Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republicturns 20 today, and it’s perhaps not the grand affair we would have expected a year ago.With the Remake reportedly in a rough place, the series is hitting this huge milestone without much fanfare on the official end of things. But thankfully, the folks over at Noclip have something to make up for it: footage of an early KOTOR build that you’ve almost definitely never seen before.
Over on itsYouTubechannel Noclip has shared a KOTOR presentation that would have been shown to the press at E3 2001, two years before the game launched. Given how E3 was a much less scripted, pre-planned affair back then too, it’s a real behind-the-scenes look at how KOTOR played during production, with this early build featuring gameplay and story elements that never made it into the final release.
Related:Star Wars Jedi: Survivor Was Way More Unpolished Than It Should Have Been
The demo kicks off not with any pre-rendered cutscenes or celebrity cameos, but with a simple slideshow of character concept art. Here, we’re introduced to early sketches of some of the possible main character designs, and even a look at Bastila beforeBioWaresettled on her iconic Jedi design.
It seems that this presentation was put together when the devs had very different plans for the cast too. For example, the dev says we can expect to have an “exotic Twi’lek” follow us around during our journeys. This was presumably an adult Twi’lek, given the choice of wording here, not the 14-year-old Mission Vao we got in the final game.
After that, we get some animations - and they’re a lot smoother than what we’d get in the final game. It is lovely hearing the dev gush about the fact that their character models have individual fingers and blinking eyes, though. It’s easy to take simple things like this for granted in modern gaming.
Then, it’s time to get into the action. This is where we see the biggest changes, with overworlds having many more moving parts. Speeders will drive past you on the street, and characters will seemingly respond to you walking near them, not just being clicked on to speak. Taris seems to have been hit with the biggest changes, however, as we see the player try and evade a Sith invasion, only to get ambushed by Darth Malak. Events don’t go down at all like this in the Taris players got to explore. Instead, the Sith have already taken over by the time we get there, and Malak’s only interaction with the place is blowing it out of the sky from orbit.
Seeing what goes on behind the scenes is always great though, and it’s a fitting tribute to the fan-favouriteStar Warsgame on its twentieth birthday. Now someone just needs to track something like this down for KOTOR 2, and I’ll be very happy.
Next:Is It Bad That I Wish We Could Still Play Final Fantasy 14 1.0?
