Chris Avellone reveals planned KOTOR 3 premise, and it involved battling ancient Sith Lords

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 designer Chris Avellone has revealed what developer Obsidian Entertainment had planned for the next game in the series, KOTOR 3, before it was canned.

Speaking to VG247, Avellone said the dev team always imagined the series as a trilogy, and started "working on the third game pitch" after the release of KOTOR 2. The plan was for the player to follow the trail of Darth Revan across the galaxy and battle ancient Sith Lords, "who are far more terrifying than the Darths that show up". As well as fighting these powerful enemies, you'd be able to uncover their origin stories, he said.

"These guys would just be monsters. These would have a level of power that was considerable, but at the same time you’d be able to dig more into their psychologies, and their personalities, their history, and even how they dealt with the player, how they talk with the player, the different powers they cultivated and developed, and for some of them like—they’re the ancients, so they’re not just ruling a solar system, [but] swathes of the galaxy," he explained.

“So the places you travel to [you’d see] how they left their stamp on that world, or that solar system, or whatever collection of moons. You’d see how horrible that was. Part of that environment would tell a story about that. [That] would be a great, epic way to end the trilogy. The Old Republic are out there. We just didn’t get a chance to do it.”

Avellone also revealed that BioWare, developer of the original KOTOR, were keen to make the third game, as were an internal team at Lucas Arts. "But it just never seemed to actually go anywhere. So I don’t know whether people didn’t think there’d be enough sales, [or if] they didn’t care about doing a singleplayer game. I know a ton of people who would want to play it, but obviously, maybe those numbers aren’t big enough, or whatever, so I don’t know what the deal was."

Avellone is one of the designers working on the next singleplayer Star Wars game, called Jedi: Fallen Order, which is due to be revealed today. You can watch the reveal here.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.