Star Wars: The Old Republic

**Star Wars: The Old Republic**, commonly abbreviated as The Old Republic, SWTOR, or simply TOR, is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that was produced and released by BioWare, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts. Developed over the course of more than five years by BioWare Austin and LucasArts at a cost of over $200 million, Star Wars: The Old Republic was first conceived in 2005 as an MMORPG follow-up to BioWare's previous video games, the popular Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, and the game was first announced on October 21, 2008. The game itself was released to the public on December 20, 2011, and The Old Republic is accompanied by an expansive metaseries of Star Wars multimedia, including a four-book novel series, three comic series, and a number of short stories as well as additional content.

Star Wars: The Old Republic succeeded Sony's Star Wars Galaxies as the main Star Wars MMO, and Galaxies went permanently offline shortly before The Old Republic was released in December 2011. Set over three hundred years after the events of the Knights of the Old Republic games, The Old Republic features seventeen fully explorable planets, eight unique classes divided into the Galactic Republic and Sith Empire factions, and over 1,600 hours of story in addition to over a dozen group Flashpoints and Operations, and it is the first MMORPG to feature full-scale voice acting. The game features extensive references to pre-existing Star Wars continuity, and introduces thousands of new characters, locations, items, groups, and events to the Star Wars universe as it depicts the conflict between the Republic and the Empire. With the discarding of the Expanded Universe on April 25, 2014, Star Wars: The Old Republic is the only remaining source that continues to produce Legends information aside from the official Star Wars Blog.
Over one million subscribers registered in the first three days following The Old Republic's release, and over a million had begun to play The Old Republic by December 26, making it the fastest-growing subscription MMORPG in history. The Old Republic has received generally positive reviews from critics, with a score of 85 on the review aggregation website Metacritic, though it has received some criticism by players for the lack of late-game content, which has led the game's developers to focus on the addition of upper-level content in many of their updates. Due to declining subscription numbers during the summer of 2012, The Old Republic introduced a Free-to-Play option in November 2012, and the game's first digital expansion, Rise of the Hutt Cartel, was released in April 2013. The Old Republic has received twenty-one major content updates so far, and the second Digital Expansion, Galactic Starfighter, was released to free-to-play users in February 2014. Galactic Starfighter was released to active subscribers on December 3, 2013, and was released to Preferred Status players on January 14. A third Digital Expansion, Galactic Strongholds, was released in August 2014, and a fourth expansion, Shadow of Revan, was released on December 9; two more expansions are due by the end of 2015.