Not in its content - in combining two top-ranked brands, Star Wars and Knights of the Old Republic, with the superlative storytelling skills of BioWare and the MMO tech of Mythic, it's a winning formula on paper - but in how EA has spent its money and how it expects you to spend yours.Īs has been widely reported, it has cost EA around $80-100 million (excluding a probably greater amount spent on marketing) to make SWTOR into an MMO with a boxed-copy-and-subscriptions model - what some call pay-to-play. It was released at the peak of the paid-for MMO business and did respectably, despite repeated design screw-ups, only being shut down to make room for SWTOR.Įurogamer's SWTOR review is a few weeks away, and we'll reserve judgment on the game itself until then, but even now it seems like a very large gamble. Galaxies took the (then still mostly-unsullied-curse-you-Phantom-Menace) main Star Wars brand and made a universe out of it, doing a fair job at replicating the feel of the world. There are uneasy parallels that can be drawn with Star Wars: Galaxies, SWTOR's much-maligned predecessor, here. Yet despite the long list of superlatives already attached to it, SWTOR feels like the last of its kind a game that was started at the end of one era of the MMO, and one that will be released at the beginning of another. The Guinness Book of Records: Gamer's Edition must be having a field day with Star Wars: The Old Republic most expensive game ever, most vocal recording in a game, longest hype, most embarrassing cosplayer, most Jedi teabagging.

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