When Star Wars: The Old Republic released back in 2011, many MMO fans were hoping it would help revolutionize the genre. World of Warcraft had reached it peak subscriber count of 12 million just one year earlier, and much of the conversation at the time was about finding the next “WoW-killer” to take the genre to new places, a task BioWare took on with confidence due to the studio’s RPG pedigree and the huge success of Mass Effect 2 just a year before.
Almost a decade on, Star Wars: The Old Republic hasn’t enjoyed the same long-lasting respect as the original Knights of the Old Republic games. The game had problems, and ultimately struggled to survive in its subscription model in the highly monopolized market of the time. However, there are still some great reasons that Star Wars: The Old Republic is worth revisiting 10 years later.
Star Wars: The Old Republic performed a high-wire balancing act that BioWare and fans alike hoped would launch the MMORPG to instant success. The game had 8 classes, 4 for the Republic and 4 for the Sith. Each one had a huge KOTOR-sized campaign with fully voiced NPCs and separate voices for the player characters, as well as an immense amount of dialog options throughout its world.
Ultimately, The Old Republic ended up feeling like 8 single-player games strung together by a shared MMORPG world. There were few ways for players to engage with each other in roleplay – after all, it would only take two players of the same class to suddenly realize they’d been living identical lives with identical companions for that to fall apart. Even in group encounters, two players speaking with identical voices made roleplaying as a group hard.
As a result The Old Republic always felt like it had two main components which didn’t quite gel. Fans hoping for a BioWare RPG experience were satisfied at first, but just playing through the game like a single player story would eventually leave the player too far behind in levels to keep up with their main quests, forcing them to engage in the less narratively-driven MMO aspects of the game.
MMO fans on the other hand found themselves isolated in story instances where they couldn’t even see their fellow players, let alone interact with them. The promise of an MMO with a KOTOR-level story was realized, but never truly synthesized. However, there is still one big reason to go back to The Old Republic.
At the end of the day, Star Wars: The Old Republic has more BioWare Star Wars content than Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel combined. MMO fans may find servers emptier, but fans of single player BioWare RPGs will still find the game a treasure trove of some of BioWare’s best and most frequently forgotten stories.
Not only that, but since its initial release The Old Republic has moved to a free-to-play model which means players can explore eight fully-fleshed out campaigns across a huge variety of worlds and some of BioWare’s best companion characters without paying a dime. Star Wars: The Old Republic may never have quite been able to realize the experience of a truly synthesized KOTOR MMO, but it remains an enjoyable broadly single-player experience in a huge world with writing to match the best BioWare games on a far larger scale.
Star Wars: The Old Republic is available now on PC.
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