We recently had a chance to catch up with BioWare senior producer Blaine Christine to discuss the newly launched free-to-play option for Star Wars: The Old Republic. Read on to find out what we learned!

Let’s first cut to why Star Wars: The Old Republic even went free-to-play to begin with. According to Blaine, SWTOR was designed as a subscription-based game early on and while BioWare did notice the obvious shift towards free-to-play games in the run up to launch, the game simply wasn’t designed for that business model. However, BioWare was looking to possibly add some sort of microtransactions to the game post-launch. As it turned out, the free-to-play situation made it much harder for BioWare to not only keep players, but also attract new players, and so the team fast-tracked retrofitting the game in order to facilitate the free-to-play model we now see.

Read more of Michael Bitton's Chatting SWTOR F2P with Blaine Christine.