Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 10-Year Anniversary Interview
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JC: What are you most proud of in the creation of KOTOR?
JO: The story twist. I thought we managed to pull off a twist that almost had the same impact as when Darth Vader revealed to Luke that he was his father. We used the Sixth Sense as a guide for how a good twist was pulled off. One of the lessons from that movie was that you had to leave enough clues that a sizeable percentage of the audience would figure out the twist before you revealed it. If you didn't leave enough clues, then the twist would ring false.
JC: You were the lead designer on both KOTOR and Bioware's most recent Star Wars game, Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR). How did your experience with developing KOTOR affect or influence SWTOR later on?
JO: If you look at all the games on which I've been the lead designer, you'll notice that there are certain recurring elements:
'¢ Epic heroic story arcs
'¢ Difficult moral choices that impact the story
'¢ Interesting companion characters
'¢ Classic class based RPG game systems
All of those elements were in KOTOR and the goal was to put all of them into SWTOR. That was a big challenge, since storytelling had never been done in a massively multiplayer online world and at such a large scale before.
JC: KOTOR is a masterpiece of RPG design and execution. Looking back a decade of RPG creation, do you think some of the magic has been lost, or have developers found new ways to innovate?
JO: I don't think the magic has been lost all. Casey Hudson and the rest of his team have done a great job of building the Mass Effect series into a franchise that has innovated in many different ways. The guys over at Bethesda have done some amazing stuff with the Elder Scrolls series and Fallout 3. I think it's a golden age for Western RPGs right now.
