Star Wars: The Old Republic will be turning 10 on December 20, 2021. The latest expansion for the game, Legacy of the Sith, will be released on December 14. During an exclusive interview on November 17, the creative director behind Legacy of the Sith, Charles Boyd, said there were “no specific plans for an end date” when it comes to supporting The Old Republic. This should be good news for anybody wondering about where the game is going in the long run. But nothing lasts forever.
The project director working on Legacy of the Sith, Keith Kanneg, said the previous day in a press conference that he believes The Old Republic has a bright future ahead of it. “This is the start of a year's celebration,” he noted. “We have a whole year of activities planned that will spark a lot of conversation with players.” He pointed out how “this is just the start.”
“This is a foundation year for us,” Kanneg said. “If we want to last another 10 years, we need to refine where we're going and what our story will be. This is the start for the next 10 years.”
“We’ve laid out with EA the next couple of years — our five-year plans,” Kanneg said. “‘What do we want?’ ‘What do we have?’ ‘Where are we going?’ That type of thing. Really, this is a foundation year for us even though it’s 10 years into our life cycle. We looked into it and said ‘if we want to last another 10 years, we have to do a lot of improvements, a lot of changes. Find where we’re going, where our story is going.’ So, where do we see it? Kind of the start of the next 10 years.”
“That’s exactly how I’d put it, too. We want to build on all this amazing storytelling and the choices the players have made to make their character unique up to this point — and keep that going,” Boyd continued. “How many games get that opportunity to tell that continuous, branching interactive narrative?” Boyd acknowledged that “we have a 10-year-old game,” but said that he wanted to “update some things. Expand options as a player. Carry the game forward into the future.”
Boyd went on to say that he wants The Old Republic to start feeling like a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. The idea is to have your choices carry forward to the greatest extent possible. “More than anything, we want players to feel like they’re having a Dungeons and Dragons tabletop experience where it’s you and a DM and it’s tailored to your choices and past experiences — your future choices and all that,” Boyd said.
There certainly is no lack of source material. Boyd noted that “we do have the benefit of 10 years of story and 10 years of branching options and storylines and characters and classes having separate experiences — which is awesome because whenever we’re like ‘what do we want to do next,’ we have all this stuff we can look at and say ‘it’d be cool to continue that piece’ or ‘here’s a new thing, how can we ground it in something players know?’”
Legacy of the Sith takes you to Manaan where Darth Norok has gained a foothold in his conquest of the planet. The expansion then takes you to Elom in search of Darth Malgus. In addition to moving the story forward, Legacy of the Sith introduces a variety of updates and improvements to the game systems including character creation and gear progression. The former allows for a higher degree of customization when it comes to player backgrounds and combat styles. The latter does away with random drops in favor of currencies and consumables.
Kanneg mentioned during the exclusive interview that technical improvements for The Old Republic are planned well into the future. The idea is to keep the game looking nice and sharp for as long as possible. Boyd for example brought up remastering the cinematics in high definition. But everything comes to an end. Somebody will eventually have to pull the plug and take the servers offline.
When asked about stopping support for the game, Kanneg said that “we’ve been working on our multi-year plans.” He intends to keep the game going for the rest of the conceivable future. “We’re already working on our five-year plan,” he said. “So at least in that regard, it’s not on any near horizon.”
Boyd said about preserving the game that “it’s not something we’ve talked about a lot.” He pointed out that “we’ve never set a particular end date, so there wasn’t really a reason for it to come up.” This of course leaves a few questions unanswered for anybody thinking about what comes after the end. “Speaking purely as a fan and as someone who worked on it, I’d love to think we’d find some way to keep it available.” He went on to say that “it’s not something we’ve really dug into, so I don’t want to oversell anything.”
Kanneg said that “for now, we really haven’t made that a priority within the team, but if you look at how we’re creating the team, and how we’re creating the game, and how we archive it already, it wouldn’t take much from that to make sure that the game is available.”
“I suspect that’ll be a question for executives and lawyers,” Boyd continued.
This brings to mind the ongoing conversation about game preservation. Developers in the past have tended to focus on producing new products instead of making sure that old games work on the latest systems. The result has been that preservation efforts have almost always fallen to fan communities. When it comes to games like The Old Republic, this usually means maintaining a private server and sometimes a form of software emulation. The problem is that fan communities frequently come under fire when executives and lawyers notice them operating without a license.
“We’re just part of the whole community of different groups that are invested in The Old Republic and want to see it thrive,” Boyd said. But in terms of game preservation, he admitted that “we haven’t really planned it because it’s not the plan right now, so we haven’t really put much into it.”
The near future is bright for The Old Republic. The distant future is however uncertain. While the latest expansion proves that players can expect more content to come, the responsibility for preservation might just fall to the fan community. What form this will take remains to be seen. The ideal situation would of course be a cooperative effort between the developer and the community to keep the game going long after somebody has to pull the plug. But who knows if this will happen.