It seems that work on the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic remake has halted. This is according to Giant Bomb’s Jeff Grubb, who seemingly has contacts within Embracer group who are in the know about this. This development may come as a disappointment for some fans out there, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be.

As reported by Insider Gaming, Giant Bomb’ Jeff Grubb mentioned during his Game Mess Mornings show that Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic remake is not being worked on at all. As in, no studios whatsoever are currently doing any work on the game. It’s not clear where he’s gotten his information, but the Insider Gaming article goes on to point out that this claim his claim appears to have been corraborated by Sony, which has apparently been scrubbing mentions of the game from its social media pages and YouTube. It’s also come to light that the project has been kicked to at least two different development studios thus far: first Aspyr Media, then Sabre Interactive (that change taking place in August 2022). Since then there hasn’t been any official news regarding the project.

Taking all of this together, it’s sounding like the remake project has effectively died, and I’m honestly kind of relieved to hear it. From the outset, it sounded like Knights of the Old Republic was going to be made with a similar ethos to that behind all other Star Wars projects made during the Disney era. That is, it was going to be remade with “modern audiences” in mind. In the other movies, TV shows and games, this has resulted in very clean, very safe, very neutered stories, characters and presentations.

In other words, a modern Knights of the Old Republic would more than likely try to shy away from the older game’s darker elements and deeper questions, and it would also likely try to push certain kinds of characters to the fore, if not completely reinvent the likes of Revan, Bastila and Malak. I don’t know about you all, but I believe that a very large part of the original game’s success was that it was willing to talk about the darker things in th Star Wars universe and that main characters were exactly who they were in that original game/story.

Any alterations to their personalities, motivations and importance would ruin that, and I don’t really trust a modern AAA studio to resist the urge to make such changes. Heck, I’d actually be shocked if they didn’t introduce some random new character to undercut one or all of them.

I might be wrong of course. Perhaps those working on this project had every intention of doin the original game and story justice. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), we likely won’t ever know for sure.

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What’s your take on this? Were you looking forward to a remake? Do you trust modern studios to pay proper respect to the originals when they do remakes nowadays?

Image from the Steam Store