BioWare have drawn a line around precisely what you will and won’t get as a free to play player of Star Wars: The Old Republic, releasing a helpfully updated chart listing features exclusive to paying space adventurers. Where subscribers get three crew skills, for example, free players get one. Where subscribers get unlimited space missions, free players get three a week. How many space missions can you handle? How many is healthy?
While free players won’t miss out on much, they’ll get a lot less of it than players who fork out for a monthly subscription. Crucially however, the story content of alleight characters remains playable up to level 50and free to play users can still pay for access to subscriber content using the in-game currency of Cartel Coins, of which subscribers are given an automatic monthly allowance.
The move to a free to play model has led BioWare to merge servers, with promises of major updates coming every six weeks. The latest of these arrived with the 1.4 update, which added the Terror From Beyond operation. Free players will only be able to sample the trans-dimensional horrors of that operation by paying for a weekly pass, as dictated bythe almighty chart.
The Old Republic is scheduled to go free to play “this fall”.
Thanks, Massively.