The Most Anticipated Star Wars Project Is Dead?
Is the highly anticipated Knights of the Old Republic remake over before it even begins? While nothing has officially been announced, things aren’t looking good for KOTOR fans. According to Forbes, not only has the original announcement tweet for the game remake been deleted but recently, the trailer for the revamped Knights of the Old Republic has been delisted on YouTube.
Ever since its release over 20 years ago, 2003’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic has been unanimously considered by most fans to be the best Star Wars video game ever made. Hands down. Taking place over a thousand years before the events of the Star Wars films, KOTOR, as fans affectionately refer to it, managed to create a compelling story set within the Star Wars universe without the aid of familiar characters or settings like the Galactic Civil War.
The corporate dustup led to Aspyr being pulled from the project and replaced with Saber Interactive in August of 2022. Since the changing of the guard, there have been no updates on the Knights of the Old Republic remake whatsoever.
So when a Knights of the Old Republic remake featuring modern graphics and potentially updated gameplay was announced in 2021 at the PlayStation showcase, Star Wars fans were beside themselves with joy. Sadly, the first signs of trouble came the following year when development of the remake was put on hold indefinitely following a dispute between Aspyr—the studio tasked with developing the new version of KOTOR—Sony, and Lucasfilm.
Allegedly, the dispute revolved around the quality of the remake as well as as well as the proposed timeline for the project put forth by Aspyr.
In the words of Yoda, “Always in motion is the future,” and we must stress that no official cancelation has been announced.
The corporate dustup led to Aspyr being pulled from the project and replaced with Saber Interactive in August of 2022. Since the changing of the guard, there have been no updates on the Knights of the Old Republic remake whatsoever. That, coupled with the fact that Sony has now quietly buried the remake’s trailer on YouTube, has resulted in many fans coming to the conclusion that the project is now deader than Jabba the Hutt after Leia choked him out.
Aspyr had worked on the iOS and Android ports of Knights of the Old Rebuplic prior to receiving the contract for the game’s remake. One possible reason that Aspyr may not have been able to produce the remake according to the standards demanded by Sony and Lucasfilm is due to its parent company, Embracer, and its money woes in recent years.
The conglomerate that owns Aspyr, as well as the studio chosen to replace them, Saber, has spread itself thin in recent years, buying up several high-profile game studios like Gearbox and Crystal Dynamics, all the while losing $2 billion dollars on a failed business deal.
The removal of the original announcement Tweet for the Knights of the Old Republic remake and Sony’s delisting of its trailer have many worried that the project has been canceled.
All of the above more than likely contributed to Aspyr—and now possibly Saber—being unable to produce the Knights of the Old Republic remake in a reasonable time frame and at a high enough quality. Hopefully, even if the Aspyr/Saber version of the KOTOR remake is dead, the idea of remaking the greatest Star Wars game of all time will remain alive and inspire Sony and Lucasfilm to find another studio with which to work.
In the words of Yoda, “Always in motion is the future,” and we must stress that no official cancelation has been announced. On the other hand, to paraphrase a common Star Wars quote, when it comes to the current iteration of the Knights of the Old Republic remake, “We have a bad feeling about this.”
