One of the best games in the Star Wars universe, which has provided players with hours of engaging gameplay, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, has turned 20 today. One of the reasons for the success of the project is the successful implementation of many ideas. As early as April 2003, project director Casey Hudson stated that the game was almost exactly what developers envisioned in 2000.
In July 2000, BioWare announced that they were working with LucasArts on creating a role-playing video game set in the Star Wars universe for PC and next-generation consoles. BioWare CEO Greg Zeschuk commented that “the opportunity to create a richly detailed new chapter in the Star Wars universe is incredibly exciting for us. It is a great honor for us to work with the extremely talented people at LucasArts, developing a role-playing game based on one of the most iconic licenses in the world.” The project was officially presented as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic at the E3 2001 exhibition. At that time, the game had been in development for about six months. “Pre-production began in 2000, but discussions began in 1999,” said Mike Gallo from LucasArts. “The first real electronic mail was sent in October or November of ’99. That’s when we started talking to BioWare for the first time. But some really serious work finally started in early 2000.”
The decision to create the game four thousand years before “Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace” was one of the first known details about the project. LucasArts gave BioWare the opportunity to choose the game’s settings. “LucasArts approached us and said we could make the game about the second episode,” said BioWare CEO Ray Muzyka. “Or LucasArts said we could go back four thousand years, a period that had hardly been explored before.” BioWare decided to set the game four thousand years before the movies, as this gave them greater creative freedom. They aimed to create content similar to that of the movies but different enough to serve as a definite predecessor. Conceptual work had to be submitted to the “ranch” for approval. Muzyka noted that very little of their content was rejected: “It was more like ‘Could you make its head like this instead of like that?’ So it was quite feasible. Good suggestions were made, and they made the game better, so we were happy to implement them. It was really a good process, and I think we were pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to work with LucasArts.” Zeschuk said, “Overall, we were really satisfied with the results. We felt like we had enough freedom to truly create something fantastic.”
Gallo revealed that BioWare and LucasArts aimed for a gameplay duration of about sixty hours: “In Baldur’s Gate, there were a hundred hours of gameplay or more. The Baldur’s Gate 2 playtime was two hundred hours… We are talking about a smaller amount [for Knights of the Old Republic], significantly smaller, but even if it’s sixty percent less, that’s still a hundred hours. So, our gameplay time goal was sixty hours. We have so many areas that we create – worlds, spaceships, things like that to explore – so we have a lot of gameplay.”
Project director Casey Hudson said that one of the greatest achievements and one of the greatest risks was the combat system. “We wanted to create something that would combine the strategic aspects of our Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights series but present it in a fast-paced, cinematic 3D action,” said Hudson. “This required us to create something that hadn’t really been
Source from www.playground.ru rnrn