Look what they've done to my KOTOR...

 I don't believe it

I have a secret. One of the hidden truths of the world, a defining factor in the turning of the world that so often goes untouched and uncommented on by those around us. I know the realities of the universe and how to define them in shocking clarity by the very merit of being 'practical'- by taking the ethereal and substance-less stuff of dreams and refining them into tough, hard being. Why dream about the potential of generating vast swathes of inescapable wealth through runaway success in the video game development space, when you can guarantee yourself those same returns. Creativity is hard. Imagination is volatile. Passion is fleeting. All you need is to follow one simple rule- take the yearned for, the dreamed of, the begged after- and realise it. Take the readily professed dreams of your exceptionally vocal audience and say "Damn, we don't even have to do Market Research because our Market is right there, screaming it out for everyone to hear!" Is that a secret? It's starting to feel like one given how many otherwise sensible heads seem oblivious to it.

Now to be fair, we live in age where game studios, slowly becoming more and more adverse to actually taking risks, are coming around on this most blatant of concepts. Afterall, this is pretty much 'The age of the Remake', when it comes to Resident Evil 4 somehow securing a nominee for Game of the Year, just as Resident Evil 2 had done a few years before it. Every rights holder in existence has taken an envious glance over at their dormant catalogue and cast an errant idea into the void, but scant few of them had made the leap to give it a shot because- well- the consequences of failure are huge. As they should be. We know how difficult it is to conceive the vision for a coherent and exciting game from scratch, like trying to catch lightning in a hurricane. But following the blueprints of someone else, updating where needs require and innovating in places originally un-though of? Why, that's simply a check of technical prowess, there's no reason why a Remake on even the most basic level should survive from announcement to launch- cancellation shouldn't even be a thought that crosses anyone's mind. Yet here we are.

Because it's so simple in theory, isn't it? Take the game that everyone loves, maintain that essence of beauty which enamoured the original audience so very long ago and replicate it on a grander, sleeker, scale- typically whilst forgetting all the artistic theory behind basic concepts like colour grading and shadow layering. (Thank you- 'Last of Us' and 'Final Fantasy IX Remastered') But then the higher ideas start slipping there. Should it still play the same way? Can we keep in that reference? That character is pretty outdated, let's change them up! Why don't we totally rewrite the Spanish language in a painfully misguided attempt to make it gender neutral? (Wait... that last one wasn't a remake. That was Spider-Man 2. My bad. No actually- Insomniac's bad.) And then the actual 'remake' process gets a little bit prickly.

Afterall, the best remakes go the distance of redesigning the entire game from the ground-up, right? Final Fantasy 7 went to the extremes of changing the game from being a turn-based RPG into an action RPG, totally rewrote all of the characters to better harp on their roles and personalities earlier in the narrative and even went so far as to rewrite the end of the story to aggressively insert the ability to make even grander rewrites later down the line. Oh, and they also managed to stretch the original title into 3 giant sized games, thus tripling the suspect profits of your average Remake. A fantastic effort but an immense one which is likely to chalk up to ten years of the development team's lives; not many people are willing, or capable, of commitment's like that. (Sorry all you FF9 and FF10 fans waiting for your world changing remakes- get yourself an insane game director or weep in squalor, I'm afraid.)

It was all this pressure and more that landed on the shoulders of the Knights of the Old Republic Remake when it landed on the door of Aspyr Media, their first major project, and was shown off to the world. Since then we've had near radio silence, with the exception of news that Aspyr were ripped off the project following a meeting with Sony wherein the feedback apparently chalked up to "It's not cinematic enough!" And from that there has been nothing, more than nothing- anti-nothing. As in, Sony have removed the announcement trailer from their socials and scrubbed all digital footprints of one of the most anticipated game announcements of all time as though they're scared of just coming out and announcing something. Why are you scared Sony? What's there to fear? We just want to hear some updates, now come on out and say it clear- why are you distancing yourself from this game?

The apparent man in charge of the project doesn't even want to go on record talking about it's state, no one can reliably list the developers working on it, and now we're hearing rumours that the reason is because literally nobody is on the team. It's a dead-wood project floating in limbo, not cancelled and not being developed. Essentially aspiring vaporware rotting down in the bowels of Eldritch horror-entity slowly seeping into the psyche of the mentally unsound, twisting them into obedient puppets of the else-world Old god sleeping under the seas- Embracer Group. By some insane decree, the remake of KOTOR was put on the bench for being too hard to figure out- and I'm sorry, but that is a damn insane position to be in.

I blame Sony. Fully and totally. It's their damned hubris for trying to make this game something it wasn't, apparently without going the distance of communicating that to the development team beforehand! The original KOTOR was built on the damn solid bones of Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition and works best as an RPG within that network, in fact- maybe a tactical turn-based system similar to Baldur's Gate would work wonders in buffing up the impact of each action! Ever consider that Sony? Of course not, because they don't want a game that's good to it's genre, they want something marketable to the general public!  They want a God of War or Last of Us- some highly overly Cinematic action adventure open world game high on the polish and nice-looking as a shelf filler. And for some reason they expected a studio responsible for mostly ports were going to pull that out of their magic hats or something.

So now the game I literally lost my mind to see announced is a ghost, and all I have to be excited for is the one announcement more hype-fuelled, Metal Gear Solid Delta, but even more in danger of disappointing. (Konami screwed up the HD Collection ports! God knows what they'll end up doing to a fresh Remake!) And Sony don't respect it's audience to such a degree that they'll let this yearning despair fester and mutate (X-Men '97 guitar riff) rather than just give us a straight cancellation. Just do it, you cowards- stop tormenting us with this indominatable nothing! At the very least we still have the KOTOR 2 Switch Port to count on... wait, they cancelled the cut content DLC for that port too? Oh Star Wars/Disney mouse god, why are you so cruel to us?