Star Wars The Old Repulic game producer Keith Kanneg, posted on the official forums something that gives us a hint of what direction the game is taking in 2018
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Keith has admitted several times in the past that the MMO elements of the game suffered when the game gave way to single player story content (KOTFE and KOTET). With the release of KOTET, though, the direction of the game has changed back to its roots – the Group Content focus is back. For this to happen, Keith says, everybody had to be on board.
To change our direction, we had to retool, reorganize, hire new talent, and get everyone on board with the changed direction. That takes time, so we made a choice and decided to release the Operation Boss encounters one at a time. This gave us more time to design, polish, test, and get insight directly from players, versus making everyone wait all year before we released 5 new bosses.
The team still stands behind their decision to split the Iokath Operation into several segmented release cycles – 1 boss encounter at a time. They believe this is the right decision and this right here (I think!) is a hint as to what we could expect in terms of Operations content in the future: another operation, split in a similar way.
It wasn’t an easy decision, as we knew we were going to be criticized while impacting progression efforts. But, honestly, it was the right call. We’re discussing future content, how to release it, what’s going to be included, and when, but we won’t be ready to disclose our next year’s plans for a while.
Thoughts on the SWTOR 2017-2018 Expansion and will there be one at all
Now, let’s be critical for a moment! It’s been 9 months since the release of KOTET and in these 9 months we still keep hearing “we are retuning to our MMO roots”. The sad news is we will probably keep hearing it all the way until the 5th boss encounter for Gods from the Machine is released. I keep wishing for more than 10 Uprisings with no new content inside them and 5 bosses in the span of one full year. The fact that we haven’t heard a single word on Uprisings, except for a few bug fixes in Patch Notes here and there, I think we may not see any more of this content in the future. At least not in the form they are today. Bioware admitted that not all Uprisings receive the love they deserve – the CXP grind only left 1 or 2 of them in the Group Finder rotation. The rest were either too long or too challenging for the reward they provided. The good news – we get a brand new Flashpoint with patch 5.4. It’s been so long since the release of the previous one and Crisis on Umbara promises to be different, more challenging! Interesting, eh? Yes it is! One can hope for more, but we know how Bioware operates – no news until it’s nearly done…
SWTOR 2018: Game Producer talks New Flashpoints, Warzones and Operation
