Star Wars: The Old Republic

Star Wars: The Old Republic is the MMORPG BioWare launched back in 2011 — and it's still going more than a decade later. It drops you thousands of years before the films, in the middle of the war between the Galactic Republic and the Sith Empire, and its big bet isn't loot or raids: it's story. Every class gets its own fully voiced campaign, and you choose what to say.

What sets SWTOR apart from other MMOs is its eight class stories —Jedi, Sith, Smuggler, Trooper and the rest—, each with its own arc, companions and light-versus-dark-side choices that shape your character. It plays almost like a classic BioWare RPG (think Knights of the Old Republic), just inside a living online world. Once the personal stories wrap up, the content converges into shared expansions that take every character through the same plot.

SWTOR is live and getting regular patches. Since 2023-2024 upkeep moved from BioWare to Broadsword —a studio staffed with much of the same team— and the update cadence held: new versions, Galactic Seasons with rotating rewards, events and group content keep coming. The population is solid for a veteran MMO, if uneven across servers: you'll find people, especially in the social hubs and on the larger servers. The focus is still story and solo play over the competitive endgame.

It's genuinely free-to-play: all eight class stories and the earliest expansions are yours at no cost. A subscription (~$15/month, cheaper on 3- or 6-month plans) unlocks the newest content, removes the credit cap and the restrictions on warzones and operations, and hands you Cartel Coins each month for the cosmetic store. Cancel and your account doesn't reset to zero — it drops to Preferred, a middle tier with fewer limits than free. You can check the plans on the official site. Recent patches widened quite a bit of what free and Preferred accounts can do.

If you want to live your own Star Wars saga at your own pace, it's about as good as it gets: a huge RPG, perfectly playable solo, fully voiced, with choices that matter. Where it falls short is the competitive endgame —its PvP and raid content don't match the scale or population of the biggest MMOs— and it shows its age in a few technical corners. But as a giant Star Wars RPG that's free to start, it has few rivals. If you're here for the story, head to swtor.com, pick a class, and the rest takes care of itself.