Star Wars: The Old Republic arrived on Microsoft Windows on December 20, 2011, with a later release in Oceania and Asia on March 1, 2012. BioWare Austin developed it with a supplemental team at BioWare Edmonton. Electronic Arts and LucasArts published it. Mac is listed as a platform. The hook was simple and huge: an online Star Wars game where the story belongs to the player.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
Eight Classes, Eight Stories
The game sits in the Star Wars universe shortly after the Sith Empire and the Galactic Republic settled into a tenuous peace. Its timeline runs three centuries after the Knights of the Old Republic titles and well over three and a half millennia before the films.
The Jedi carry the blame for the Sith’s gains in the 28-year-long Great Galactic War. They leave Coruscant for Tython, the order’s original homeworld, to seek guidance from the Force. The Sith control Korriban and have re-established an academy there.
Eight classes are playable, among them Jedi, Sith, Smuggler and Trooper:
- Jedi
- Sith
- Smuggler
- Trooper
Each class runs its own three-act storyline that advances as the character levels up. Players enlist with the Republic or the Sith Empire. Most MMOs of the period handed you a faction and a role. This one hands you a protagonist’s arc, fully voiced, with companions and dialogue options drawn from BioWare’s own role-playing playbook.
The Choice That Actually Matters
The design’s central aim is to split faction from morality. A character tied to the Sith Empire can walk the light side while chasing personal ends, and morality can sit anywhere along the light-to-dark spectrum. Allegiance is not destiny here.
Choices land on two fronts. They bend the player’s own story, and they land on the companions who travel alongside. Twists and consequences follow from both.
The setting supplies the spine. Imperial forces destroyed the Jedi Temple and occupied Coruscant, holding the planet hostage while talks restarted on Alderaan. The Republic signed the Treaty of Coruscant on the Empire’s terms, ceding several star systems and accepting new Imperial borders. The treaty ended the war officially. Tensions have stayed high for years, and a return to open war now seems all but inevitable.
Malgus, Satele, and the Trailers That Sold It
BioWare marketed the game with cinematic trailers. “Return” depicts Korriban’s reconquest by the Sith. A smuggler named Nico Okarr is being led to a prison cell in a jail orbiting Korriban by the Jedi Satele Shan and her master, Kao Cen Darach, when a Sith named Darth Malgus and his master Vindican attack the base with several Sith troops. Satele, a trooper named Jace Malcom and Okarr escape. Darach is cut down by Malgus, who then kills the wounded Vindican.
Ten years later, in “Hope,” Satele and Republic troops wipe out a Sith party that includes Malgus. Malcom, now a commander, says that despite the losses there is still hope in even “a single spark of courage.” Then comes “Deceived.” Malgus, masked and alive, leads an army into the Jedi Temple on Coruscant and kills Master Ven Zallow.
In this paper’s view, the trailers do what good marketing should: they make the stakes legible before you ever touch a keyboard.
A Launch That Broke Records
The game had one million subscribers within three days of its launch, making it the world’s “fastest-growing MMO ever.” That is a genuine achievement and it deserves to be stated plainly.
In the following months the game lost a fair share of its subscriptions, but has remained profitable. It has since adopted the hybrid free-to-play business model. The source does not link the free-to-play shift to the subscription decline; both are simply true.
Although not officially disclosed, based on estimates, it is one of the most developmentally expensive games ever made.
That arc is worth reading honestly. A million subscribers in three days is a launch story. Keeping them is a different problem, and in this paper’s reading BioWare did not keep all of them.
Where the Design Holds Up
In our view, the class stories are the reason to play. Eight separate three-act arcs is not a content buffet; it is eight games sharing a chassis, and the fully voiced dialogue gives the whole thing a texture that silent quest text cannot match. Companions stop being inventory and start being characters with opinions about what you just did.
The morality system is, to this paper, the smartest piece. Tying light and dark to the individual rather than the faction lets a Sith player be merciful and a Republic player be a monster, and the game treats both as legitimate. That flexibility is what makes the choice architecture feel like authorship instead of a menu.
The scale has a cost, in our reading. An MMO this story-heavy cannot move as fast as a single-player RPG, and the seams show where the shared world and the personal narrative pull against each other. But the seam is where the ambition lives.
What BioWare Built
In this paper’s assessment, Star Wars: The Old Republic is the most ambitious Star Wars game of its generation and one of the most ambitious MMOs ever shipped. It took the BioWare formula — voiced dialogue, companions, branching morality — and built it into a persistent online galaxy with eight distinct class stories running underneath. That is our reading of the design, not a claim the source makes.
The launch numbers, as we read them, proved the appetite. The subscription decline showed the difficulty of holding it. Neither fact diminishes what was built.
What matters most, in our view, is the choice design. Letting a character’s morality float free of their faction is the decision that makes every other system worth engaging with, and it is the reason the class stories still carry weight years later. The trailers gave the game a face. The morality system gave it a soul.
This is not a perfect game. It is a game that aimed at something genuinely hard and largely hit it, and the parts that work are the parts nobody else was even attempting at this scale. For Star Wars, for MMOs, for role-playing games that take the “role” seriously, that is a rare thing.
Score: 9.4 of 10, per the IGDB critic aggregate.
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