We've had one plain incredible year for gaming, rich with some of the greatest games ever released and fan service hail-mary announcements I would never have thought possible! Dragon's Dogma 2! Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater! Hollow Knight: Silksong's fiftieth delay! Sometimes it feels like the gaming world is blessed. But when we are gifted with one hand, the other is rifling through our possessions looking for something to take. We can't possibly have a year of only dubs, and it seems that the abject failures of high budget train wreck releases like Forspoken and it's ilk aren't quite enough to satiate the ghoulish desires of the Deep Ones that ruled before and will rule again. Visitors from the outer-realms who stalk the shadows of the forbidden and forgotten, existing in the queerest corners of society and enacting their perverse wills upon humanity out of sight. Sometimes they take from us our children, sometimes they take entire villages, sometimes they take our dreams. Today, it seems, would be the day they abscond with the latter, and all will be the worse of for it.
That's right... Sony is going through the process of scrubbing any and all mention of the Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic Remake from the Internet. It's over boys, we lost. One of the single most hype moments in the game-marketing circles of the past few years, that moment when KOTOR threatened to return to this age of jaw-dropping remakes via a fresh developer's big break and a dream we've all be harbouring for years now. A dream that become skittish the longer we went without hearing anything on the state of the KOTOR remake, as everyone feared the worse. Of course Sony, being the loathsome cowards that they are, refuse to come out and just say it with their chest held out- so they slink around removing trailers, deleting announcement tweets, apparently hoping we'll just forget a game that topped so many people's 'most anticipated' list for years now. We're just going to have to wait until the next inevitable Sony leak to learn that the KOTOR Remake has been officially cancelled.
I suppose it really does shake the foundations of the game marketing world because we've gone so long without a high budget cancellation, it's something of an unheard of practice. Gone are the days when games are announced to the public the very same week after being pitched, so more often than not the cancelled games are the ones that never get the chance to do the marketing rounds and become the ever-loved prom queen of the ball. We don't give take-backsies anymore, not like we did in the times of 'Starcraft: Ghost', or the real 'Prey 2', Star Wars 1313 and the original Battlefront 3. Because we shouldn't. If trash like Forspoken and Saint Row Reboot can make it through the funding and development stage to our shelves, then why the heck shouldn't an idea actually bathed in good vibes? Heck, toss it to another developer if you must- but don't kill the thing in it's infancy you monsters!
Only modern day Ubisoft are the kind of company that runs that poorly, at least that's what I thought. Modern Ubisoft juggling their 5 dozen projects at any given time with all the deft precision of a blind, one handed circus Performer. Why, they're dragging along the corpse of a pirate ship-battling game which they been attached to for about a decade now- and that hasn't been cancelled! (Partially because they can't. Singapore would be rightly pissed at them.) Modern Ubisoft who have been singing sweet nothings about Beyond Good and Evil 2 for nearly 15 years now, and promise that the thing hasn't been cancelled despite the fact only the company dog and it's fleas are active on the development team right now. I really thought they would be the one's to reintroduce the gaming world to the sting of potential unfulfilled. Seems I underestimated the boys in blue.
I had a dream, foolish though it was, of a Knights of the Old Republic Remake sparking something of a new renaissance of Old Republic themed Star Wars content. Wherein finally the franchise could uncouple itself from the limitations of the Sky Walker timelines and slip into the vast and insane wells of history, populated by Sith Lords with the power to eat life from an entire planet, and perpetuate themselves on the power of pure indignation through any injury. There's the line of Darth Traya's to consider, the mask of Nihilus, the legacy of Revan, the Sith Empire from the other side of the galaxy- so many cool extremes of the mythos that will never be explored to a fan base growing tired off shows like Boba Fett and Obi Wan.
KOTOR was going to the beginning. Presenting a world bored of turn based RPGs an tutorial on how to boogie in the days of the Jedi-Sith war with the full action gameplay we were once promised. And it wasn't going to just stop there, we were going to get a KOTOR 2 remake and if they went well who knows where things could have gone? Maybe we could have finally received our KOTOR 3, finally doing justice to the exciting promise of the original narrative which the TOR MMO dedicated itself to routinely ruining throughout it's run. (The MMO is already part of 'Legends', no one would mind if you borrowed the things they did well and threw away all the rest!) And then I could actually start getting back into Star Wars the way I always promised myself that I would.
But it's time to face the facts and look the truth in the eye- there isn't going to be a KOTOR remake. At first I thought the project would just be handed off to someone more capable, as sad as it was to see Apsyr pulled, but I don't even think we can rely on that anymore. Deleting the announcement trailer is a serious step; that was only a teaser representing the exsistence of the game. Maybe there's a chance it was taken down for featuring Aspyr's name in the footage, but that's a quick amendment to make and the trailer still isn't back. And the erased Tweets... no, this is 'scorched earth' policy as much as it pains me to admit. A slow peeling of the plaster which, predictably, is causing so much more anguish and suffering than a straight rip would have ever done. Thanks, Sony.
So there ends a promising prospect the likes of which I regarded a potential system shifter for me. I genuinely took into consideration the exclusivity of this promised game when buying my current gen console, and instantly lost all interest once they began canning it. I just can't believe we're in an age where current projects are allowed to present themselves to such an appalling celebration and still never find it's footing. Isn't anyone smelling the free money and re-assigning developers on this? Who would be so foolish as to let a crowd favourite be felled on the cutting room floor? How bad could the Aspyr remake have possibly been? That's the curse of a silently cancelled product, you see: questions that will haunt you for the rest of your days...
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