RPG masters BioWare are currently finishing up work on the impending Anthem, and even have a new Dragon Age in (early stages of) development, but it turns out they really want to return to a galaxy far, far away.
There aren’t many Star Wars fans who don’t have fond memories of BioWare’s excellent Knights of the Old Republic RPG series – widely considered by many to be among the very finest of Star Wars video games.
Sadly, the last we saw of this incredible franchise was a 2011 MMO spin-off that was pretty cool, but not quite the in-depth single player gold that we got from the previous games.
Following recent reports that EA has shut down yet another one of its Star Wars projects, reporter Jason Schreier (who broke the news for Kotaku) has revealed on Twitter that BioWare have tried on more than one occasion to revive Knights of the Old Republic.
Schreier wouldn’t say much more, only that BioWare have had no luck in getting a sequel off the ground. This becomes particularly frustrating when you consider that BioWare is a division of EA, who own the exclusive license to publish Star Wars games.
Since getting the license from Disney in 2013, we’ve had two intensely divisive Battlefront games and a couple of cancelled projects. The fact they haven’t put BioWare on a KOTOR sequel is baffling, to be honest.
We’ll probably never know for sure exactly why BioWare haven’t been allowed to make a new KOTOR, but it likely has something to do with EA’s preference to treat games as a live service – that’s one of the reasons why Visceral’s single player Star Wars game was shut down, after all.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is the next game to come from under EA, and it’s apparently a single player story driven adventure game. Hopefully it does well enough to convince EA that there’s money to be made from a new KOTOR.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.