The Old Republic Goes Free-to-Play - Will I fall to the Dark Side once again?

With the newly announced free-to-play option for Star Wars: The Old Republic I've been thinking a lot about if I want to jump back into my lightsaber rich adventures once more.
Back when SWTOR launched in December I played the game for quite a lot of hours and managed to get my lightning tossing Sith Inquisitor up to level 50 and complete his storyline.

While I did have a lot of fun during my time with SWTOR, I found it to ultimately be a disappointment for me and I ended up only paying for a couple of months of subscription before my enthusiasm for the game dried up like a Gungan in a Sarlacc pit.

Soon all of these lightsabers can be yours for 0 monies!

The big problem with SWTOR for me is that my motivation for playing it comes largely from experiencing the story, but to fit the game into the structure of a MMO Bioware padded out the trip through your character story with many many hours of uninteresting side quests and awful space combat missions.

On the other hand I found the character stories compelling enough that I wanted to play them all, but I felt like I was being conned out of my money by being forced to spend so much time doing things that I had no interest in.

With the game now going F2P I think that I will probably jump back into the game and spend a few hours now and again, just plucking away at some story content and then not playing for days or weeks.
It will give me a chance to play SWTOR much more casually without making me feel that I am wasting money by paying for a subscription that I'm not using.

I think that there will probably be a lot of people like me, who will be casual star warriors, spending a few hours on their weekends but generally not investing themselves in the game all that much.
I wonder if that will be enough to improve the profitability of the game for EA though, since I certainly don't plan on spending any of my money on SWTOR, but that's another (interesting) discussion.

Free Play Time... UNLIMITED FREE PLAY TIME!!!

Ultimately the F2P option doesn't change the fact that SWTOR is fundamentally flawed though. If EA want's to try to really turn the starship around with SWTOR then they have to make some dramatic changes, which may not be possible at this stage.
So far it looks like the course that they have laid out is one of more dungeons, raids and PvP zones, all of which is all good and well, but it's just more of what we already know from all the other MMO's.

Oh well, in the end I'll be happy to go back to the galaxy far far away and take my Sith Warrior all the way to his rightful place as a mighty Lord of evul!




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