GDC 2013: BioWare expected players to take three to five months to hit SWTOR's level cap

Speaking to a room of game developers and journalists at GDC this morning, BioWare Creative Director James Ohlen discussed the problems that Star Wars: The Old Republic faced at launch. Chief among them was the team's huge underestimation of players' ability to consume content, which Ohlen believes was caused by the studio's inexperience in the genre.

Ohlen's presentation was marked by sincerity and sobriety as he described the ups and downs of SWTOR's launch. "Some of the risks that we identified going into launch were becoming worse than we thought... The most worrisome was that people were going through the content a lot faster than we expected. We had expected our playerbase to play through the game and get to the endgame, on average, in about three to four months, maybe five months. It was 170-180 hours of content. But our metrics were showing us that, on average, for the millions of people playing our game, they were going through the game at a rate of 40 hours a week."

MMO players are notorious for their ability to chew through content infinitely faster than developers are able to produce it. Most MMO and expansion launches have been marked by a race between players trying to reach the level cap first and earn all the accolades, forum posts, and shiny achievements that come along with that.

Still, Ohlen expressed the team's shock at how fast players were playing through SWTOR's content. "[40 hours a week] was the average! We actually had people doing 80 to 100 to 120 hours a week, which I can't even comprehend."

A fast leveling curve isn't necessarily a game-killer. DC Universe Online, for example, was chided at its launch for requiring minimal effort to hit the level cap (a relatively low 20-30 hours), but the game had a wealth of endgame content ready to go at launch, so level-capped players stayed active. According to Ohlen, the real problem for the SWTOR team, and ultimately the game itself, resulted from the team not being prepared for how fast players consume content in MMOs, a genre Ohlen pointed out that BioWare had no experience in before SWTOR.

There was a tone of regret in his voice as Ohlen continued his recounting of the month after launch: "We had people going through the game so fast that within one month, four to five weeks, we suddenly had close to half a million people at the endgame. It was something we didn't expect at all. We had all those people at the endgame and suddenly certain things like having only one Operation, and having no group finder [tool] become much bigger challenges than what we thought they were going to be."

The rest of Ohlen's presentation documented the entire year following SWTOR's launch, with blunt appraisals of the studio's falling morale during the problems of 2012. He ended on a high note, however, praising the game's success after going free-to-play, and revealing that subscription numbers have been rising steadily since the business model change, and that studio morale is high once again.

Latest in MMO
A goblin with sharp teeth, wearing goggles, lets out a mischievous cackle in WoW's latest patch: Undermine(d).
The hooligan hacker guild that tore up WoW's newest raid (twice) just posted video evidence of the whole thing, and it's got me feeling weirdly nostalgic
Dune Awakening
Dune Awakening's latest trailer offers a glimpse of its massive coriolis storms, which reshape swathes of the map each week for 'infinite exploration'
Concept art of WoW's upcoming player housing system, showing a warm homestead with a welcoming figure in shade.
WoW flexes its MMO player housing system in a new blog post, and it really might just beat FF14's dated furniture placement into the dirt
Orithopter shooting down another in Dune
Dune: Awakening confirms air-to-air combat in ornithopters
Defiance players
A dead MMO that launched with a now-cancelled TV show in 2013 is coming back 4 years after servers were shut down
Gallywix wears an uneasy smile as he's confronted by Xal'atath in WoW: The War Within.
World of Warcraft guild uses exploits to get world 'first' on the game's new raid, gets banned, puts its name backwards and does it again
Latest in News
Man facing camera
The Day Before studio reportedly sues Russian website for calling infamous disaster-game a 'scam'
Will Poulter holding a CD ROM
'What are most games about? Killing': Black Mirror Season 7 includes a follow-up to 2018 interactive film Bandersnatch
Casper Van Dien in Starship Troopers
Sony, which is making a Helldivers 2 movie, is also making a new Starship Troopers movie, but it's not based on the Starship Troopers movie we already have
Assassin's Creed meets PUBG
Ubisoft is reportedly talking to Tencent about creating a new business entity to manage Assassin's Creed and other big games
Resident Evil Village - Lady Dimitrescu
'It really truly changed my life in every possible way': Lady Dimitrescu actor says her Resident Evil Village role was just as transformative for her as it was for roughly half the internet in 2021
Storm trooper hero
Another live service shooter is getting shut down, this time before it even launched on Steam