Star Wars: The Old Republic Column: SWTOR – The ‘Singleplayer RPG’

Many gamers have labeled Star Wars: The Old Republic a “singleplayer RPG”, but is this truly a fair criticism? What’s the larger issue here? We discuss it all in this week’s SWTOR column!

I’ve had the honor of stewarding this fine community here at MMORPG.com as your community manager for the last three years, and in that time I’ve seen all manner of comments posted on our forums. Working in community, you develop thick skin quickly and learn to resist jumping at the opportunity to respond to some of the more ridiculous statements you’ll inevitably encounter.

Unfortunately, one sort of comment has been nagging at me for going on two years now and I really can’t ignore it (or the subject) any longer. It goes something like this:

“Star Wars: The Old Republic is a singleplayer RPG.”

There are a ton of variations on this comment, but it’s pretty much used both in context when responding to threads about grouping or just as a catch-all criticism about the game whenever someone feels it’s deemed appropriate.

This statement is simply ridiculous, and I’ll explain more in a moment, but the most amusing part of all is that this was being thrown around even before Star Wars: The Old Republic was at all close to being released. You know, when no one really knew either way what the ratio of regular to group content would actually be? In fact, we even used to have a sticky thread dedicated entirely to this ‘discussion’ prior to the game’s launch.