I was saddened to read the news about SWTOR going F2p by the end of the year. I actually stayed away from the comment section on articles that covered it, not wanting to read a bunch of people crowing in triumph over the perceived fail of a game that they hated. In my opinion, The Old Republic was a very good game; for me, there just wasn’t enough to justify an additional sub fee once I’d reached level cap. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a good game. I consider Warcraft to be one of the best MMOs that I’ve played, and I’m not subbed to that, either – for very much the same reason.
(That’s kind of a lie. I do have a sub, since I signed up for the Annual Pass. Were I not forced to keep it, I wouldn’t be paying a monthly sub.)
This whole thing irritates me because I get the feeling that most of the people who had been predicting the game’s demise were those who hate story in their games, and resent development time and money being spent on it. If you are a spacebar-skipping “I refuse to read quest text” type of person, then you probably didn’t care for it, I get that. I understand that there are gamers with the attention span of a gnat, who have never read a book, who care nothing about what their character looks like or what their place in the world is…onwards to pvp! I understand, but I just don’t respect you.
For me MMOs are all about story, from the creation of my character to the way that their story unfolds against a unique world. Star Wars did an excellent job at making me want to find out what happened next. I loved the cutscenes, and the interplay between myself and the other people that I was grouped with. Although I’d said that The Secret World is hands-down best at telling a world’s story, SWTOR was best at telling a story at a personal level, and it makes me sad that there probably won’t be many content updates going forward. Oh, there will be some…but I would be surprised if they invested that level of resources into the personal story. And that is a shame.
So yes, once it goes free to play I will undoubtedly start re-levelling some of those alts that I was working on. But I am saddened by this decision, because I still have some genuine love there for the game.