A Bloomberg report is suggesting that the remake of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic has been delayed indefinitely amidst trouble at developer Aspyr Media.
According to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, Aspyr completed a vertical slice demo of the remake at the end of June to show to executives at Lucasfilm and Sony. The following week art director Jason Minor and design director Brad Prince were both fired from the studio. Prince indicated on his LinkedIn page that the termination was not expected, writing, “Things can change very fast in a day. I am no longer working at Aspyr and looking for work.”
The vertical slice —essentially a demo that’s intended to showcase all of a game’s intended features in action, and that Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert once called “one of the dumbest things the game industry has ever come up with”—is apparently the cause of the uproar. Minor may not have seen trouble coming, but sources told Bloomberg that Aspyr’s studio bosses weren’t pleased with the state of it, or of the amount of time and money that had been put into creating it.
There are also concerns about the remake’s projected timeline: Aspyr had said internally that it would be out by the end of this year, but developers now reportedly believe that a launch sometime in 2025 is more realistic. That’s the sort of discrepancy that no amount of crunch (or anything else short of straight-up magic) could ever solve.
More on this as we get it.
