Rise of The Old Republic?
If you follow gaming news at all, you probably saw that just before the weekend, it was reported that Electronic Arts finally has one of the most requested games of all time in development: A new game based on the critically acclaimed RPG classic Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.
This new game wouldn’t be a sequel though. Assuming the reports are accurate and a new game is happening at all it would be a “re-imagining” of that incorporates elements from the first two games with a more modern take so in a lot of ways it would be a fresh start for the series, which hasn’t had a new single-player entry since 2004, and that game wasn’t even developed by Bioware. Granted no word on if Bioware is working on this new remake, but that seems like the obvious choice if it is indeed happening.
While this news brings some obvious excitement, there’s a serious question of what even a new Knights of The Old Republic game would be in the present. If it’s in development now it’s obviously going to be a game we will see on the next round of consoles as those are due out later this year, but a new game certainly needs to be more than just some amalgamation of the previous two with modern graphics.
Don’t get me wrong, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is my favorite Star Wars game by a long shot, and probably my second favorite Bioware game (hard to top Mass Effect 2, happy tenth anniversary to that modern classic). But the performance and look even for the time were pretty rough, and the gameplay is pretty slow by any modern standard. If you’ve been playing all kinds of RPGs since before the days of the NES like me, that might still be tolerable, but things definitely need to change if you are going to bother with something new.
I think as far as a battle system, you don’t need something brand new, just maybe a slight evolution of the Bioware RPG battle system that’s been evolving since KOTOR. You could pretty much take the gameplay from Dragon Age: Inquisition and it could fit pretty perfectly. It’s very well suited to a universe that involves fantasy weapons and space wizards for sure.
One thing I’d really like to see that you don’t have to be a Jedi. A lot of the best Star Wars games have little to do with being a Jedi. You should be able to be a range of classes, maybe with a range of Force sensitivity and powers, or none at all but other skills to make up for it. Maybe Jedi is more of an optional class you can unlock later in the game. Just being a Jedi from the start or not far in seems like a crutch the Star Wars games as a whole rely on too often when it would be great to just be a smuggler or an ace pilot or a Mandalorian and come up with creative ways to have those characters have advantages over Jedi or Sith opponents.
Arguably, the most important feature of a new Knights of The Old Republic would be the “light side/dark side” system, which really introduced the idea of making moral choices throughout a game and having it matter in the in. This is still the only Bioware game to date where I feel like your choices truly made a difference. In Mass Effect or Dragon Age, you still achieved the same result, just in a different manner. In KOTOR, you literally saved or doomed the galaxy. And while it wasn’t perfect, it’s one of the few pieces of Star Wars media that at least that explored the idea that the Dark Side itself isn’t necessarily evil, but it can corrupt those not able to control it. I’d really like to see this expanded upon in a reboot/new entry in the series. Maybe not every choice matters, and you definitely shouldn’t make a choice at the very end that invalidates any previous choices and simply makes you choose binary good or bad endings.
Ideally, what you would have instead is a series of key choices that eventually lead you down the path to possibly multiple endings, but in a subtle enough way that it’s not super obvious which path is the right one. It shouldn’t kill the younglings or defeat the evil empire. Be more nuanced than that. Bioware has shown that it can be done for sure, but not delivered so much on the “your choices along the path shape the ending you get” premise. That’s what I’d like to see. There’s ending A & B (and maybe a couple of additional ones) and your choices throughout determine which one you get and it’s not obvious. Is that too much to ask? Possibly, but I really hope if after all this time Electronic Arts (hopefully with Bioware working on it in some key capacity) is bringing back Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic it’s to give us a big refresh and evolution of what came before, not just a rehash. That’s all for today, see ya real soon!
