After more than a decade at the helm of Star Wars: The Old Republic, BioWare is handing over the reins of the MMO to a third-party studio rumored to be Broadsword Online Games. This has naturally left Jedi, smugglers, and other adventurers wondering what the future holds for The Old Republic, but a recent developer update attempts to allay fears that it will go into maintenance mode and stagnate.

"As we have said before, we are working on future plans that include further story and modernization efforts for the game," says game director Keith Kanneg.

"We are in the process of upgrading the game to 64-bit and moving our servers to the cloud.

He adds that moving development to third-party studios allows for a lot more creative freedom, although it is not clear why this is different than when BioWare was running the show.

The gist of the post is that the change will not affect the player base. The site, forums, and support system will remain the same, and nothing will happen to your splurged Cartel coins. However, the servers will be moved to the cloud, but other major changes have necessitated a review of their timeline.

"I understand the pessimism when something like this happens. 'This is not the beginning of the end, but really a new beginning for us. As you can imagine, there are quite a few moving parts now, but there is a lot to talk about regarding our future."

These future things include an update 7.3.1 at the end of the summer, which will be followed by 7.4 around the vacations; Kanneg also said that more work is being done on the "technical side," including "better integration with Steam and updates to DirectX 12." He added that more work is being done on "technical aspects" such as "improved integration with Steam and updates to DirectX 12. More details on these updates will be announced soon.

Development has slowed down considerably over the past few years, and BioWare's last expansion, despite introducing some great quality-of-life features, such as eliminating class and story entanglements and allowing players to experience any story they want without being forced into a particular class, was quite It was shoddy. So maybe it's time for a change. And this does not mean that the entire development team is leaving.