Gaming
Knights of the Old Republic is Too Much for the Current Star Wars Canon
Rumors have been floating around for years now about a potential Knights of the Old Republic remaster or remake for current gen systems. With Casey Hudson’s return to BioWare almost two weeks ago, the KotOR fan base started to light up with hope once more. However, this story just doesn’t work anymore for Star Wars as it is now.
The story of the first game in The Old Republic trilogy is that two Jedi Knights named Revan and Malak fell to the dark side while fighting in a war against the Mandalorians. Darth Malak turns on his master Darth Revan, who is brought back to the Jedi Council and brainwashed into serving the Republic. From there, players can choose whether to become a Jedi and save the Republic by destroying the ancient Star Forge or to become a Sith and use the Forge to conquer the galaxy. There are many details from this story that is currently canon, like the Battle of Malachor and the Mandalorian Wars, however, there’s way too much that doesn’t fit into modern Star Wars.
For starters, the backstory of the game would have to seriously be expanded upon and heavily vetted for it to work in the Disney canon. Stories of the Rakata’s Infinite Empire and of fallen knights like Exar Kun and Ulic Qel-Droma would have to be heavily altered. The game goes into great detail about various events such as these in Star Wars Legends (the old Extended Universe) in order to establish its place in that timeline. Each of them revolves around aspects of the Force that have either not been explored yet in canon or don’t fit the current narrative.
Disney has tried to differentiate between machine and life in the canon, making Force-based technology, the foundation of the Infinite Empire, impossible in the story. The Star Forge is also an integral part of the main story of KotOR and can’t possibly exist due to this issue. The story of such fallen Jedi Knights as Kun and Qel-Droma (and most of the Sith Lord lineage for that matter) wouldn’t work anymore either. Jedi are now the first and only ones who have managed to create Force Ghosts and thus most of these fallen knights can’t be corrupted by Sith ghosts.
All of this has just been about the back story so far. There are many inconsistencies in the three games as well, let alone just Knights of the Old Republic 1. The story revolving around the Mandalorians especially doesn’t work. They name their leader Mandalore, yet in canon, that’s a planet, not a person. There is no planet Mandalore in KotOR but rather many different planets where Mandalorians come from, none of which are canon. Their culture is off as well. In KotOR anyone can be known as a Mandalorian if they prove themselves worthy, but in canon, they are a race that doesn’t accept outsiders. The Mandalorian Wars were also ended with the Battle of Malachor, which has been entirely changed in canon as well. Malachor is an incredibly different planet in canon and this battle was now between Jedi and Sith, having nothing to do with Mandalorians.
Moving on from Mandalorians, another potentially game-breaking inconsistency is how lightsaber crystals work. There used to be two crystals, one for color one for power, yet this doesn’t work anymore. Disney has now made it so lightsabers only use one crystal and it is clear until a Jedi Knight pours Force energy into and personalizes it. Sith crystals are no longer synthetic but rather Jedi crystals that have been bled with dark side energy. This eliminates much of the role-playing elements of the game. It makes specific colors more difficult to come by since each character would ideally only be able to make one color. Such locations as the Dantooine crystal caves would also have less impact and only supply clear crystals.
There are plenty of other small issues as well. Korriban would have to be called Moraband, Darth Bane would have to find another way to get influence from Revan, certain Sith Lords like Nihilus and Vitiate would have to be nerfed, etc. Even if the LucasFilm story group could find some way to make all of this fit into the canon, it would take an insane amount of work and the end result wouldn’t be safe for them. They’d inevitably piss somebody off with the changes that would need to be made and that could be a lot of somebodies considering how popular this series is.
It would also be a logistical nightmare to make just considering ownership. KotOR and it’s 2004 sequel were Microsoft exclusives, yet EA owns the third game in the trilogy and the Star Wars gaming license now. I just can’t see Microsoft giving up a potential exclusive and EA giving up on money because of a project that has so many narrative roadblocks.
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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