If you never bothered with BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO because you didn’t feel like paying a subscription fee, starting Thursday November 15 you can play for free. Without signing up for a subscription you’ll be able to play as any class and experience all the base game’s level 1 through 50 story content.
Naturally there are plenty of restrictions if you’re a free user. You can only join a few Warzones per week, for example, which are The Old Republic’s player versus player arenas. If, while leveling from 1 to 50, you feel like participating in more Warzones, you don’t need to subscribe. Passes to access content like this more frequently can be purchased individually. These passes can be gifted or sold to other players for in-game currency, so directly purchasing from BioWare isn’t the only method of acquisition.
Microtransactions like this can be made for a number of things, including mini pets, cosmetic items, bags of special items and Legacy system bonuses. Free players will also have their number of available character slots, item storage space, and ability to equip rarer gear restricted, and BioWare will implement ways to bypass those restrictions with paid purchases.
You’ll make these purchases with a virtual currency called Cartel Coins. These can be purchased with real money in packs from $4.99 for 450 Coins to $39.99 for 5500 Coins. If you already have an account, you can see if you’ve accumulated any free Coins so far by logging in on the official SWTOR site, clicking over to ‘My Account’ and then clicking ‘Cartel Coins’.
If you’re still paying a subscription fee for The Old Republic, BioWare says you shouldn’t expect much of a change on November 15 aside from a likely increase in the number of players running around on your server. If at some point you decide to stop paying a subscription fee, you’ll still retain ‘Preferred Status’, which means you’ll keep some of your subscription perks, including cargo hold storage access, access to chat, the ability to sprint and more ways to trade.
Also on November 15 BioWare will launch additional content in update 1.5, which among other features includes a new level 50 quest area called Sector X on Belsavis with a storyline that involves the Dread Masters. You’ll also be able to complete a series of quests that begins in Sector X to acquire the snarky assassin droid HK-51. While this content will be available to subscribers, free-to-play players will need to pay to see it.
Overall it seems free-to-play players will get access to a lot of content without paying anything, though the restrictions on equippable items and storage space seem pretty severe. We’ll have to wait until the full free system goes live next week to determine if free-to-play in SWTOR is actually fun or just an irritating series of reminders that you should pay real money to keep playing.
While those who opt out of subscribing will get all the game's story content for free, as a rough rule you'll basically be able to do most things three times per week; three PvE Flashpoint runs, three PvP Warzone battles and three Space Missions each week. You'll be able to buy Weekly Passes for each though in order to get unlimited access. There will be restrictions on both Cargo Bay and Inventory storage which can be removed using the new Cartel Coins currency.
There's no right to run Operations under the free package, so you'll need to buy a Weekly Pass if you want to get your hands on the best loot. Having said that, according to the chart you'll be unable to equip "most purple items unless a license is purchased", so it may not appeal that much to you anyway.
Most of the other restrictions are essentially matters of convenience; those who sub will get priority on login queues, a shorter Quick Travel cooldown and the ability to use the Emergency Fleet Pass to instantly return to their faction's space station. You'll also only get one Crew Skill slot with the free-to-play version of the game, and get a limited number of Field Revivals to use when you die in the middle of nowhere.
The free-to-play version of Star Wars: The Old Republic was announced back in July in response to continually falling subscription numbers. No fixed date has been given for when the free-to-play option will become available. It's still listed as "later this fall", but the game's current sub model will continue to be offered for players who want unlimited access to all the title's content.
Luke Karmali is IGN's UK Editorial Assistant and former SWTOR player. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on IGN and on Twitter.
While those who opt out of subscribing will get all the game's story content for free, as a rough rule you'll basically be able to do most things three times per week; three PvE Flashpoint runs, three PvP Warzone battles and three Space Missions each week. You'll be able to buy Weekly Passes for each though in order to get unlimited access. There will be restrictions on both Cargo Bay and Inventory storage which can be removed using the new Cartel Coins currency.
There's no right to run Operations under the free package, so you'll need to buy a Weekly Pass if you want to get your hands on the best loot. Having said that, according to the chart you'll be unable to equip "most purple items unless a license is purchased", so it may not appeal that much to you anyway.
Most of the other restrictions are essentially matters of convenience; those who sub will get priority on login queues, a shorter Quick Travel cooldown and the ability to use the Emergency Fleet Pass to instantly return to their faction's space station. You'll also only get one Crew Skill slot with the free-to-play version of the game, and get a limited number of Field Revivals to use when you die in the middle of nowhere.
The free-to-play version of Star Wars: The Old Republic was announced back in July in response to continually falling subscription numbers. No fixed date has been given for when the free-to-play option will become available. It's still listed as "later this fall", but the game's current sub model will continue to be offered for players who want unlimited access to all the title's content.
Luke Karmali is IGN's UK Editorial Assistant and former SWTOR player. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on IGN and on Twitter.
Star Wars: The Old Republic lead designer Daniel Erickson has left BioWare. Erickson made the news official on Twitter, writing “As part of leaving BioWare I'm officially starting a twitter account for job hunt and design thoughts.”
Erickson previously sparked speculation about his departure after adding "actively looking for new opportunities" to his LinkedIn page last month. He follows recent BioWare departures including The Old Republic executive producer Rich Vogel, who left BioWare in July, as well as BioWare co-founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuck, who retired from the company last month.
Darth Malgus may not be the ultimate villain of Star Wars: The Old Republic. He may not even be that recognizable to certain players depending on the choices they made and the characters they encountered during the course of the game. But given Malgus' resemblance to fan-favorite Darths like Vader and Malak, he is seen as the most marketable character in The Old Republic's cast.
So it's no surprise that we've already seen a number of action figures and statues depicting this ancient Dark Lord of the Sith, including a mini-statue from Gentle Giant that was included with the Collector's Edition version of the game. These collectibles range wildly in size, from the diminutive Lego figurine to Sideshow's impressively large (and impressively costly) life-size statue. But assuming your Star Wars obsession doesn't justify paying the price of a decent used car, Sideshow has another option in the works. This week they debuted new pictures and details about the Darth Malgus Premium Format Figure.
Premium Format Figures are large statues designed at 1:4 scale. The mixed media approach combines polystone bodies with real fabric clothing.
Malgus measures about 20-inches tall. He's priced at $374.99 on Sideshow's website for an expected March 2013 release. The statue will be released in both a standard version and a Sideshow-exclusive version with the alternate, unmasked head seen in some of these images.
Jesse is a writer for IGN Comics and IGN Movies. He can't wait until he's old enough to feel ways about stuff. Follow Jesse on Twitter, or find him on IGN.
BioWare and EA recently made the announcement that Star Wars: The Old Republic would shift from a subscription-only model to free-to-play. The adjusted model, which will take affect this November or December, will let anyone start up TOR and play to level 50 with a character class without having to sign up for a monthly fee.
“The market is clearly becoming a free-to-play market in the MMO space,” said Matthew Bromberg, general manager of BioWare Austin. “It appears that’s the direction the whole industry is going. Our own research told us that a significant percentage of the folks who have left the game, left because of the commitment to the subscription model. It’s not that surprising if you think about it because the dynamic in an MMO is essentially one in which you subscribe and then you’re waiting for new content, and people don’t feel good about waiting.”
The Old Republic started out very strong when it launched late last year, accumulating as many as 1.7 million subscribers. But then players started to leave in big numbers, so the number of active subscribers dropped below one million, though according to EA, is still “well over” 500,000. That’s still a lot of players, far more than most MMOs ever attract, but also a lot of players lost in under one year, and a trend that could have potentially continued without a change to the payment model.
EA is promising more frequent content updates from this point on, which will be free to those who decide to stay subscribed, but must be purchased by players leveling for free. Bromberg says the updates will introduce content that’s more social in nature. “Group content, Operations, Warzones, Flashpoints, events as opposed to focusing primarily cinematic story-driven single-player content.” Bromberg also teased a different style of space mission, saying, “we think there’s an opportunity beyond space on rails to do something really cool.” It sounds like that new style of space mission wouldn’t be ready until sometime next year.
The more solo-play-focused content is still on the way, with a level cap raise and new quests on the planet of Makeb scheduled to be released at some point in 2012, but this type of content isn’t exactly easy to produce. “The power and strength of the game, a lot of it was in this epic story. In fact it was so engaging that people played through it much more quickly than we’d imagined. The biggest strength of the game can also be a challenge as people get to the end. They got to the end much more quickly and we weren’t prepared for that. And so there was this lag time. That created some issues for us, clearly.”
One of the issues was development cost. “It’s hugely expensive. It’s cinematic, it’s lush, there’s voice over, it’s unbelievable. The amount of content available at launch was extraordinary. You have folks who’ve played through the levels, and what an online service has to provide is grouping. All of our research shows that people who have friends in game and play with people in social content, love the game and stay. If you remain a single player, you won’t stay. Our focus, in addition to extending the story which we will continue doing, is giving those players who want to play in groups with other people something fresh and new to do all the time.”
Bromberg said the behavior of a typical TOR player was to pick a class and stick with it through the story before branching out and setting up new characters. “That’s what drove the focused consumption of all that content. I think we’re still continuing to see that. Which is why I think it will be interesting in the free to play model, there are so many more people that we can open up to the story.”
Because The Old Republic wasn’t initially designed as a free-to-play game, it’s been an especially complicated process for EA and BioWare to figure what to charge for and what to keep free. “You try to find a balance whereby the limitations don’t impact the fun of the game. When you hit a certain level of engagement you’re going to naturally make that calculus in your head that it makes more sense to subscribe.”
Subscribers get unlimited access, while players without subscriptions won’t have unlimited access to PvP Warzones, will have fewer inventory and bank slots, as well as other limitations. “Ultimately you’ll be able to buy everything individually. But in the first phase, not everything will be purchaseable. But we’ll get there over time.” A microtransaction-driven Cartel Market will also be implemented, which will offer up cosmetic items, boosts and convenience items and tiered treasure chests that could contain rare vanity items.
As developers and publishers continue to experiment with pricing models, it’s not rare to hear some say pricing model design these days is game design. Bromberg pointed out the potential flaws in equating the two. “You don’t define a game by how people pay for it. I don’t think people who design games think about it that way. All the principles of game design, it has to be fun, it has to be engaging, it has to be social, all those things are true. And when you’re designing with free-to-play in mind, it does impact how you’re designing the game. I do think there’s been a little bit of an overemphasis on it, especially with the business model. Game designers don’t design games because of the business model is, they design because they love doing it. [The Old Republic] being free doesn’t really mean anything, you have to want to play. Especially in a crowded world. Especially with all these options. People don’t play something just because it’s free.”
Moving forward, Bromberg said a key factor in The Old Republic’s future will be an ongoing willingness to be flexible with the payment structure. “You never know how precisely it’s going to work until you begin interacting with consumers. You have to tweak as you go, and you have to tweak every day. That’s a very different discipline than a subscription model where you’re watching over time and it’s a bit slower. We’ve got to get in and look at the data every day and make sure we’ve got that balance right. I wouldn’t be shocked at all to see it change a lot. How much is too much, how much is too little? You can only figure that out by looking at data. You design by looking at data to begin with, but especially for us, this will be new. I’d expect there to be a lot of changes.”
It’s not easy to tell a good story in an MMO. While cut-scene story sequences of games like BioWare’s The Old Republic and Funcom’s The Secret World are more effective at evoking specific emotional responses, they don’t feel like especially social experiences. They tell very rigid stories that make you feel like you’re playing a single-player game, which is great for a change of pace after a round of questing, but can also take away from one of the chief benefits of the genre: the sense of community.
ArenaNet mixes numerous styles of story delivery, offering up highly structured main story content but also events, which are basically dynamic open quests that occur out in the main game world. When an event takes place, there’s no need to read a lengthy text box or ensure the proper quest is active and at the proper stage of completion. After arriving at an event area the quest is essentially auto-activated, allowing anyone to start fighting, collecting, escorting, or whatever the objective happens to be.
“A good dynamic event is going to bring people in just through the nature of what’s going on through visual effects, audio effects, what the NPCs are talking about, what the story is,” said ArenaNet’s Mike Zadorojny. “People are just naturally interested because they’re curious, they want to see what’s happening. Also because that’s where you’re going to get Karma, so there’s a reward system built into it to encourage people to go along that path as well.”
Of course simply dangling the carrot of Karma in front of players isn’t going to be reason enough to keep them coming back throughout the entirety of the leveling process. If the event involves staring at bunnies for twenty minutes, really ugly bunnies, chances are nobody is going to bother sticking around to earn the rewards. Zadorojny explained how the team goes about building the events to ensure the action is as much of a motivating factor as the rewards.
“We actually had the early dynamic event system working in the Guild Wars 1 engine before we could even work on Guild Wars 2. That’s how long we’ve been iterating on this process. A straight collection event isn’t necessarily exciting. A straight kill count event isn’t necessarily exciting. But when you layer in additional things, like you’re using a gun to collect something, or you’re using a gun that transforms creatures and then from there you’re collecting items. When you start layering additional mechanics it becomes more engaging to the player.”
ArenaNet links events with bits of fiction so it feels like one connected storyline, even as outcomes change depending on whether or not objectives are met. In the Asura starting zone, for example, there’s an Asura trying to repair a gate so she can travel into an ancient laboratory. “When she actually gets down there, there’s an event that basically escorts her through the location,” said Zadorojny, “and there’s a side objective where if you find these extra data crystals you can give them to her. If you give her enough data crystals, the follow-up event is different. If you don’t do the side objective, when she gets to the end there are golems that don’t recognize her as the owner of this facility so it puts her in a stasis field and players are defending her from the golems. If you give her enough crystals, she can fake the system into thinking she’s the original owner, and so the secondary event is no longer about protecting her from the golems, it has to do with destroyers that are coming up and causing problems. So you’re doing something with the golems instead of against them.”
In another event chain on the same map, a reactor explodes and it’s up to the group to help an NPC clean it up. If everyone manages to protect the NPC through the entire cleaning process, he explodes and a gigantic fire elemental stomps into the area and starts attacking all nearby. If the group fails to protect him, he gets captured by enemy forces and turned into a hostile golem, and his ensuing destructive rampage needs to be stopped.
“If you’re doing an escort that leads you into a new area and [the NPCs] set up shop, there’s a good chance that events are going to spawn off of those locations. Based on the states of the world, who’s located where, where safe havens are, you can start seeing this spider web of events that are trailing off to various other locations.”
ArenaNet doesn’t only allow one group at a time to experience this type of content. Many can join in throughout the course of an event, and that follow along with stories in a social environment with fewer restrictions when compared to many other MMOs. “We have a scaling system in place that handles a lot of this,” said Zadorojny, which is used to boost the difficulty level of encounters as more players join, adding in things like additional attack types for bosses and minions, to ensure encounters can’t simply be steamrolled over by superior numbers.
But there’s far more than quest structures to consider when telling stories in an MMO and setting a tone, as designer Ree Soesbee explained. “We want [players] to go find things and when they find something Asura kids telling jokes or a pirate house or just a really gorgeous vista we want them to feel like they’ve accomplished or they’ve discovered. And if you go there and it’s meh, then you walk off. It’s much cooler if you go there and these NPCs are reacting as well, they’re doing stuff.”
“It creates the idea that they’ve got their own lives,” said ArenaNet’s Jeff Grubb. “For our main cities we really wanted to give them a sense of place and a sense of being alive and we did that with a lot of voice over that is not directly tied to what you’re doing. You may encounter it and you may not encounter it, but that has a feel for the spontaneity.”
Depending on which are you start, ArenaNet hopes to preserve the distinct personalities of each race, from the warlike Charr to the hyper-intelligent, overconfident Asura. “The Asura are brilliant and confident and irritating,” said Grubb. “They’re a race of mad scientists as a result.”
It was important to ArenaNet to give all players a sense of all races, so it’s not necessary to play an Asura to know what the Asura are like. “In Charr lands you can still get an understanding of what the Asura are about,” said Grubb. “So I’ve played Charr and I know everything about the legions and I meet this little Asura guy and I go oh, that’s different. What’s that? Hey he’s smart. Whoa he insulted me. Hey what’s his story? You get interested in what their story is because those NPCs throughout the world are conceptualized from something that is really potently distilled so that it is a reflection of that. Then maybe you go and play as an Asura.”
To tell more directed stories, ArenaNet uses a personal story system threaded throughout each zone, which takes you to instanced areas and uses voiced dialogue sequences to tell the most important parts of the story, more in the style of a single-player game. These stories won’t be the same for everyone, but tailored to the decisions made through character creation as well as decisions made at crucial moments throughout leveling and questing. “You get three, three or four choices right off the bat,” said Soesbee. “More than that if you count things like your race and your class. Those things each spawn a little storyline.”
For example, if a player picks Sylvari and specifies during creation that the character dreamed of a white stag, a white stag is involved in personal story quests, and it might lead to a meeting with an NPC that would never otherwise happen. “You get this revolving cast of NPCs and situations that is very mutable based on what you’ve done in the world,” said Soesbee. “So either you’re going to go save that guy and fight a big boss who is holding him prisoner, or you’re going to save the town and the fight is going to be you against a thousand little guys who are trying to burn the town.”
Soesbee explained how ArenaNet had to be careful about how to tell these stories without fumbling the emotional impact. “We don’t want to tell you what your character feels. That’s kind of a no-no if I went up to you and said this guy died, you should feel sad. We try to just set the scene so that you do feel sad. We try to show that death or show that event in whatever emotional context it is and let you feel what you would feel about it and just tell the story around you and let you interact with it as much as possible.”
“We’re not above manipulating your emotions,” added Grubb, “but we do recognize that you can feel different ways about it.”
“That’s one way that the choices in the stories and in the personal stories can be very useful to us,” continued Soesbee, “because we show you two NPCs and one is really funny and one is really serious. And then we say one of them is going to die. They’re being attacked. Which one do you save? Well we’re not saying you have to feel strongly about this funny guy because you might pick the other one, but because you’ve chosen which one you like, we know that you are going to be more invested in that story of saving that guy.”
ArenaNet plans to build in more events and story-driven content following launch, though so far is only giving hints as to what that content might involve. “We’ve laid out a lot of hooks,” said Grubb. “I came in on end of Factions so I worked on Nightfall and Eye of the North. I did a lot of research on the basics of the world to figure out okay, why is this happening? What have we said? How does that help create the basis for new stories? One thing that Ree mentioned early in her movement of the world which was sort of like our story manifesto was that we refer to the various elder dragons. We talked about a sea dragon, just one line. We haven’t talked about it since. The fans haven’t forgotten about it. And will we talk about it? I don’t know. If we come up with you know good stories for it, yes we will.”
We’ll know for sure if ArenaNet’s take on story implementation is ultimately a good one overall after the game launches on August 28.
