Star Wars: The Old Republic

• 1. Introduction

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  Star Wars: The Old Republic launched on the 20th of December 2011, and within three days it had attracted one million subscribers. That made it, at the time, the fastest-growing MMO ever released. The number is striking on its own. But it only starts to hint at the scale of what BioWare had built. Industry analysts estimated the development budget at somewhere between $150 million and $200 million or more, placing it among the most expensive games ever made at the time. A billion dollars in lifetime revenue would eventually follow. So what was this game, and how did a studio best known for single-player storytelling end up building something this large? The answers run through years of preparation, a writing team unlike anything the industry had seen, and a galaxy at war with itself.

• 2. A Galaxy on the Brink

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  The game is set more than 3,600 years before the events of the Star Wars films, placing it in a timeline virtually untouched by the movies. A 28-year Great Galactic War had devastated both sides, ending only with the Treaty of Coruscant, a fragile ceasefire that left old wounds open. The Jedi, held responsible for the Sith's gains during that war, abandoned Coruscant and returned to Tython, the world where their Order was first founded. The Sith re-established an academy on Korriban, their ancient homeworld.

  Three cinematic trailers BioWare produced before launch told parts of this backstory without words of dialogue, using action alone. The first, titled "Deceived", was shown at the Electronic Arts E3 press conference on the 1st of June 2009. It depicted the Sith assault on the Jedi Temple on Coruscant, centered on Darth Malgus cutting down Jedi Master Ven Zallow. A second trailer, "Hope", released on the 14th of June 2010, showed the Battle of Alderaan. A third, "Return", shown at E3 2011, reached back even further to show how the Sith first recaptured Korriban. By the time players logged in, they were arriving at the edge of a cold war with decades of history behind it.

• 3. The Scale of the Story

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  In October 2008, when BioWare announced the game, the studio said it contained more story content than all of their previous games combined. That is a significant claim from a company that had already produced Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series. The writing team worked on the project longer than any other department, and by October 2008 some of the twelve full-time writers had already been on the project for more than two years.

  In January 2012, Guinness World Records officially recognized The Old Republic as the largest entertainment voice-over project ever completed, with over 200,000 lines of recorded dialogue. Every character in the game, including the player character, was fully voiced. Eight distinct class stories, each with a three-act structure, meant that a Jedi Knight and a Bounty Hunter played through almost entirely different narratives, even while inhabiting the same game world. Players' choices along the light and dark spectrum permanently opened or closed storylines, and companion relationships could evolve into romance or collapse depending on how a player acted throughout the game.

• 4. Companions and Controversy

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  Among the game's many companion characters, one generated an outsized amount of public debate. Vette, a Twi'lek companion available to the Sith Warrior class, was voiced by Catherine Taber, whose earlier role as Mission Vao in the original Knights of the Old Republic had already made her familiar to longtime fans. A fan poll by IGN in 2012 placed Vette fourth among all companions. BioWare itself reported that as of July 2016, Vette and Lana Beniko were the most recruited companions across the player base.

  Writers at multiple outlets praised Vette's character arc as evidence that romantic subplots in games could carry genuine narrative weight rather than serving as distractions from the main story. But the game also allowed players to treat Vette cruelly, which sparked a separate and more contentious conversation. Mike Fahey, writing for Kotaku, recalled players openly boasting about low affection ratings with Vette. The Daily Mail ran a story citing Fahey's article, alleging that kind treatment of the character was not popular; that piece drew sharp responses from writers at MCV, Destructoid, and Computer and Video Games, all of whom criticized the paper for thin evidence and selective framing. Religion Dispatches later published findings from a survey of 369 players asking how they had chosen to interact with Vette through their characters.

• 5. Launch, Collapse, and Survival

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  Subscribers peaked at 1.7 million by February 2012, roughly two months after launch. By the end of March 2012, that figure had dropped to 1.3 million, and by July 2012 it had fallen below one million. EA converted the game to a free-to-play model, with free-to-play going live on all servers on the 15th of November 2012. EA said at the time that 500,000 subscribers were enough to keep the game profitable, and that they were well above that number. By May 2013, subscriptions had stabilized near that 500,000 mark.

  The financial picture, though, looked different from a different angle. In 2013, the game generated an estimated $139 million in additional revenues beyond subscription income. By an earnings call in October 2019, Electronic Arts told investors that The Old Republic was approaching a billion dollars in lifetime revenue, measured against a reported $200 million development budget. As of August 2014 the game counted over one million monthly players. In June 2023, IGN reported that EA had reached a deal to transfer ongoing development and operation to Broadsword Online Games, the studio that maintains Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot, freeing BioWare to focus on Mass Effect and Dragon Age.

• 6. Expansions and Evolution

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  Eight major expansions arrived between 2013 and 2022. Rise of the Hutt Cartel, released on the 14th of April 2013, raised the level cap to 55 and centered its story on the planet Makeb. Galactic Starfighter, released on the 4th of February 2014, introduced 12-versus-12 space-based player-versus-player combat. Shadow of Revan, released on the 9th of December 2014, took players to Yavin 4, which first appeared in the original Star Wars film, and to Rishi, described as a tropical pirate haven at the edge of the galaxy.

  Knights of the Fallen Empire, announced at EA's E3 2015 press conference, introduced a cinematic trailer titled "Sacrifice" made by Blur Studio. IGN awarded it Best Trailer of E3. Knights of the Eternal Throne arrived in December 2016, coinciding with the game's five-year anniversary, and raised the level cap to 70. The gap before the next expansion, Onslaught, was the largest in the game's history, nearly three years, with a release date of the 22nd of October 2019. Legacy of the Sith, the eighth expansion, was revealed on the 2nd of July 2021 in a Twitch livestream marking the game's ten-year anniversary. Scheduled for December 2021, it was ultimately released on the 15th of February 2022, with a new cinematic trailer titled "Disorder" released the same day.