triple A games coming out that are free to play for a subscription based model to survive.  Even World of Warcraft, the king of kings, is seeing the crunch in the model with dwindling numbers of subscribers.  Though, they have a LONG dwindle before Blizzard needs to worry about a “need” to go Free-To-Play.

The biggest problem with MMOs, and really the overall industry in general (this can be said for Origin vs. Steam as well), is that they continually try to reinvent the wheel.  SWTOR is absolutely no exception to this.  Rather than follow the defacto leader of the “Freemium” movement, Turbine, they’ve opted to once again come up with a whole new plan.  And it honestly doesn’t make any sense.

First, let’s start with SWTOR’s F2P launch day.  What a mess.  If you had purchased the game, for $14.99, prior to August 31^st, you were to receive Cartel Coins in the new in-game store.  THEN, they extended it, and if you purchased the game and a month of subscription before October 22^nd, you would receive some points.  (NOTE: This has been made even MORE confusing by the fact that they appear to have extended it yet again.  Please see http://www.swtor.com/free as further evidence of their madness).  Though not as many as if you had purchased and subscribed prior to that.

This is confusing, in and of, itself.  The real problem then comes down to the fact that come November 15^th, Free-to-Play and HK-51, launch day…they fail to give most of these people the Cartel Points that were promised.  Not only that, but it looks like you have to actually subscribe another month on their website in order to actually gain the points that you already earned!  Absolute failure on EA/Bioware’s part.

This may or may not be fixed in the sudden repair patch that is planned for the morning of November 16^th.  Only time will tell.  But, honestly, for me it caused me to grind my teeth to little nubs to find out that my subscription time accounted to exactly zero Cartel Points.  Not only that, but checking the forums, another player had been subscribed since launch day, only to find out that his Cartel Point balance was zero.  Considering that the Cartel Store and the whole transition had been available on the test servers for almost a month makes me wonder what the hell was going on.  Hey, EA/Bioware, are you guys actually paying attention?

After months of talking about the Free-to-Play option, it finally comes out, and, it appears, we’re going to be nickel and dimed to death.  Literally.  You want the option to not show your helmet?  Pay Cartel Points.  You want the option to match your uniform colors?  Pay Cartel Points.  You want access to the Guild Bank you already set up?  Pay Cartel Points.  Enjoy.  Please point your fangs in the direction that is deserved.

In addition to this you will have to pay Cartel Points if you wish to play more than three space missions per week.  Which….well, whoopidy doo, right?  Space missions were nothing but a remake of the 1983 Star Wars Arcade game anyway.  There’s been a promise of an update to space combat to make it more like the free world environment we all had in Star Wars Galaxies since last April of 2012.  Honestly, I am NOT a fan of Star Wars Galaxies and found better time spent in Second Life (that is to say, NONE what so ever), but the space combat was superior.

In addition, there are limitations to how many PvP matches you play per week.  However, there’s been no additional PvP matches added and you still can’t pick which ones you want  to do.  So, I hope you love playing Hutt Ball for three weeks running, because that’s a possibility.

Don’t get me wrong, I do like Star Wars The Old Republic.  It’s a game that has a lot of potential.  Why they chose to not look at Turbine’s proven method with Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online, I’ll never understand.  This confusion can be said for many games, which I’ll leave out.  The biggest problem with these companies seems to be that they don’t follow the ideas that came before them.  They all act like they’re the first ones to ever do anything.  And they all end up failing at the beginning, then having to patch it over and make it up in the end.  This goes from MMO launch to MMO converting to F2P.  The MMO launches and says, “DERP!  HEY!  WE CAN DO IT WITH TWO SERVERS!  DERPA HERP!”  On launch day, it crashes terribly and they look at everyone else doing the same thing and say, “Ohhhh….we need more servers.”

The same thing happens with F2P transition.  It’ll work out for SWTOR.  Evenutally.  You’re going to get boned in the meantime though.  And that sucks.