Former BioWare lead designer James Ohlen has revealed there was once a plan to reboot the studio’s massively-multiplayer online role-playing game Star Wars: The Old Republic, and it would have made it more like 2003’s single-player RPG Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, had the project been allowed to go ahead.
Speaking to PC Gamer in a wide-ranging interview, Ohlen, who was lead designer on KOTOR as well as Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 and Dragon Age: Origins, said he spent six months in 2015 – four years after Star Wars: The Old Republic was released – compiling a design he referred to as The New Republic. Ohlen described the project as a “chance to do [SWTOR more like] Knights of the Old Republic online, it was a chance to [put right] everything I’d said that we’d messed up,” Ohlen said.
With the help of a mock-up trailer, Ohlen managed to convince a handful of key people that The New Republic was the right direction for SWTOR. He convinced then-LucasFilm president Kathleen Kennedy about the idea, and now-Lucasfilm president Dave Filoni. Filoni was reportedly so enthused that he said, “If you set it a couple hundred years before the fall of the Republic, we can have a tie-in,” Ohlen recalled.
Ohlen even managed to convince apparent SWTOR hater Patrick Soderlund – the boss of EA worldwide studios – about The New Republic. “I remember I got super excited because the big challenge was [EA exec] Patrick Söderlund, who I think is great but hates Star Wars: The Old Republic,” Ohlen said. “And I convinced him… it was one of the greatest accomplishments of my career.” (Soderlund went on to create Embark Studios and make The Finals and Arc Raiders.)
“We were going to be able to have a Star Wars: The New Republic until the board of directors of EA […] remembered spending $300m” -James Ohlen
For Ohlen, only one hurdle remained: EA’s board of directors, and sadly here, the game’s original eye-watering budget came back to thwart him. “We were going to be able to have a Star Wars: The New Republic until the board of directors of EA, who all remembered the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic, and remembered spending $300m… They’re like, ‘Why the fuck are we gonna spend a bunch more?'”
The board said no and the idea died, and so began Ohlen’s discontent at the studio. “That was the beginning of the end for me,” he said. He’d begun to feel powerless and like a “completely useless person”, and though he would spend a few more years working on Anthem with many of the original KOTOR team, Ohlen would exit BioWare in 2018 after 22 years working there – a year before Anthem was released.
Hearing that we once came so close to a truer Knights of the Old Republic experience online is agonising for fans of BioWare’s game and the KOTOR series (a flawed but beloved sequel was developed by Obsidian). Love for the series can still be felt strongly now, whenever there’s talk of the lost-in-development KOTOR remake. You can also feel it transferred into excitement for KOTOR director Casey Hudson’s new game Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic, which sounds very much like the same thing. Hudson intends to release the game before 2030.
Even without a New Republic reboot, though, Star Wars: The Old Republic made attempts at providing a single-player KOTOR-like experience, particularly with the Knights of the Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne expansions, which I enjoyed an awful lot. They bent the game mechanics to tell a grand story about overthrowing a millennia-old Sith Lord. Yet, however KOTOR-coded these additions were, they were only ever imitations of the follow-up fans have long hungered for.
Side note: did you know that BioWare once had its own ideas for a Knights of the Old Republic sequel, involving a storyline revolving around the deception of a Yoda-like character? James Ohlen told me about this in 2021.
After BioWare, Ohlen created a new game studio Archetype Entertainment, which was funded by Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering maker Wizards of the Coast. There he directed the promising Mass Effect-like third-person sci-fi RPG Exodus, which is due at some point next year. But Ohlen announced he was leaving Archteype at the start of this year, citing burnout. “I was running on fumes,” he elaborated to PC Gamer, “and it was hurting my health, and my personal life, and everything. I just needed to step away.”
He’s recovering by returning to where it all started for him, to tabletop gaming (fun fact: the original KOTOR idea came from one of Ohlen’s teenage Star Wars D&D campaigns) and to writing campaign books for – and compatible with – Dungeons & Dragons. That’s at yet another studio he co-founded, Arcanum Worlds, although this one is much, much smaller. And who knows? Perhaps one of these books will provide a jumping-off point for another video game project somewhere in the future, Ohlen mused to PC Gamer. “I’m sure I’ll get bamboozled into starting another video game studio,” he said, “and all the pain that comes with it.”
