Gamers will get more Warzones and HK droids are being teased

May 29, 2012 13:35 GMT  ·  By

Despite the post-launch layoffs that took place at the Austin studio of BioWare, the development team working on Star Wars: The Old Republic is still large enough to deliver new content as fast as players can explore it.

Emmanuel Lusinchi, who is an associate lead designer working on the MMO, told PC Gamer, “We have a very large development team still, definitely one of the biggest in the industry, and we have a very complete and detailed plan for the rest of the year.”

The game creators stated, “The players don’t really care about all that, behind closed curtains, but they want what they’re paying for which is a service with new content, new systems, that’s what they’re asking for and we listen to them. That’s what we mean to deliver.”

Lusinchi also approached the subject of subscriptions, saying that there are other MMOs on the market at the moment, envious of the numbers that Star Wars: The Old Republic has been posting.

The game had a high watermark of 1.8 million subscribers during February and has since then lost about 400,000 of them.

Before the game was launched, both developer BioWare and publisher Electronic Arts have said that half a million long-term subscribers were enough to recoup the development costs of the MMO and that anything over that would be pure profit.

The team now working on the game is developing the next big 1.3 patch, which is supposed to fix a number of problems while also adding a number of new game modes.

It might introduce HK droids as well, a fan favorite since the days of Knights of the Old Republic, to the MMO.

Analysts are suspecting that later during 2012 The Old Republic might move to a free-to-play business model if subscriptions continue to drop.