Former SWTOR lead says he wanted a full top-down overhaul after launch

Former Star Wars: The Old Republic lead designer James Ohlen says he pushed for a major overhaul of the MMO after it launched, including reworking the game from a top-down perspective instead of sticking with smaller updates.

In an interview with IGN, Ohlen said he believed SWTOR needed bigger structural changes during its live run. The comparison point was basically the kind of large-scale reset players now associate with Final Fantasy XIV, though SWTOR never actually went that far.

Ohlen didn’t frame it as a minor tune-up. He said he wanted to revisit the game in a much broader way, which suggests changes to core systems rather than the usual cycle of expansions, class tweaks, and endgame additions. That plan, obviously, never happened, and SWTOR instead continued on its existing path with incremental updates.

That makes the interview more of a what-could-have-been story than a reveal about current development. SWTOR is still running today under Broadsword, after BioWare stepped back from active development last year. It remains one of the few long-running story-heavy MMORPGs on the market, built around class stories, Flashpoints, operations, and Star Wars faction conflict.

So no new relaunch is being announced here. The interesting part is the hindsight: one of the game’s original leads thinks SWTOR may have benefited from a much more aggressive redesign while it was still early in its lifespan.