Don’t you..
forget about me…
I’ll be alone…
dancing, you know it baby

From GI:

Specifically on the Star Wars news, Pachter noted, “We believe the free-to-play option and lower retail price will combine to significantly increase the number of Star Wars players by the end of the year as the two largest barriers to entry for potential Star Wars gamers (apart from an appreciation for the franchise and PC gaming) have been significantly reduced or eliminated.”

“We expect the network effect to augment the number of gamers further. In the long-term, we believe the adjustments will result in incremental revenue and earnings growth as high-margin Cartel Coin purchases by a much larger pool of gamers and additional advertising generate more revenue than was lost through declining subscription fees and the lower MSRP.”

Ultimately, Pachter believes that Star Wars now has the potential to “attract at least 10 million MAUs indefinitely, with upside to perhaps 50 million.” He added, “Thus, we believe that contribution from the model shift could be significant for years to come.”

MAU is industry jargon for “Monthly Active Users”. Given that Blizzard just announced they had dropped t0 9.1m users globally, that is a fairly bullish  prediction of market domination from Pachter, who went on to state that whipped cream is a perfectly cromulent floor cleaner, crunch is really good for you and builds character, and that Ratt’s “Lay It Down” was the greatest song the 20th century ever produced.

HE TOLD ME ENOUGH! HE TOLD ME WE HAD MILLIONS OF SUBSCRIBERS!

It was foreshadowed for quite a while, and today EA finally made it official: SWTOR is going free to play.

The matrix listed at first glance is fairly reminiscent of SOE’s offerings – theoretically, you could play the entire game for free, but realistically, you run up against walls pretty quickly that ‘encourage’ you to switch to a subscription plan. The site is light on details (and most likely rushed out in time for EA’s earnings call to be held soon) but the cash shop items listed seem to run towards the intangible and not, say, unlocking a race or warzone.

So, as SWTOR players (which, by the way, I still am, to a fairly frightening degree) we still don’t have a lot of information on how this pending change will affect us. As industry pundits, though, it’s fairly easy to draw conclusions:

The subscription model is rapidly becoming the “new car price” initial markup of even the largest budget MMOs – once you get past the first year, that markup devolves to the default free-to-play model quickly. Even The Secret World, this year’s Most-Successful-MMO-Shipped-Until-Guild-Wars-Two-Consumes-All release (which, by the way, is launching as a free-to-play title), is already straightforward about how in a couple of years it will be a free to play title as well. The number of MMOs that do not have some free to play element are limited, indeed. And if you think World of Warcraft is some kind of exception? Well, they certainly don’t want you to think so judging from ads aimed at people who don’t play World of Warcraft (all seven of them):

Everything is free to play, because the financial barrier entry for MMOs is fiercely competitive and in the end it’s very difficult to compete with zero. However much grognards may grumble, the vast majority of players prefer that revenue model. They’ve voted as such with their pocketbooks, and MMO developers who fail to recognize this (all six of them) are committing malpractice.

The other conclusion, which somewhat contradicts the above: going free to play is seen as a sign of giving up. Would Bioware prefer to be making $15 from millions of people every month? Of course they would. Will they make $15 million a month in microtransactions from millions of free players? No one knows.  It’s a risk. And with a title as heavily weighed down with budgetary requirements and licensing fees as SWTOR? Risk is not something you easily sell. Which makes this decision all the more important: at this point there are X hundreds of millions of dollars in budgetary outlays to make back up, and clearly someone at EA saw the trend of subscriptions going down and said “uh, let’s try something new.”

2012, without a doubt, is the year of The Old Republic. And it has not been a good year.

It was on an unnamed battle station, set up by Republic spies, where I fell from grace.

You see, up until that point, I had seen myself as an honorable man. Of course there was chaos and atrocity all around, but this was war, and war can be harsh. But I had a code of honor, and the knowledge that although many judge our Empire harshly, I fought for stability and order.

But the dark side… it was so seductive. It beckoned with the siren lure of shortcuts and the red haze of murder and power. I was strong, though, and could resist, and was even developing a reputation as an honorable Sith, odd though such a combination could be.

It changed when I finally met the nemesis of my master. Although through a hololink, it carried enough weight of what I, my people were fighting against – the sneering superiority of a caste that assumed it knew all the answers, the mocking calm of someone who assumed that only he had the path of honor and justice.

He was on a path I could no longer follow. That I had to prove wrong. That I had to destroy utterly. That I *could*.

I cut down his defenseless minions without a second thought, and my saber turned red, and I leapt into the abyss willingly.

—

Why yes, I am talking about an MMO. And what’s more, describing the point in an MMO where I made a decision to change my character’s progression, counter-intutively from a character building perspective, solely because of events in the game’s story.

During Bioware’s development of SWTOR, they often talked up storytelling as the missing link of MMO gaming, the “fourth pillar” of what makes a compelling game. Now we have an emphatic example of this development philosophy. It may well not be for everyone – even in a game such as World of Warcraft, people rapidly “click through the quest text” to continue with the game. That’s not an option here – you are part of an interactive movie, where the setup for even the most bog-standard kill 10 womprats quest (which are present in full force) is fully voiced and animated. You could conceivably spacebar your way through every conversation cutting short every cut scene, but at this point you are missing, well, the game.

So, yes. SWTOR tells a good story. This is a Bioware game, so this is pretty much a given. How much of a GAME is it?

Well, if you go into SWTOR expecting Star Wars Galaxies II, you are going to be very disappointed. SWTOR comes down very heavily (in fact with a Sith downward saber stab) on the side of game vs. world. There are some nods towards a deeper MMO community (such as social unlocks based on how often you group with others, and a fairly brilliantly handled pre-game guild launch that automatically load balanced guilds amongst servers) but SWTOR is a game. And many similarities to World of Warcraft are wholly intentional – to the point where popular WoW addons-to-game-systems such as gearscore are already baked in. Remember Wowhead? Welcome to Torhead.

If you’re really, really tired of World of Warcraft (and after seven years, a few million people are) then that alone may cause you to recoil. But if you see the World of Warcraft-centric game systems as a grammar used to build SWTOR’s language, it becomes clearer why those choices were made. In fact, in my week or so of play, some of my more “doh” induced boners were in areas where SWTOR veered away from World of Warcraft’s interface. Did you know that when you buy skills from trainers in SWTOR, the skills for your advanced class (another, rare divergence from World of Warcraft) are in a separate tab from the skills for your base class? For seven levels I didn’t!

If I have one criticism of SWTOR at this early point, it’s that for the initial 25 levels it seems to be, for the most part, a single player game played in parallel with many other people. This was fairly obnoxious when, for example, others would ninja-grab world quest objectives. There are instances (called “Flashpoints”), daily quests intended for groups, the aforementioned social rewards for doing them, and of course PvP (including battlegrounds). But up to this point they haven’t really been part of my focus.

You see, I’ve turned to the dark side. And I have a lot of red murder to catch up on.

In SWTOR, no need to wait for the game to actually ship before forming your guild.