Star Wars The Old Republic is 11 years old and making a big change

Star Wars The Old Republic, the MMO made by Bioware is now 11 years old and with that news comes one massive change, the game is migrating to a 64-bit version.

As the game is 11 years old Keith Kanneg, the games lead producer, released a statement on what the 11 years means to the studio making the game. You can read the entire statement here.

Right now the access is only on the test server, which is where new features get tested before they roll out to the general audience. The team released a statement explaining why this is happening on the site, you can read it below:

Star Wars: The Old Republic was initially released in 32-bit on the game client in order to run on the widest variety of PCs available at the time. A decade later, 32-bit PCs are much less common. The last 32-bit PC processor was released in 2010.

The first advantage of moving to 64-bit code is memory. With 64-bits players can use more memory and aren't limited to 4 GB per process. This limit applies to the game client itself, and restricts things like how much content we can be placed in each area.

That ties into the limits that our tools have because they’re based on the same code. SWTOR has ten years of content in it: planets, characters, conversations, missions, systems, NPCs, etc... The migration over to 64-bit removes that limit and will help us streamline the process of building compelling content for years to come.

Additionally, we are future-proofing. With each new generation of Windows PCs, 32-bit support is slowly disappearing. Moving to 64-bit will help keep the game running smoothly by making sure it is running in the preferred mode for the hardware.

This is not a small test, the version of the game that is on the server is 7.2, which just went live the other week to all players, check out the video below to see what is included in that. With this test, there is no real work on when it will roll out to all players, or if it even will.