Star Wars: The Old Republic is making a big change to its servers by migrating them to the cloud. This upcoming change is a part of The Old Republic's ongoing efforts to upgrade and modernize the game for its second decade of service.
In a recent blog post for The Old Republic’s 11-year anniversary, it confirmed iterations of its Public Test Server had been hosted on Amazon Web Services. Now, The Old Republic has officially announced it is migrating all of its live servers to AWS in the near future.
Doing so has a number of benefits for both players and developers. The technology will improve player performance and connectivity, and will allow for more efficient backend maintenance to ensure the health of SWTOR. Resources used to maintain current servers would be freed up to focus on other aspects of the game, and The Old Republic will be able to integrate more modern tech into the game to improve graphics. It may even be able to offer gameplay in regions currently unable to play SWTOR.
To facilitate this migration, Star Wars: The Old Republic is launching a server fully hosted on the AWS cloud to test its functionality. From April 3 through April 18, players will be able to play on the temporary Shae Vizla server to help test it. SWTOR will be looking to find any problems with performance, functionality, visuals, or connectivity with the new cloud host. What’s more, players that log in to this server and complete a PvP match, a Galactic Starfighter match, and a Flashpoint in Star Wars: The Old Republic will receive the highly-coveted Opal Vulptilla mount for all of their live server characters.
This big update for Star Wars: The Old Republic is just one way it is improving its technical aspects. SWTOR switched to a 64-bit client in a recent patch. This technical update brought the dated 32-bit restrictions from BioWare’s long-running MMORPG to a more modern level, which will allow the game to simultaneously perform and look better than ever before.
Being over a decade old, The Old Republic is starting to show its age, meaning technical updates are important to keep it contemporary. World of Warcraft has had several such model updates in the past, and Final Fantasy 14 is working on a graphical overhaul for its next expansion. Fans of The Old Republic are glad to see the game is trying to keep up with the times, and are looking forward to seeing what other sort of improvements BioWare can introduce in the future.
Star Wars: The Old Republic is available on PC.