KOTOR remake: is 2028 real, and will combat go real-time?

The Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic remake is still alive, and somebody at Saber has finally put a year on the table. Before I get excited about a date, though, I want to see about 30 seconds of an actual fight. The second we see somebody pull out a lightsaber, we're going to know a lot more about what kind of Star Wars game Saber is making.

Can I pause? Can I tell my whole party what to do? Am I timing my parries like in Jedi Survivor? And if the combat changes, how much of the RPG underneath goes with it? The original Knights of the Old Republic came out in 2003 from BioWare.

Saber's 2028 KOTOR remake comment is a hope, not a release target

Here's the latest. Back in March, Saber's Tim Willits himself told IGN the remake was still in development. That's exciting, and it amounts to a green light. Saber's chief business officer then mentioned the remake as something he hoped would be part of the company's 2028 lineup.

Saber told PC Gamer the comment was genuine but said it shouldn't be taken as an official release target yet. So if you've seen headlines saying the KOTOR remake is coming in 2028, one word is doing a lot of heavy lifting there: hopeful. We're hopeful. That's the latest concrete update.

We're still waiting for an official gameplay reveal, a release date, and any specifics on combat or quality of life changes. There are old development screenshots floating around, but those came from the Aspyr version. Game File reported that a different studio took over development, so I'm going to put very little weight on what an old prototype tells us about the game we'll eventually play.

Why the original KOTOR combat is more than turn based

When people say they want the turn based combat back, it's more interesting than that. This is a huge debate, because it comes down to what you do with a remake. How do you capture the legacy and that original feeling, while updating it for players in 2026 whose attention spans are a little different?

In the original, you could let a fight play out in real time, or you could pause. You could switch characters and queue up what you wanted everybody to do. Underneath the animations, attacks resolved in rounds with dice rolls. You'd watch your character swing a lightsaber and sometimes wonder how in the world that missed. Meanwhile, the game was doing math you probably hadn't thought about since you made your character.

I can see why somebody playing it for the first time would bounce off of that. A lightsaber duel ought to look like two people fighting for their lives. Give me faster reactions, make the hits feel like they connect, and let me see why an attack failed. If an enemy shield is eating my blaster fire, I need to see that. If I've queued up a Force power the enemy can resist, give me enough feedback to make a different call next time. You could make that old system feel so much better just by making it easier to read.

What full real time action could cost the KOTOR party

Then there's the full real time action debate. I get the appeal. You catch a blaster bolt, shove a guy off a ledge, and turn around just in time to block a lightsaber. If the reveal opened with that, I'm probably going to do a double take and watch it twice.

My question is what happens to the rest of my party while I'm doing that. Can I tell them to lock down a threat while I go after somebody else? Could I build a character around blasters and have just as much fun as I would with a lightsaber? And if I put points into a skill, am I going to feel the difference even if I already know how to dodge every attack? There are so many subtle nuances to the original that Saber has to take into consideration.

My pick for the KOTOR remake: responsive combat with a party pause

Personally, I want to go in the middle. Give me responsive movement and attacks, with a pause that lets me issue orders to the whole party. If I'm cleaning up a couple of low level enemies, I can keep moving. If I walk into a room and realize I brought the wrong people for the job, it gives me a second to figure out how I'm going to get everybody out alive.

I'd love to have a fight go sideways because I sent the wrong companion after the wrong enemy, and then come back and win it with a different plan. I think that's part of why I want my party to still matter. If you go straight to real time action, you could take that away.

The quality of life upgrades I'd expect from a KOTOR remake

What would make me replay this thing a third or fourth time is the little things: the nuance and the detail. Give me a journal I can open after a week away and immediately remember who I was supposed to talk to on Taris. Give me a map that shows which floor I'm on and lets me place a pin. Let me compare gear against what my companions are wearing without bouncing between screens over and over.

When I level up, tell me which feats I'm working toward before I spend points I'm going to wish I had back 10 hours later. If you've ever played the original, you know that pain. I'd also love an optional tutorial that lets you feel the difference between builds, so I can test feats on training droids before I pick one.

I want a few more autosaves around big area transitions and a manual save I can find in two clicks, please. Let me adjust subtitle size and remap the controls. Those are all quality of life upgrades I'd expect from a remake today. I'd still want the option to turn off quest markers, though. I think part of the fun of landing on a new planet is walking into a room because I'm curious and finding a problem I didn't even know I could get involved in.

Keep the KOTOR story intact and add companion conversations

I'll keep this spoiler free, because many people are going to play this for the first time. The original takes place roughly 4,000 years before the movies, and BioWare used that distance to make Star Wars feel big again. You had the Jedi, the Sith and everything you could recognize. But you could meet somebody on the Ebon Hawk and spend the next few hours caring more about what happened to them than whatever you were supposed to be doing to save the galaxy.

Back in 2021, the original announcement talked about rebuilding the game while preserving the story and the characters. I hope that's still the goal. I'd happily take more companion conversations, especially ones that happen out in the world when somebody has a reason to speak up. Imagine bringing a different crew member to a planet on your second playthrough and getting a whole different read on a situation, or getting more time with someone you always left on the ship because you already had your two favorites. That's where I'd put new writing.

Please, please, please let me take my time with the big reveal. Let new players form their own opinions about the characters. Let the little things that seem incidental on a first playthrough take on a whole different meaning the second time around. That's replayability. When the first big story trailer comes out, trust that there's enough cool material in the first few hours to sell people on the game. I want to see somebody reach that moment in the remake and immediately start thinking back through every conversation they've had.

What I want to see when Saber shows KOTOR gameplay

Whenever Saber is ready to show it, which I don't think will be super long from now, give me a sequence from start to finish. Let us see somebody talk their way into a room, have the conversation go bad, and then fight their way out with their companions. Show me what they put points into and what the party can do.

Then show me whether a different player could get through that same room without ever drawing a weapon. We need to know how this is going to play. I think I'd learn more from that than I would from any cinematic sequence.