Upcoming Update of the Game Launcher

Hello everyone,

We’re continuing to take steps to improve the player experience with SWTOR, so let’s talk about some testing we’ll be conducting in the next week.

In short, for non-Steam players, we're updating the game launcher with a much more efficient patching system that is closer to the performance already enjoyed by players on Steam, allowing faster delivery that ultimately translates to shorter download times for our players.

Beginning next week, we will release this update to a small subset of players before releasing it live to everyone. This update will be in the launcher itself, not the game client. The launcher update happens BEFORE the login screen is enabled, so you will still have to log in again as normal when playing the game.

Are players expected to download anything on their end?

Players who have the latest game client with our current launcher will not need to download anything again. However, if they have an older version of the launcher (anything before the 7.1a version), they will.

Further details on what this looks like for players who use the current launcher

All players with the latest version of the launcher will NOT need to download the game client. When we are ready to deploy the new launcher, it will APPEAR as a client download (as it uses the same progress bar), but it will only be scanning files to compare them to the new data structure. The “download” in this case refers not to re-downloading the game client but downloading small pieces of information for validating the game data already on disk. So to reiterate once more, players will not be experiencing a full download.

Players who are selected to help us test this will notice a red banner toward the top of their launcher informing them they have been selected. If you are a player that was included in the subset to test this update and you are experiencing issues, please detail your issue in a reply to this thread.

Provided that testing goes well and there are no issues, this update is intended to go live on September 22. Should this timing change, I will inform you all with an update.

Note: FR and DE translations of this post will be published at the latest, Monday, September 19th.

Thanks, everyone!