Star Wars: The Old Republic

Star Wars: The Old Republic, simply known as SWTOR or TOR, is a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) that was originally produced by BioWare, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts, and published by LucasArts. Developed over the course of more than five years by BioWare Austin and LucasArts at a cost of over $200 million, Star Wars: The Old Republic was first conceived in 2005 as an MMORPG follow-up to BioWare's previous video games, the popular Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, and the game was first announced on October 21, 2008. The game itself was released to the public on December 20, 2011, and The Old Republic is accompanied by an expansive metaseries of Star Wars multimedia, including a four-book novel series, three comic series (Threat of Peace, Blood of the Empire, and Star Wars: The Old Republic — The Lost Suns), and a number of short stories, as well as additional content.

Star Wars: The Old Republic succeeded Sony's Star Wars Galaxies as the main Star Wars MMORPG, and Galaxies went permanently offline shortly before The Old Republic was released in December 2011. Set over three hundred years after the events of the Knights of the Old Republic games, The Old Republic features seventeen fully explorable planets, eight unique classes divided into the Galactic Republic and Sith Empire factions, and over 1,600 hours of story in addition to over a dozen group Flashpoints and Operations, and it is the first MMORPG to feature full-scale voice acting. The game features extensive references to pre-existing Star Wars continuity, and introduces thousands of new characters, locations, items, groups, and events to the Star Wars universe as it depicts the conflict between the Republic and the Empire. With the discarding of the Expanded Universe on April 25, 2014, Star Wars: The Old Republic is the only remaining source that continues to produce Legends information aside from the official Star Wars Blog.

Over one million subscribers registered in the first three days following The Old Republic release, and over a million had begun to play The Old Republic by December 26, making it the fastest-growing subscription MMORPG in history. The Old Republic has received generally positive reviews from critics, with a score of 85 on the review aggregation website Metacritic, though it has received some criticism by players for the lack of late-game content, which has led the game's developers to focus on the addition of upper-level content in many of their updates. Due to declining subscription numbers during the summer of 2012, The Old Republic introduced a Free-to-Play option in November 2012, and the game's first digital expansion, Rise of the Hutt Cartel, was released in April 2013. The Old Republic has received several dozens major content updates so far, and the second Digital Expansion, Galactic Starfighter, was released to free-to-play users in February 2014. Galactic Starfighter was released to active subscribers on December 3, 2013, and was released to Preferred Status players on January 14. A third Digital Expansion, Galactic Strongholds, was released in August 2014, and a fourth expansion, Shadow of Revan, was released on December 9. With the next two digital expansions: Knights of the Fallen Empire (October 27, 2015), and Knights of the Eternal Throne (December 2, 2016), the game took a narrative twist, focusing on a new faction, the Eternal Empire. On April 13, 2019, it was announced that a seventh expansion would be coming to the game, titled Onslaught. Onslaught was released on October 22, 2019. In celebration for the tenth-year anniversary, an eighth expansion was announced on July 1, 2021, titled Legacy of the Sith. Legacy of the Sith was released on February 15, 2022.

In June 2023, BioWare handed off maintenance and development of Star Wars: The Old Republic to Broadsword Online Games. The majority of the Old Republic development team at BioWare was intended to join Broadsword to continue to work on the game. On December 19, 2025, it was announced that the Legacy of the Sith storyline would end in Game Update 7.9 and that a ninth expansion would be released sometime in 2026 for the fifteen-year anniversary of the game.

Text and facts from the “Star Wars: The Old Republic” article on Wookieepedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Modified for this site.