Star Wars The Old Republic has experienced a pretty smooth launch, sure there have been issues, the argument about early game access over people who had pre-ordered not getting up to five days access when lots of people didn’t seem to understand what up to meant and lots of other people didn’t seem to understand what five days meant. Seriously, if at any point Bioware knew they couldn’t deliver up to five days early access, they should have stopped advertising it. However as things went the vast majority of those who pre-ordered did get up to five days early access, some got seven, so that worked well.
Then there’s the issue of queues, Bioware seem to like the concept of queues, not only do some have to queue to get logged in, you can also end up in a queue just to access the forums!
However the bigger issue is queues to actually login to play, this is a big issue for some.
Fortunately for me, I’ve created characters on three different servers and not once had to queue, some are reporting they have to queue for hours, which isn’t really on. The thing is that Bioware want users to be spread out amongst their servers, they don’t want lots of people on one server and very few people on another, so they are capping how many people can login. The general advice is to go and play on another server if the queue is too long. This would work fine for me, but it is a headache for guilds who were pre-assigned servers.
That said, the launch has been pretty damn smooth from where I’ve been sat, I haven’t seen too many bugs, the servers haven’t been crashing or taken offline for emergency maintenance, there have been no real major problems, in terms of a launch this has gone well. I think people sometimes forget how rocky previous game launches have been.
My machine barely scrapes by the minimum specs, but I’ve found that minimum graphics settings, turning off bloom and closing other applications such as Firefox and email before I play, has left me with a pretty smooth game performance, and one that despite the low graphics settings, still looks pretty damn decent. There are bugs, there are glitches, I have had difficulty climbing some stairs, but for a newly launched game that is extremely popular at launch, this has been quite an impressive experience.