SWTOR's Fifteen Year Game Plan
A lot of fans of Star Wars: The Old Republic and their anti-fan counterparts were caught off guard by a statement from Bioware's senior creative director James Ohlen when he indicated that the company has a fifteen year 'road map' for the development of the game. What? Playing SWTOR in 2025? "Impossible!" says one group. "Awesome!" says the other.
If the nebulous title brought you in, you're not alone. Yet in an interview during last weekend's ComiCon in San Diego, Bioware's senior creative director James Ohlen mentioned that Star Wars: The Old Republic will launch with seventeen explorable worlds but the road map allows for over 500 worlds in 2025. That's over a decade's worth of content additions, folks.
JO: Well, I can say that we have 1(7) major worlds. Then we have an indeterminate number of minor worlds. And our goal, obviously this being an online game, that we're hoping is going to last for decades, we're going to be, obviously, adding more to the galaxy map as the game progresses. We want to add dozens of worlds. Hundreds of worlds eventually. In 2025, we'll hopefully have 500 worlds.
Source: DarthHater.com
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Now in all fairness, the quoted sentences were said partially in jest. However, and as your sainted mothers have doubtless told you, every blithely uttered remark tends to contain a nugget of truth. So then the quest is to discover precisely how far Bioware foresees taking SWTOR. Can a game stay successful and profitable for over a decade? There are several fine examples that say yes including EVE, Ultima Online, Everquest and others. But in this day of over-hyped and prematurely released games, the rotting corpses of legion MMOs riddle the road map of success. So where does SWTOR fall on this continuum? Only time will tell.
What do YOU think?
