Knights of the Old Republic Rumors

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Over the last several days there has been quite a bit of information coming out about the potential of a game set in the Knights of the Old Republic currently in the works. The curious thing about these rumors is the fact that according to Jason Schreier the Dev Whisperer… it is supposedly being worked on outside of the greater EA/Bioware hegemony. Which leaves a whole bunch of questions about who and where and what. I almost tacked this bit of conversation onto yesterdays blog post but I also did not want to make that one span thirty pages of rambling. So this morning I am going to talk a bit about where we have been and where we are going.

While Darth Malak is the big baddie of Knights of the Old Republic, really for me it is the story of Darth Revan and his redemption arc. I say “his” because thanks to Star Wars the Old Republic we have a Canon Male Revan right or wrong. The first game legitimately changed so many things I thought a game like this could be and will likely always have a special place in my top games of all time. This represented the transition from Neverwinter Nights style top down isometric roleplaying games that I so regularly consumed and the later Mass Effect/Dragon Age style of third person environmental narrative driven experience. As I have been back playing KOTOR2 I have realized just how much of a period of transition these games truly were and as such were the heralds of so many things to come.

While I have not completed the game and there is a new big baddie in a cool mask, I would very much say that Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is STILL the story of Revan. The entirety of the game so far is effectively an epilogue to the first experience. You see the damage wrought by Revan on the galaxy and the fact that it isn’t doing too well on its own. The power vacuum of Revan going off into deep space to find his destiny left the Republic and Jedi Order without a charismatic leader to guide them into a new era. Generally speaking when a vacuum is formed someone else steps in to take the place but between the Mandalorian crusades and the Jedi Civil War… all larger forces that COULD step in were wiped out meaning what happens instead is a slow inevitable collapse of the galaxy.

There is some heavy debate about whether or not Star Wars the Old Republic the MMORPG counts as being part of the cycle of Knights of the Old Republic tales. I personally believe so and that is largely because it sets the ground work for the conflict to come and also reveals to us where exactly Revan went and what he was doing. Revan sensed something and went out to find it, and his struggle against that presence ultimately dominates much of the back story of Star Wars the Old Republic whether or not it is apparent and clear from the start. For me at least the true continuation of the KOTOR storyline would be the Jedi Knight story arc because it seems to deal the most directly with the Evil that Revan was trying to guard us from.

So ultimately the question is where do we go from here? As I stated before, I still firmly believe that Knights of the Old Republic is the story arc of Revan, and I think were they to continue the story it would need to take place after the events that have already played out in Star Wars the Old Republic. This causes a bit of a problem of bookending the story of a live service… but also it isn’t as though a lot of content is being delivered. There is also the option of setting the story in that time between the end of the Shadow of Revan expansion and the beginning of Knights of the Fallen Empire. There is a high likelihood of KOTFE and KOTET being washed away by the giant eraser of “Legends” as well.

Who Will Build It?

The first candidate that my friend Storm threw out there was Larian Studios. I absolutely think that they would do an amazing job with the franchise. However I also think this is a bit of a long shot given that they are already currently in active development of Baldur’s Gate III which expects to still have another year or so of incubation before release. Then after release I fully expect to see expansion content and more games in the D&D realm from this studio. Basically I think they are overcommitted at the moment given the size of the studio.

We already know that there is a deal in the works for the Massive division of UbiSoft to create an open world Star Wars game. However Massive is the studio behind The Division 1 and 2 and given the way that UbiSoft loves to make formulaic games I am fully expecting the Star Wars adventure to be in that model. I’ve said this before but I am expecting a single city setting like Nar Shaddaa or Coruscant where the entirety of the game takes place but also gives the player plenty of room to explore different environments. Hell I might be wrong here but I am expecting this one to also be off the table.

I personally would love to see what Spiders could do with the franchise given how phenomenal of a game Greedfall was. The problem with Spiders is that they have come really close to greatness a number of times but never quite pushed across the finish line. I think maybe with a high profile franchise like KOTOR, they might have the attention needed to make sure the final product was perfectly fine tuned. Again however this is a pipe dream because they were recently purchased by Nacon and duringa reveal show announced the next game they are working on. Steelrising looks awesome but is this baroque automata French revolution game that seems to be nothing like Knights of the Old Republic. They are a small studio and as such I think fairly single threaded so we can push them off the list.

Right now at this very moment I am playing a Knights of the Old Republic game built by Obsidian Entertainment. While they are now owned by Microsoft they have also been shown to not necessarily be building exclusive content. It would not be outside of the realm of reality for them to take over the franchise. To add fuel to the fire, Casey Hudson just left Bioware to join Microsoft Studios as Creative Director. He was the director on Knights of the Old Republic so maybe the cards are aligning in such a way as to have the franchise return to its Microsoft roots. If you remember KOTOR was originally an Xbox exclusive that later got a Windows release.

So in a bit of a dark horse pick, I want to throw out ArcheType Entertainment. This studio is backed by Wizards of the Coast and seems to be made up of a bunch of Ex-Bioware folks. One very key player would be Drew Karpyshyn the writer of KOTOR and some of the SWTOR content. Additionally James Ohlen and Chad Roberston were both in leadership roles over Star Wars the Old Republic and represent the Head of the Studio and General Manager respectively. The only thing that does not align is that when the studio was spun up in February of 2020 it was announced that they would be working on a brand new Science Fiction IP. Maybe fates shifted and the break up of the EA Star Wars license opened up other opportunities to pivot what they were working on into the Old Republic setting.

Another studio that I would not rule out either is InXile entertainment. These are the folks the modern Wasteland and Bards Tale games as well as Torment: Tides of Numenera. As a studio their jam seems to be really good isometric roleplaying games. However they would also have the same Microsoft connection that Obsidian has. I think this is a really long shot however because the wealth of their experience is in modernizing the isometric genre and creating games that feel like we remember the classic PC RPG era feeling. It is because of this nostalgia based approach that I am not really certain they would be screwing with the formula just yet, that is unless they themselves are feeling like the isometric thing is getting a bit stale.

It’s All Rumors

The problem with all of this is the fact that right now none of it is tangible. For all we know it could be Aspyr working on remastering and modernizing Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2. Excitement is getting the better of games media and myself included. I would love to see a new Knights of the Old Republic game, but also I know it is probably two or three years out there if it even ends up happening. So friends, what are your thoughts? Who do you think might be developing this game and what sort of game are you expecting it to be? Do you think it will be a continuation of the KOTOR lineage or just something new set in the same Old Republic era setting? Drop me a line below, because I am curious about your thoughts.

Lacking Plot Urgency

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I am not exactly sure what is going on, but I have been on this single player game kick. It sometimes happens over the Holiday break and then continues forward into the next year. I went on a bit of this last year playing through several of the titles by Spiders, the game studio behind Greedfall and a number of “Bioware-like” titles. I’ve talked about bouncing off of Dragon Age Inquisition and the joy of revisiting that game and finally latching onto it. Similarly I bounced off of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords back when it came out on PC late 2004.

There were of course a number of reasons why I bounced, not the least of which was the fact that World of Warcraft had just released. On top of that there was also the suicide death of my nephew that we were contending with. I know at some point I gave the game an attempt at playing it, but ran into a number of technical difficulties that I never quite pushed through. Similarly when a re-release happened on Steam in 2012 I once again gave it an attempt at playing but kept running into technical problems. We scan forward to now and a dozen unofficial addons later, and I am now successfully playing and engaged with the sequel to one of my favorite games.

Another reason I was super interested in playing KOTOR2 is the pedigree of it coming from Obsidian. This is the same studio that created my beloved Fallout New Vegas which was a very similar scenario of them working within a pre-established IP. However I had forgotten that they also created Neverwinter Nights 2 between these two games, a game that I so thoroughly bounced off for both mechanical and narrative reasons. So I went into this game hoping for hidden greatness, but what I am ultimate finding is lightly messy “goodness”. This is another game that had a fraught development life cycle and a number of things were left on the cutting room floor that have been since restored by fans of the game.

The key problem I am having as I play through it is that the game as a whole is missing the clear call to action that Knights of the Old Republic had. Each planet in that game lead you to the next planet in sequence and there was a sense of urgency in your actions because you were trying to beat another group to the chase. In KOTOR2 you have some vague threats and a galaxy that has more or less forgotten that the Jedi were ever a force for good and see them as destroying the galaxy in some fool crusade. You have a few evil forces working against you, but there is no clear path forward other than “maybe find some other Jedi”.

The other challenge that this game has against it is that it takes a really long time to get into what feels like the normal flow of the story. The game starts with you taking control of a droid and attempting to save the Ebon Hawk, the ship from the first KOTOR. This sequence plays out fairly slowly and acts as a prologue, which is skippable. Then you become stranded on the Peragus mining facility and finally take control of your primary character throughout the game. This effectively ends up being prologue 1.5 and it is very much not skippable and the actions taken within this section start to have some weight applied to them.

Finally if you make your want through Peragus you gain control of the Ebon Hawk once again… only to immediately lose it as soon as you dock with the Citadel Station at Telos. Surprise surprise your first “planet” is a space station where you are under House Arrest. This serves as the “tutorial planet” where you have to determine which of the factions you are going to support in order to finally go on a mission to reclaim your ship. Which leads you to finally encountering your first plot point in the form of the individuals that seem to have stolen your ship and indirectly send you out on a mission to find other Jedi. I am being purposefully vague here because plot points happen, but also they happen in a way that ultimately feels bad.

So I presently find myself in this uncanny valley of enjoying myself, but also at the same time admitting that Knights of the Old Republic II is not exactly what I would consider to be a good game. There are moments of greatness, but the tapestry that is woven has giant chunks that went horribly wrong. Granted I do realize that we have not arrived on the Bioware formula with this game that ultimately lead to things like Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Star Wars the Old Republic MMO. KOTOR and KOTOR2 are the prototype upon which those games were built, and KOTOR2 specifically seems to be trying to do some interesting things that are mostly landing flat.

This however is the challenge of spelunking into the backlog and pulling out a game that is at this over fifteen years old. Normally the thing I struggle with these older games is when the mechanics of gaming has evolved in a different direction than what was the standard at the time. This however is not really a problem with KOTOR2 because it does a good enough job of mouse look once you invert the Y axis. What I am struggling with instead is that this game comes from an era when the plot lines were not so emphasized and things just sort of evolved as you progressed through taskwork. KOTOR2 struggles with this more than its predecessor, but I am now engaged and committed to seeing this through.

Like I said I am enjoying myself and I am enjoying the character development, but also it seems to be just dumping large amounts of exposition on me that I don’t necessarily feel like I have earned yet. Obsidian had some really interesting ideas and I am glad that they used this game to polish those ideas so that we ultimately got Fallout New Vegas, but this game is a bit of a challenge. I see why I ultimately bounced off when I was nowhere near as focused as I am currently.

Bel Bungles Minecraft

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Last week I talked about rediscovering X’s Adventures and the fact that he is currently doing an adventure in Minecraft Hardcore Mode. I also talked a bit about how I thought it might be fun to do the same thing given that I had no clue Hardcore Minecraft even was a thing that existed. Since then I have started recording clips of me playing Minecraft in Hardcore mode and uploading them to my YouTube channel. They are pretty low production value because I am recording them directly from OBS and then uploading them more or less uncut. If you are interested in listening to me ramble while trying to sort out how Minecraft works, then this may be your jam.

As of this blog post, there are three parts to the series and each of them are in the neighborhood of 30 minutes. It seemed like 15 minutes wasn’t really enough time for me to actually accomplish much of anything. Seeing as I am not exactly doing this thing to get internet famous and really for my own personal amusement I am sticking to that format. The funny thing about this video series is that I don’t believe I have ever used my name aka “Belghast” as a seed for a Minecraft world. Turns out that seed is really solid because it put me really close to a village.

I need to sort out what exactly I want for a goal, because right now I am more or less going through the same routine that I have always gone through. Initially it was a hunt for Wood, Coal and Shelter and that evolved into a search for Iron. Which will in itself lead to a search for the bounty hidden without the bowels of the earth like Diamonds and such. However I am not entirely certain what my goals SHOULD be. An initial goal was to get a full set of armor, but past that I am going to have to sort out what my long range goal needs to be. I could in theory hide within mines for any number of videos because that is something that is relatively safe to do.

However I somehow doubt that watching me hollow out the innards of the earth is exciting content. I have various projects that I would like to complete, but the challenge with that is a lot of them are going to require large chunks of time to do them. My fear at doing “offline play” and then showing the results is that since this is Hardcore Minecraft… one death means the end of the run and should probably be something that is recorded. I’ve done a few things offline now, but they are simplistic like building some proper stairs or organizing my inventory. Something like “Let’s build an inside garden!” would take significantly more time and also with that brings forth significantly more dangers. I might be able to do the safe indoors tunneling work offline and then do the final bits while recording.

I will have to figure out exactly how to make this work. For now I have been releasing a video each day, but I somehow doubt I will be able to maintain that schedule for very much longer. It isn’t like I have an awful lot of viewers right now, but what are some projects that you would like to see tackled? It seems like a double edged sword because there is a certain act of discovery from not having played in so very long and not fully understanding how the world works. However that also means I don’t know a lot of things that might be interesting to go after.

The Best Dragon Age

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It has been a pretty wild ride for me and Dragon Age Inquisition. I remember when it initially released I had a pretty negative reaction to it, not in the least part because I ran into some significant technical difficulties. The negative opinion might have also been brought on by the fact that I had an awful lot of things on my plate. Warlords of Draenor was ramping up and that was an expansion I absolutely was serious about raiding in, as well as the fact that we were still very much actively raiding in Final Fantasy XIV as well. The combination of all of these left a pretty sour taste in my mouth, but I think a bit part of the experience was the fact that narratively it set me on a path of playing someone I considered to be the bad guys of Dragon Age 2.

As such it might come as somewhat of a surprise when I now tell you that after finishing Dragon Age Inquisition over the weekend, that I am pretty certain that it is now my favorite in the series. This game does more for the overarching cosmology of the setting that any of the previous games. It answers so many questions that were left hanging as well as creation all new mysteries to leave us waiting a fourth outing. Additionally to bring up a point raised on the podcast this weekend, Dragon Age Inquisition shows you a world worth saving. Ferelden during the blight was a miserable place, and Kirkwall similarly seemed to be horrible place as well. It isn’t so much that Orlais is that much better but you do get to see that the outdoor world of Thedas truly is breathtaking.

The real charm of Dragon Age Inquistion and the thing that ultimately won me over to its side… are the characters. In every other Bioware game there are always going to be one or two characters that by the end of the game I hate with passion. My friends have had to listen to my rants about these characters for years. In Dragon Age Inquisition there isn’t a single character that I did not come to love in the end. They all evolve over the course of the missions and the two of you grow together so that in the end you can look back on your time spent together fondly. I could not have said the same in those early hours with this game, but after over a hundred hours spent on this one play through I regret that the journey is over.

One of the more interesting things about Inquisition is that it has given me a new found respect for Dragon Age 2. The only problem is that now I cannot view my adventures in Kirkwall as anything other than the opening story arc of the Inquisition story. It makes me want to go back and play my way through it again because the events of Kirkwall play so directly into the events of the Templar and Mage war that I feel like knowing where it is going will give me a better appreciate of that story. I enjoyed Dragon Age 2 when I first played it, but it is a more cloistered experience than Origin or Inquisition. It is telling a smaller tale and as such it doesn’t feel like you had quite the same epic sweeping adventure. That said if you never played the second game I would absolutely suggest it as “required reading” for inquisition, because there will be plot points that probably land a little hollow. There wasn’t really a direct continuation of the story in Origins, but it feels like Inquisition takes place moments after the events of the second game.

So there we have it. The fifth time playing this game absolutely was the charm. I am looking forward to the next outing so much and I am hoping that maybe just maybe we see it before the end of the year. However given the lack of details and the still very early state the Game Awards Teaser appeared to be… I fully expect it to be a 2022 release. After experiencing the main story and DLC content I can say without a doubt that I am happiest with the way that Inquisition wraps things up. As such it is bumping Dragon Age Origins out of the way for my “favorite Dragon Age game” slot. Unfortunately this also bumps down Dragon Age 2 a rung, because it is still an overall worse experience than the first game but still one very much worth playing.

While I am apparently on this redemption arc for Bioware games kick, I am trying the OTHER title that I have never successfully made it thorugh. KOTOR and KOTOR2 originally released on the Xbox and I did not get to play either of them until the eventual Windows releases came out slightly afterwards. I loved Knights of the Old Republic when I played it in late 2003 and was absolutely rabid for a sequel. So when KOTOR2 The Sith Lords released in early 2005, I made every attempt to play it but encounter so many bugs that ultimately halted that experience. Similarly when it was finally released again through Steam in 2012 I gave it another attempt… but still largely found it to be a buggy mess. So here we are nine years later and an intricate series of third party patches applied… and things seem to mostly be going fairly smoothly.

It is a MUCH slower gaming experience than the more recent Bioware titles that I am used to. However I am starting to get into the swing of things. This is an era when this sort of third person RPG experience was not a “solved problem”. Interesting thing of note… sometimes Tam and I discuss when exactly mouse controls flipped so that what was inverted Y is now standard Y. Apparently it was sometime around the release of this game, because I ultimately had to flip the Y axis in order to get a control scheme that was more comfortable overall. The other interesting thing of note is that this exists in a world before “Quest Tracking” really existed and as such I find it interesting how there are no real waypointing going on directing you towards your objectives. I guess it was a different time in gaming, but I am getting used to it and hopefully can make it through the experience this time.

Now I am curious. Do you have any games that you bounced off and would like to return to? Drop me a line below. Also feel free to contest my proclaiming Dragon Age Inquisition the best Dragon Age game.