Star Wars: The Old Republic Lead Writer Calls BioWare Farewell Omission "Heartbreaking"

The farewell post went up on a Wednesday. It named six franchises, thanked players, and closed the book on more than three decades of BioWare. Then Caitlin Sullivan Kelly read it and noticed what wasn't there.

"No mention of the game that's been going for almost fifteen years, that supported the studio and all of its projects with income and manpower and time (sometimes to our own detriment)," she wrote on X. "Heartbreaking."

Kelly is the lead writer on Star Wars: The Old Republic, the MMORPG that has quietly outlived nearly every project BioWare shipped alongside it. Her post landed within hours of EA confirming that BioWare was closing after more than thirty years, and that early development on the next Mass Effect had been cancelled.

To be clear about what is and isn't happening: SWTOR is not shutting down. The game moved to Broadsword in 2023 and remains online and in active development. What Kelly is describing is not a threat to the game's survival. It is something closer to the opposite - a question of who gets remembered, and by whom.

What BioWare's Farewell Actually Said - And What It Didn't

The official farewell post on BioWare's blog ran through the studio's catalog: Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Anthem. Six names, spanning the studio's entire history.

Star Wars: The Old Republic was not among them.

The closure itself arrived alongside a letter to staff confirming EA would not move forward with Mass Effect's early development, "which means we're closing the studio and our Edmonton workspace." The cuts were part of a wider reduction of roughly 400 roles across EA, with about 50 falling at BioWare. The timing lands months after EA's $55bn take-private by a Saudi-led consortium, a deal that left the company carrying $20bn in debt - a financial backdrop that may have shaped the decision without being cited by anyone at BioWare as its cause.

BioWare has not publicly addressed the omission, and nothing in the studio's statement suggests it was deliberate. That silence is the space in which the entire conversation has unfolded.

"Supported the Studio With Income and Manpower" - Kelly's Response in Full

Kelly's post is worth reading in full, because the parenthetical does most of the work:

"No mention of the game that's been going for almost fifteen years, that supported the studio and all of its projects with income and manpower and time (sometimes to our own detriment). Heartbreaking."

Her position in this story matters. Kelly is SWTOR's current lead writer at Broadsword and a former BioWare employee - her X bio reads "Lead Writer @SWTOR. Formerly BioWare." She moved with the game when EA handed it to Broadsword in 2023. She is not a current BioWare staffer airing a grievance from inside; she is someone who spent years inside the studio and now works on the one BioWare-born game still running.

She also framed the omission personally. Dragon Age: Origins, she said, was the game that "made me want to be a game dev." She started playing SWTOR "BECAUSE it was a BioWare game." And she expressed sadness that the studio "leaves us out of the history books."

That "to our own detriment" line has a specific history behind it. SWTOR staff were reportedly pulled onto other projects over the years, most notably Anthem, which struggled from launch and had its live-service support cancelled in 2021. The MMO kept the lights on while the studio's other bets struggled — an assessment Kelly herself implies — and it did so with a shrinking share of its own team.

The Case That It Wasn't a Snub

There is a credible reading of the farewell post in which nothing was snubbed at all.

The list nods to franchises rather than individual games. Knights of the Old Republic, in that framing, covers The Old Republic as a sequel - the same universe, the same lineage, the same Star Wars RPG tradition. And the list is demonstrably inconsistent: Jade Empire, one of the studio's most beloved original properties, was also left out. Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood didn't make it either. Anthem, a commercial and critical disappointment that EA shut down, did.

A list that omits Jade Empire while including Anthem is not a list that can be read as a precise statement of value. It reads more like a hurried summary written under difficult circumstances.

There is also the structural argument: SWTOR has been a Broadsword game for three years. When a studio writes its own obituary, it writes about the games it still owns. By that logic, SWTOR no longer belonged in a BioWare farewell - not because it doesn't matter, but because it moved on.

None of this has been confirmed by BioWare. The tension between the two readings is the story, and it doesn't resolve cleanly.

Fifteen Years, More Words Than Any BioWare Game

The scale is the strongest argument Kelly has, and it is not a sentimental one.

SWTOR launched in December 2011 as BioWare Austin's attempt at a fully voiced, story-driven competitor to World of Warcraft. It went free-to-play with an optional subscription by autumn 2012. Over the twelve years BioWare ran it, the game accumulated more writing and voice work than any other BioWare title in history - a volume of script and recorded dialogue that dwarfs the studio's single-player catalog. The game's script runs to millions of words across its expansions and updates — a volume that, by the studio's own accounting, exceeds any other BioWare title.

That is the thing about an MMO: it is a service, not a boxed chapter. It doesn't end with credits. It grows, patch by patch, expansion by expansion, for years. Which is precisely why it is easy to leave off a franchise list - and precisely why leaving it off stings. The game that generated the most words was the one that got the fewest.

When Broadsword took over in 2023, it was largely the same Austin team under a new banner. The people who built SWTOR are, in many cases, still building it. The studio name changed. The work didn't.

The Community Wrote Its Own Goodbye

Separate from Kelly's critique, SWTOR's players held their own memorial.

A thread on r/swtor sharing BioWare's farewell post drew nearly 5,000 upvotes and more than 700 comments within hours of going live, with players paying respects to the studio that made the game they still log into. The tone there was not angry. It was grateful - grief and criticism running on parallel tracks, neither cancelling the other out.

For SWTOR's players, the practical reality is unchanged: the servers are up, the story is still being written, and Broadsword's team is still at work. The parent studio is gone. The game it made is not.

The History Book Has Two Editions

Kelly's phrase about the history books is the thesis of the whole affair. There is the official history - the list on a blog post, six franchises long - and there is the history the developers and players actually lived, which includes a fifteen-year-old MMO that paid the studio's bills while other projects came and went.

Those two editions don't always match. Sometimes the gap is a snub. Sometimes it's an oversight. Either way, the people who were there know what they built.

The lineage also continues elsewhere: According to Kotaku, Casey Hudson, the director of Knights of the Old Republic and co-creator of Mass Effect, is working on a spiritual successor to KOTOR, likely a few years from launch. The studio that started it is closing its doors. The tradition it established is not.

Star Wars: The Old Republic is still running. It is still being written. And being left out of an obituary doesn't mean you weren't there.

Tags: Star Wars: The Old Republic, BioWare, EA, MMO, Broadsword