BioWare once pitched a Star Wars: The Old Republic reboot project

Star Wars: The Old Republic almost stopped being the version players know. James Ohlen said he once pitched a full reboot that would have pushed the MMO a couple of hundred years before the fall of the Republic, turning it into something closer to Star Wars: The New Republic and giving BioWare room to rebuild the fiction from the ground up.

That pitch got farther than a lot of studio pipe dreams. Ohlen said it was discussed with Lucasfilm leaders including Kathleen Kennedy and Dave Filoni, and that EA executive Patrick Söderlund initially greenlit it. The idea died at the board level, where Electronic Arts looked at the enormous cost of SWTOR’s original development and decided it was not worth pouring more money into a risky reboot. Ohlen said the end of that period left him feeling like a highly paid but useless person, which says plenty about what it looks like when a team can see a better path and still cannot get the sign-off.

The loss matters because SWTOR was never a small bet. It launched on December 20, 2011 as a subscription MMORPG, then later slid into free-to-play after a steep drop in subscribers. BioWare and EA have since kept it alive for years, and BioWare called it the longest-running live-service Star Wars game in a June 27, 2023 blog post. Instead of becoming a fresh chapter in the franchise, it remained the existing MMO, with all the limits that came with that original framework.

By the time EA confirmed on June 27, 2023 that development would move from BioWare to Broadsword Online Games, the game had already become a long-running survivor rather than a breakout reinvention. BioWare said most of the current team would be invited to move, and EA said it was evaluating how to give the game and team the best opportunity to grow and evolve. IGN reported earlier that EA and Broadsword had signed a letter of intent, with roughly 70 to 80 people on the core SWTOR team and more than half expected to move. Broadsword founder and president Rob Denton had also helped lead SWTOR during its development and launch at EA.

That is why Ohlen’s abandoned reboot lands like a hard cut. SWTOR did not just miss a cosmetic relaunch; it missed a chance to become a different kind of online Star Wars game altogether. The one that shipped survived, but the road not taken still explains a lot about what players got, and what EA would not pay to risk.