According to a new report, development on Star Wars: The Old Republic may be moved from BioWare to a new studio in order to free up BioWare to work on Dragon Age and Mass Effect.
The report comes from IGN and states that parent company Electronic Arts is looking to move development away from BioWare to Broadsword Online Games, which currently develops and runs Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot. There is a connection to SWTOR at the studio as well, as it is run by Rob Denton, a former VP at BioWare who worked on the game in its earliest days. Denton also co-founded Mythic Entertainment and Loric Games, so he’s clearly an MMORPG vet.
EA will continue to publish Star Wars:The Old Republic, but this move is intended to transition BioWare to focus on the Mass Effect and Dragon Age titles in development. Both of those games are a couple of years from their announcements, with scarce updates since, so this move could be seen as a way to jumpstart development on both of those franchise projects. Of the two announced games, Dragon Age: Dreadwolf, is said to be in a more advanced development stage after years in development, with reported overhauls and delays.
There’s an agreement in place between the two companies, with a signed letter of intent, and the intention to finalize the deal as early as this month. If this deal goes through as expected, more than half of the current development team would go along with the game to Broadsword. This is an estimated 40 people who might follow the games development team to the new company, with the rest of the team potentially finding other roles at EA or affected by layoffs.
Star Wars: The Old Republic launched back at the end of 2011, and the BioWare team continues to develop the game, as well as make efforts to modernize it to set SWTOR up for the future. Among the changes have been the release of a 64-bit client and a recent cloud-based test server to gain some data and feedback ahead of moving the game’s servers to the cloud.
Should the development team change, we’ll have to see what the roadmap looks like.
UPDATE:
EA has responded to IGN's report with the following statement:
“Almost 12 years after launch, Star Wars: The Old Republic remains a success and continues to grow its dedicated and passionate community. We’re so proud of the work the team has done, and the future of the game and the community continues to be very bright. We’re evaluating how we give the game and the team the best opportunity to grow and evolve, which includes conversations with Broadsword, a boutique studio that specializes in delivering online, community-driven experiences. Our goal is to do what is best for the game and its players.”
