Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic’s lead designer reckons his version of a KOTOR threequel wouldn’t be great since he’s “all Star Wars’d out.”
James Ohlen was a longtime developer at RPG factory BioWare, where he worked for 22 years on games such as Dragon Age: Origins, Baldur’s Gate, Anthem, and more. But the veteran doesn’t see himself returning to make a Knights of the Old Republic 3 - mainly because he no longer works at BioWare, but also because he thinks it would be “not great.”
“Because I’m all Star Wars’d out,” Ohlen said in an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun. “I have nothing else to say about Star Wars. But if a whole new studio does KOTOR 3 that loved KOTOR, that could be an amazing game,” he continued.
“So hopefully Disney makes that happen. But probably not, because executives around there are all probably going, ‘it’s too hardcore.’” While joking about Disney executives, Ohlen also recalled the time he had to convince former EA boss (and now former Unity boss) John Riccitiello that fantasy was a commercial genre: “I had this whole PowerPoint presentation… We have Lord of the Rings! We have World of Warcraft! We have Diablo!”
Disney’s efforts to remake the original Knights of the Old Republic haven’t gone so smoothly, however. According to a report from last summer, the game was delayed indefinitely and then switched developers following a rough internal demo. Recent news about the KOTOR remake hasn’t been any more hopeful: when asked about the project, the game's publisher gave an exasperated “no comment.” Though the removal of all KOTOR trailers seems to have been “normal business,” according to Sony.
Elsewhere, Ohlen said 20,000 hours spent playing D&D is what prepared him to make Baldur’s Gate.
