It's Official, SWTOR is Moving to Broadsword

Keith Kanneg, now SWTOR’s Executive Producer at Broadsword, and BioWare’s General Manager, Gary McKay, issued statements today confirming that SWTOR’s development will officially be moving to a new studio, Broadsword.

Broadsword, Not Maintenance Mode

Broadsword currently manages two other, significantly older MMOs, Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot, both of which are definitively in maintenance mode. For those of you that haven’t been following this story very closely, this change of hands is why so many people believe that SWTOR will be going into maintenance mode.

This notion of maintenance mode is at odds with literally every official source who has spoken publicly about the studio changing hands. Even the initial leak published by IGN didn’t state that the game was going into maintenance mode, and that’s absolutely not the kind of detail that a leaker would want to leave out if that was the plan.

Every official source has been as emphatic as possible that the move to Broadsword is not the end of SWTOR’s active development. Most go a step further and characterize the move as a new beginning and opportunity for growth and that sort of discussion is anathema to a game going into maintenance mode.

Being deceptive and euphemistic in advertising is one thing, but direct contradiction and lying are a major step beyond that for which there are often legal consequences.

The bottom line is, if you still believe that maintenance mode is imminent, you must also believe that multiple people in leadership positions at EA and BioWare are outright lying to your face. It’s far more likely that this is just part of a much larger restructuring that’s happening at EA and specifically at BioWare with other unrelated layoffs.

Keith and Gary both stated that “most of the current team” for SWTOR will be making the move to Broadsword. Keith added that this includes others from team leadership while Gary clarified that “not every role will make the move”.

It’s unclear what Gary meant by “not every role”, but it’s most likely that the people not coming over are those that would be made redundant because there’s already someone at Broadsword who does their job. I imagine these are positions that are more distant from actually making the game like administration, compliance, HR, IT, server/network management, and potentially QA.

However, given that the framing is around roles, it’s also theoretically possible that Broadsword could be dropping support for one or more types of content, though I’m not sure what that could be considering they’ve recently reinforced support for all types of content besides those that have already been deprecated like Uprisings, GSF, and Ranked PvP.

Operations Probably Aren’t Going Away Either

Operations stand out to many of you as a type of content that might be getting the axe given that the most recent raid, R-4 Anomaly, didn’t and won’t be receiving a NiM difficulty, but I don’t think that’s the case.

As part of the recent announcement that R-4 won’t be getting NiM, Eric Musco, SWTOR’s Lead Producer explained:

“I want to express that we very much understand how critical aspirational endgame group content is. Whether that is delivered through MM Flashpoints, World and Lair bosses, or even Ops. It is still something we will prioritize as a part of our roadmap going forward.”

There’s definitely something to be said about the absurdity of comparing the difficulty of Flashpoints to Operations and considering both to be aspirational endgame group content, but that is how BioWare (now Broadsword) sees it.

Regardless, it’s quite reasonable to assume that encounter designers create boss fights for multiple types of endgame group content, not just raids or flashpoints or world bosses, so it doesn’t fit very neatly into the role framework that Gary McKay established.

In other words, Flashpoints and World Bosses aren’t going anywhere, and the people that make those could absolutely make an Operation or Lair Boss, so it’s almost certainly not what Gary is talking about with some roles not coming over.

The Future of SWTOR

As Gary McKay says, SWTOR’s future is bright. The game isn’t going anywhere. It’s gonna continue to get regular updates for quite some time.

I think the current update structure will persist until modernization is complete, likely remaining the same for most or all of 7.0 and possibly beyond where 7.X updates will offer a chapter-sized bite of story along with some modernizations and apiece of group content (my guess is Lair Boss next) while 7.X.1 contains a Galactic Season and some more changes and modernizations, but nothing significant in terms of content.

We can see this pattern in recent updates:

With 7.2 we got the Showdown on Ruhnuk story, featuring a brand new planet called Ruhnuk with a daily area, a modernization of the Map and Utility Bars systems, the introduction of PvP Seasons, and a new Onderon 4v4 PvP Arena.

With 7.2.1, we got the Mek-Sha Stronghold, Galactic Season 4, PvP Season 2, and a game client upgrade to 64-bit!

With 7.3, we got the Old Wounds story that returns to Voss in a new Landing Zone called The Interpreter’s Retreat complete with repeatable missions, a new Flashpoint called Shrine of Silence, and will soon have the return of the Nightlife Event and PvP Season 3. I imagine it was also supposed to contain the move to AWS cloud servers, but those plans were disrupted by the studio move.

We also know that Galactic Season 5 will be coming with 7.3.1, which should be sometime in mid-August, possibly along with some sort of GTN overhaul and additional improvements to the game’s economy to combat inflation coming sometime in the future.

SWTOR is getting upgraded to DirectX 12 in a future update too and Keith says plans are already underway for 2024 and 2025.