Play Star Wars For Free!
There are a lot of factors that keep me from playing MMO's , but it's mostly that I won't have the time to devote to it so I can keep up with everyone else playing the game and I'll let them down. The other factor is cost, because I don't want to pay a monthly fee for a game I'm probably not going to get my money's worth from (I downloaded DCU Online to my PS3 when it went free-to-play, and still haven't even opened it yet).
But if the subscription fee was keeping you from playing Star Wars: The Old Republic, well, BioWare would like you to know that you're going to have to come up with another excuse. Because this fall, the MMO is adding a free-to-play option that will let you play the eight iconic Star Wars character classes up to level 50 (with certain restrictions, naturally).
"Players want flexibility and choice. The subscription-only model presented a major barrier for a lot of people who wanted to become part of The Old Republic™ universe," said Matthew Bromberg, GM of BioWare Austin.
As a first step, SWTOR will go on sale in August for $14.99, including one month of free subscription. Personally, I think all MMOs should have a free-to-play option. It's like a game demo. But being an MMO, there's the whole community aspect to take into consideration. So playing for free for a while helps you decide whether or not the game is really suited to you, and then you can go ahead and subscribe if you really need to unlock those extra features or level up even more!
Wootini
Posted to Video Games on 31 July 2012
· Comments (5)
Other stuff like this: bioware, free to play, mmo, pc, star wars: the old republic
Players also want a game that isn't stagnant.
Actually, what's keeping me from playing SW:TOR is their BS involving the gay romance options.
At this point (actually quite a while back) I'm convinced that it isn't going to happen, ever.
And it should've happened immediatly at release.
The entire way it went down and the fact that they nevertheless used the supposed inclusion for some good press (in the nature of 'Ooh, aren't we progressive') has soured me on the whole game.
I'll be nursing my MMORPG lust on Guild Wars 2 when it comes out and when I get a new computer, because my current one is having issues.
I think that the free-to-play restriction is to level 15, not 50. The overall game level cap is 50.
On a different note, I just started playing this about two weeks ago (KOTOR was one of my favorite games of all time). It is pretty great if you love Bioware stories and characters. There is a bit of repetition as all of the classes play on the same planets, but there is a lot of opportunity to customize play.
If anyone is interested in hooking up on the game for group missions or flashpoints, hit me up.
Personally, I reckon Bioware would have been better served by making KOTOR 3. MMO's are not an easy genre to get right, and while SWTOR had quite a few new and interesting features, it ultimately was failed by making it far too easy for people to burn through all the available content and then quickly become bored. I'm convinced that WOW's success owes it all to the fact that organising 40 people for raids which are quite impossible without being geared right ends up stalling the majority of the game base and keeps them hanging around, rather than say beating your new operations boss within the first day of the new patch going live.
Alting became a focus with the legacy feature, though you basically had to go through the exact same levelling path that you went through the first time, guess how quick that got old? Needless to say, the slowly dying server populations didn't help matters much, and transfers and merges came too late to maintain my interest.
Now comes the spectre of free to play, which is never a good sign.
All in all, a new single player RPG would have cost considerably less to make, and would probably have been critically acclaimed regardless of its quality.
SWTOR has smothered all talk about their promise of same-gender relationships coming "soon" by restricting it to one thread and deleting any mention from any other threads as soon as they see it, meanwhile continuing to offer no new information from any source. Their promise six months ago was this year, but this year is passing very quickly. At this point they have gotten almost all good press for promising something without actually delivering it.