Star Wars: The Old Republic was a very ambitious MMO that didn’t really pan out the way some fans had hoped. They wanted something in the vein of BioWare’s Knights of the Old Republic role-playing games, just expanded into a bigger online adventure. What they got was something closer to World of Warcraft reskinned with Star Wars. James Ohlen said he pitched a plan to eventually turn that around, but Electronic Arts’ board of directors ultimately killed the initiative.
Ohlen was still working on 2011’s Star Wars: The Old Republic before he left BioWare in 2018. He said he felt like a “highly paid, completely useless person” by the end. His decision to leave came after EA refused to pay to reboot the MMORPG. “It was the chance to do Knights of the Old Republic online, it was a chance to [put right] everything I’d said that we’d messed up,” he told PC Gamer this week.
Game development is full of plans to do cool stuff that never make it much further than the dry-erase whiteboard, but the BioWare veteran suggested his plan to reboot SWTOR was much more than that. Ohlen said he’d pitched then-LucasFilm president Kathleen Kennedy, who was overseeing the whole Star Wars universe, as well as director Dave Filoni, who has since taken over the franchise alongside executive Lynwen Brennan. “[Filoni] was like, ‘if you set it a couple hundred years before the fall of the Republic, we can have a tie-in,’” Ohlen said.
But the biggest challenge was convincing EA’s then-Worldwide Studios VP, Patrick Söderlund, to go along with the idea. SWTOR had cost hundreds of millions, and greenlighting even more investment was risky. “I remember I got super excited because the big challenge was Patrick Söderlund, who I think is great but hates Star Wars: The Old Republic,” Ohlen told PC Gamer. “And I convinced him … it was one of the greatest accomplishments of my career.” Söderlund later went on to cofound Embark Studios and ship both The Finals and last year’s hit extraction shooter Arc Raiders.
There was one more roadblock to SWTOR 2.0, however, and that was EA’s board of directors. They ultimately pulled the plug. “We were going to be able to have a Star Wars: The New Republic, until the board of directors of EA, who all remembered the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic, and remembered spending $300 million,” Ohlen said. “They’re like, ‘Why the f*ck are we gonna spend a bunch more?’” (It was around this time that EA reported the MMORPG had gone on to earn over $1 billion in lifetime revenue).
Ohlen decided to leave BioWare as a result, and EA later decided to offload SWTOR to an outside studio called Broadsword Online Games so that what was left of BioWare could focus on Dragon Age and now Mass Effect. But while one dream for more Knights of the Old Republic died, another still lives. Fellow BioWare veteran Casey Hudson is currently heading up a new Old Republic RPG with the goal of shipping before 2030.