Lit What Kotor 3 III would have been

I don't even really consider tOR to be part of the EU, since it conflicted too much with what had already been established, and the only other part of the EU that I didn't recognize was Star Woods. It isn't just that I never had time for an MMO when it came out (they got greedy trying to be the next World of Warcraft) but a lot of it just blatantly conflicted with what had already been established AND did a tremendous disservice to the stories of the Kotor characters.

It's worth remembering that we do have more or less a good idea of what Kotor 3 would have involved, from other EU sources and from surviving development documents and art. I considered the Exile and Vima Sunrider to be one and the same, and Meetra Surik works as a code-name or married name used by Vima. The story of Vima somehow being one of the greatest Jedi ever per the existing lore makes sense if she was the Exile.

I do like the idea that after Malachor and its Sith threat were destroyed that the Republic did get a task force together and deal with the "True Sith" wherever they were, that they didn't repeat their mistake they made after the Exar Kun War. We know from Kotor 1 that most of the Republic fleet was in the Core Worlds (per Manaan dialog) and after the events of K2 were still strong enough to liberate the Gordian Reach from the GOTO droids, per the New Essential Chronology.

We know the Sunrider and several other Jedi bloodlines managed to be among the 100 or so Jedi left at the end of the Dark Wars (Qel-Droma, Ketos, Nadd/Kiras, Diaths, Lamars (as in Vrook Lamar and the later Mad Master Lamar the 5th)), so those presumably would have featured in a Kotor 3. Atton, Mira, Visas, Mical, Deesra Luur Jada from Dantooine, Bastila, and possibly Yuthura Ban, Dustil Onasi, Jolee and Juhani, Atris, Kel Algwin, Mekel, those all give us a good percentage of the known surviving Order at that point.

On a side note there, it's notable that the Sith Assassins did NOT target the Tetan or the Onderon Royal Families during the Purge. They only focused on Jedi?

Presumably, there wouldn't be too many of the Triumvirate Sith left after the loss of the forces sent to Peragus, Korriban, Onderon/Dxun, the ones lost with the Ravager and the whole fleet at Telos, and finally Malachor, but hunting down the last ones would have been a priority for the Republic.

If K3 had picked up immediately after K2 the first priority would have been to get the Ebon Hawk repaired or at least to a port/shipyard.

We do know from the development docs that have become public that Taloraan, Mandalore, and Rodia were going to be in K3, and I like to think that we would finally have gotten to see the volcanic world of Sleheyron. Taloraan would be where they get the Hawk fixed and to get a message to the Republic about the destruction of Malachor and the Triumvirate and to warn them about the True Sith, and rendezvous with the Mandalorian and Rodian hunter forces they would have needed to recruit to help combat the True Sith and hunt down the remnant Triumvirate Sith. Adum Larp would of course have made an appearance on Rodia dealing arms for the player to buy.

In K1, I took the mention from Canderous of "the Sith came to us with an offer" and starting the Mandalorian War to have been remnant Kun forces, or equally Sith species survivors NOT from any sort of "Sith Emperor". Rather, what was canonical at the time (and sadly, overlooked) was a panel from the Fall of the Sith Empire comic confirming that "some of Ludo's forces are still out there". The True Sith were thus descendants of Kressh's Sith. K2 featuring the newly visible Tomb of Ludo Kressh would have been a hint about that faction having survived the Hyperspace War and this still being out there somewhere in the Galaxy, and presumably what Revan and Malak found.

But yes, K3 in essence would have been the remaining Jedi, Republic, and other factions uniting to finish off ALL the remaining Sith threats, leaving the Sith extinct until the time of Darth Ruin and letting there be millennia of peace and rebuilding as was the continuity of the EU prior to how tOR had it.

 

I just started playing TOR two weeks ago, and re-played KOTORs 1 and 2 beforehand to get ready. You're right, TOR is not KOTOR 3. TOR is fantastic, but it's a completely different generation.

It's like if Lucas made ANH and ESB, then skipped several hundred years in the future for the next movie and you find out what happened after ESB in pieces as the new story progresses. Most of the characters and plots developed over the course of the previous two installments are gone.

 

I know it went against plans for KotOR 3, but I've never really been clear on what established information SWTOR contradicted. I've tried checking old threads here, but it looks like the initial post-release discussion was mostly on the temp boards.

 

The bigger points of established continuity were the very existence of another Sith threat where the various WEG and Chronology books had said that there weren't any in between Kun and the New Sith, the continued existence of the Sith Species when they had been extinct, said Sith actually dominating large parts of the Galaxy for decades, and even sacking Coruscant, there being a multi-generational "Cold" and later hot war between the Sith and the Republic, and later Vititate and his other factions, Vitiate himself, Dromund Kaas not only having been occupied after the Great Hyperspace War but being the capitol of a galaxy spanning Empire, the various designs of ships and armor and weapons and even having Moffs that look blatantly like those of the movie eras despite being thousands of years earlier, and then of course a lot of lesser but still important lore points that are outright incompatible with other points (Tulak Hord and Kallig, as an example).

And then of course, it turns out that everything you did in both Kotors was for nothing...

It also doesn't help that by making it all an MMO they made it effectively inaccessible to those who didn't and don't have the time for those, all because they were greedy for World of Warcraft levels of money.

 

Wasn't it said somewhere that the jedi knight story in TOR is basically what KOTOR 3 would have been as a single player game?

 

I believe so, something like that.

 

@Barriss_Coffee If you want a more direct follow up to KOTOR1/2 I would suggest the Revan novel. It is a more direct sequel. With the JK story following on from that.

I wonder if we would have a new protagonist again.

 

It would be hard not to, I would think, unless they could contrive some way for Revan to lose all their power and start from scratch, as well as lose enough information that there can be twists and revelations despite this being Revan's mission.

 

I don’t think so. There was an oft-repeated quote about how TOR had the equivalent amount of story content to a hypothetical KOTOR 3 through 11 or something like that, but I don’t remember anyone promoting the game by saying they directly lifted the plot of KOTOR 3 and reused it for the Jedi Knight class story.

There were actually two different KOTOR 3s in development at different times: Obsidian’s, about which we know quite a lot, and BioWare’s, about which I don’t think we do. I believe Chris Avellone said at some point that Obsidian’s plan involved the Exile returning as the main player character and Revan being reintroduced later into the game, possibly as a recruitable party member.

 

How do you think that would go? Combined with the more lovecraft description of Sith. The more I hear about it the happier I am it never got made.

I like the Revan novel.

 

Avellone’s done a lot of interviews about KOTOR 3 over the years. Can’t find the one where he talks about Revan potentially being a party member, it might have been on a podcast or something, but he confirms here that Obsidian’s plan was for the player to be the Exile again.

I don’t have anything good to say about the Revan novel lol but for people still looking to fill the gap of KOTOR 3, its biggest problem is probably that it’s a TOR novel pretending to be a KOTOR novel. They should have just let Drew Karpyshyn call it The Old Republic: Scourge.

 

I wonder if the “True Sith” would have been mostly or entirely Red Sith.

 

Personally, I think SWTOR worked fine as a sequel to the KOTOR series. I was never a fan of its MMO status, but taken purely as storytelling, I think its good. There's really no way to have a direct tie-in sequel to KOTOR2 that isn't a personal story, akin to what the Old Republic: Revan novel was anyway. There's just no room for a direct sequel because there's no story to tell. Not until the arrival of the True Sith.

Which brings me to Vitiate and the Sith Empire of SWTOR. I think it works for the True Sith mentioned in KOTOR2. They are the -True- Sith, in the sense that they are the last remnant of the original Sith Empire. They are the last remnant of the Sith Pureblood species as well, and Tenebrae himself was effectively the last Pureblood Dark Lord of the Sith. Despite his body hopping, Tenebrae/Vitiate/Valkorion was originally of the Sith Pureblood species. Though I'm not a fan of the quasi-Imperial aesthetic of the Sith Empire, I think there's enough differences aside from the starships, which I can chalk up to Dromund Kaas being located right in the middle of Revan's Sith Empire. Some Interdictor and Centurion Cruisers likely 'disappeared' thanks to Vitiate's operatives, and Vaiken constructed the Harrowers on their basis.*

Given that SWTOR was in development as early as 2006, I think the general story we see in the game is pretty much what was always envisioned for a KOTOR sequel, its just that they turned it into a MMO.

I can't know what Avellone was actually speaking of, but I can't read that description of the game villains and not think;


*What I really want to see these days is Sith Hammerhead Cruisers, because logically Revan/Malak should've had some of them around.

 

Yeah, it seems that the general idea stayed the same. Basically a war against the revived remnants of the Sith Empire from the Great Hyperspace War, that acted from the shadows for centuries.

Even Avellone in 2009 said that the "True Sith" were supposed to be Naga Sadow's Empire remnants like they are in SWTOR:

 

It's easy to play SWTOR as a single player experience these days. I did most of the class stories without having to interact with a single person, outside of the occasional wave or thanks if they decide to help me kill a hard enemy.

You can even do most of the 4 player group content by yourself in a 'Story' mode, where you can just use your companion and a Droid support NPC to help you through it.

 

yeah I have played since the beta and BARELY done any group content (most of it was to get the companions in KotFE). It is a shame there isn't an offline single player version.

 

I played for a hundred hours or so and couldn’t do it anymore. It’s not that it’s too hard to play single-player, but the endless repetitive quests requiring you to cross time-consumingly massive environments filled with nothing but continuously respawning enemies was just a huge time sink and no fun at all. Whenever you completed enough fetch quests to unlock a story-relevant cutscene or dialogue tree it was great, but most of the gameplay felt way more WoW than classic BioWare.

 

For me the main thing is that we never got to see the specific ideas Avellone and his team had for KOTOR 3. What little we have heard about them sounded very promising and different from much of what we’d seen before or, frankly, since.

I mean, KOTOR 2 had this very philosophical take on what it meant to be a Sith, and it spent its time looking at the kind of mindset it would take to become that kind of person and what that experience was like. And then it went beyond that and hinted at some state of being even worse than the Sith we’d seen in the movies and the games. It set up this ultimate horror threat out in the darkness of space that was coming for the Republic and planning its doom.

Avellone wanted the true Sith to be something almost otherworldly. They were ancient beings so powerful that the worlds and systems they ruled became reflections of their inner selves. They had transcended normal humanity, but they were not unknowable. And the player would get to journey into the hellish region of space ruled by these old demonic beings and take them out one by one. It sounds like a journey into hell, but done in Star Wars style.

 

When you put KOTOR 1 and KOTOR 2 together, the implication is that Revan and Malak seeked out and started using the Star Forge with the intention of using it to build up the Republic’s military to prepare for the True Sith, but got corrupted by it. While Revan continued to have the True Sith in the back of his mind, Malak was so totally corrupted by the Star Forge that he forgot about the True Sith and became a cackling villain hell-bent on killing and destroying everyone and everything.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=bgH7Pb4GN_Y

 

I get the impression that Malak and Revan's corruption itself was part of the True Sith's plans. The ancient Sith were manipulating everything, weakening the Old Republic so that they could eventually conquer it without having to go to war. So it seems to me that all the Sith from the Old Republic—from Exar Kun and Ulic Qel-Droma to Revan and Malak—would have been revealed to be part of the ancient Sith's plans.

Revan was different because he realized there was more going on, so he started acting against their manipulations. I'm not sure how exactly that would've been integrated into the backstory. Perhaps the ancient Sith revealed themselves and the Star Forge in order to prompt Revan and Malak fall. But I do think they orchestrated it because the backstory to KOTOR 1 and 2 makes me think a lot about the comic Tales of the Jedi: Dark Lords of the Sith, and especially about this scene toward the end:



In this scene, the long-dead ancient Sith reveal that they were behind the fall of Exar Kun and Ulic Qel-Droma, choosing them to become the new Dark Lords of the Sith who would conquer the Old Republic. KOTOR 3 would've revealed that the ancient Sith still lived and were behind the wars that had ravaged the Old Republic for decades. So in essence we have an echo of what happened in the comics, only Revan realized what was going on and started planning against them. But Malak and the other Sith were not as wise, so they tried to take Revan out of the picture and continued the original, more destructive plan of the ancient Sith. At least, that's my impression.

 

Sequels and potential Sequels aside.... what if one were to create a KOTOR Saga PREQUEL game instead as single player? Now given the KOTOR + KOTOR2 + TOR era is rich and full, what if we got a Prequel that does not focus on but might cameo Zayne Carrick. One that tells us the Revan+Malak story during the Mandalorian Wars in between and around what Zayne's comics already hinted at and did along with many guidebooks digging into that era.

Potential? What would need to be done and in, what would not?
Given the rich tapestry, what new stories may be woven into the expected ones from such a game?
Main character playable being Revan or else?

They could even put the perspective on its head and have the game start with a Sith leaving to infiltrate the Republic and Jedi to manipulate it. Sith as main character that over the course of living among the enemies has the choice to slowly turn towards the light so to speak. A spin on the Lightsider turning maybe dark games usually do. Maybe add a twist that the Sith in question learns he was a Jedi once kidnapped and brainwashed by the Sith? Light Side Ending: the Sith warns Revan about a threat before dying by fellow Sith shadowing him. Dark Side ending: he manipulates the Jedi and Republic as the Sith wish it and Revan finds out and defeats him but too late to stop his machinations and no proof of body left to convince the Council that the Sith are behind the wars.
A Sith main character would be fun and play off nicely against evil Jedi like the Covenant and its Sentinnels, show the corruption of Republic and Jedi while always aware that the hero is no good guy himself. Also showing truly good Jedi and Republic officials that struggle against the behemoth of corruption themselves.

The plethora of characters and stories hinted at only in the KOTOR-TOR Saga and Zayne's comics and soucebooks would make such a game an instant win and detail rich fanfavourite I think.

 

That's the one part which never truly interested me. It just feels too cheap, and is no logical follow-up for those Sith being remnants of an old group. Why would those who remain from a once great Empire somehow be way beyond anyone else? It's not the best who remained, so why would they somehow be way better than anyone else now?
A cunning and scheming villain that works in the background to set up conditions to regain what has been lost? Sure. But over the top villains who somehow just sat around in hiding for ages on end even though their skill far exceeded that of the heroes? Bleh.
Nihilus still kind of works - though even he is quite over the top - because he is more a freak accident from a catastrophic event and not so much someone who managed to transcendend his normal being.

That's also why I never liked the idea of Revan and Malak having done things because other Sith made them. That tries way too hard to ret-con villains, which tends to fall flat. "Remeber that great villain? Turns out he was just a pawn of another villain who made him do stuff!", yeah, that doesn't cut it for me. If you want to create a villain, create a villain, don't weaken earlier villains just to prop up yours. They tried that with Daniel Craig's Bond movies, and it didn't work at all, it merely cheapened the villains from the other movies instead of making the all-controlling one look good. It also reeks of the old EU with its constant attempts by authors to one up each other's villains and super-weapons, to the point that they became just ridiculous.

 

Yeah, but i still wonder if the True Sith were meant to be something other and more powerful than the remains of the Sith Empire we know from TOTJ.

Would be interesting to know, in this case, what kind of entities they would have been, what kind of empire they would have had and how they were supposed to look like.

And the kind of abilities they would have mastered.

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Yeah if the Sith are these reality-warping creatures why haven't they taken over the galaxy?

I like the idea of Revan and Malak falling in the war (not a sacrifice they just went evil). Then the Emperor TIRED AND FAILED to make them pawns. I think he wanted them to find the Starforge but they rebelled.