Development of the remake of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic frozen

Aspyr Media decided to freeze the development of a remake of the iconic role-playing game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

Bloomberg journalist Jason Schrijer reports this with reference to his sources.

KotOR was to be the first project in a long time not to be developed by the EA publishing house, which has concluded an exclusive agreement with Disney.

The contract expires in 2023, but it is already known that Lucasfilm has granted licenses to other developers, including even Ubisoft.

Aspyr Media specializes in the development and publication of remasters of old games, including projects from the now defunct publishing house LucasArts.

The remake of KotOR was to be the first big project for the company, with BioWare veterans participating in the development, who managed to work on the Star Wars: The Old Republic IMO.

The remake was officially announced in September 2021. At that time, the project was already under development for about three years.

And on June 30, 2022, Aspyr Media completed the development of the so-called "vertical cut" of the game, which was then demonstrated to partners from Sony and Lucasfilm.

And that's where the problems started. According to Schrijer's sources, after the demonstration, the company's management fired the design director Brad Prince and art director Jason Minor.

This shocked the developers, and Minor admitted that his dismissal was a surprise. As Aspyr Media said, the demo was not what they wanted.

Therefore, the development of KotOR was suspended indefinitely. One of the insiders suggested that it took too much money and time to create a vertical slice.

The fact is that Aspyr Media promised the partners to release the game at the end of 2022. However, the developers now believe that the release should not wait until 2025.

In this situation, the future of the project remains vague.

It is possible that the project will eventually be taken away from Aspyr Media and transferred to Saber Interactive, which has also been involved in the development since May 2022.