‘Fate of the Old Republic’ Puts ‘Star Wars’ at an Incredible Crossroads

Last night, the Game Awards kicked off with a major disturbance in the Force. The long-awaited, long-rumored news about the in-limbo remakes of two of the most beloved Star Wars video games ever made, Knights of the Old Republic and its challenging sequel, The Sith Lords, didn’t show up at Geoff Keighley’s annual awards-show-meets-trailer-fest.

A brand-new Old Republic game did instead.

We still know incredibly little about that new game, Fate of the Old Republic. It’s being helmed by KOTOR and Mass Effect veteran Casey Hudson at a new studio, Arcanaut Studios; it’s likely not coming out for a very long time, and perhaps, most intriguingly, it’s not a direct sequel or continuation of the Old Republic games before it, but a spiritual successor.

What “spiritual successor†means in this regard also remains unknown, but our first look at the game last night is littered with the direct iconography of designs seen and made for The Old Republic‘s own envisioning of an ancient period of Star Wars history. It’s all ruins, but they’re there: Interdictor cruisers (not related to those other Star Wars interdictors), Sith starfighters, and assault droids, unchanged from how they looked over 20 years ago when we saw them for the first time, now just rendered in the slick fidelity of contemporary CG.

Whatever the reason that they’re in ruins, as we see a mysterious Force user and her allies trek through them, is likewise a mystery, but their untouched identity raises what is arguably the most fascinating and likely-to-be hotly debated question about Fate for months and years to come until we learn more: is it Star Wars canon, or is it Legends?

Usually, this question isn’t just moot; it’s rather droll. Star Wars and Star Wars fandom alike are often too wrapped up in placing the status of canonicity on a pedestal, one that diminishes both the narrative itself and our ability to interpret and critique that narrative beyond whether or not something “matters†to a wider archive of continuity. Down the line, whenever we do learn more about Fate of the Old Republic, that question will remain moot and droll, even as we find ourselves intrigued by it in the here and now.

So why is it intriguing now and droll later? Because whatever these two things Fate of the Old Republic is, it’s a step forward in a new direction for Star Wars as we know it.

If—and it’s a big if—Fate of the Old Republic is set in the same continuity as its predecessors and rooted in what has now become the old Expanded Universe status quo, it would mark the first significant brand-new material set in that canon for over a decade since the decision to reboot Star Wars continuity (outside of the limbo ongoing support of the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, that is, a fitting parallel to Fate‘s eventual, well, fate).

Over that decade-plus history, Star Wars‘ exorcism of the old has grown less harsh with the passage of time. Characters, worlds, events, concepts, and ideas—indeed including elements from KOTOR—have slowly but surely come back over to the contemporary canon to exist in new contexts. On a broader level, Star Wars as a brand and machine of merchandising has remembered the ability to resell what was once old, putting new covers on old stories and putting them back out into the market, or action figure lines dipping into heroes of yore as often as they do the latest shows and films. Money remains money, after all, regardless of continuity.

But creating something new in those legends has yet to be done on the level of something like Fates of the Old Republic, which would open the potential gateway for more like it. Right now, Star Wars‘ bifurcated continuities exist in an imbalanced, yet symbiotic, pairing. Legends is allowed to exist, both as a source for things to become “real†again in the primary canon and as a source for things to sell, but it’s not exactly alive in the way the main continuity is. If (and again, it’s a big if!) Fate gets to be the first significant addition to Legends material in over a decade, maybe almost even decades by the time it actually comes out, there exists a chance for there to be more beyond it, and for Star Wars itself to move beyond this dull idea of whether or not a story “matters†by being canon or not: if both canons are allowed to live, grow, and truly coexist, then it all “matters†on that level regardless.

And if Fate is set within the primary canon and simply dragging over a heap of things from KOTOR and the old Expanded Universe into that canon along the way? Then it’s the first steps in exploring a period of Star Wars‘ timeline that has largely gone untouched in that aforementioned decade-plus.

While an era dubbed “The Old Republic†exists within current Star Wars continuity and has been touched on and mentioned in passing here and there, we have yet to really explore it as a significant avenue for Star Wars storytelling. We’ve had things that dance around it and have parallels, of course: The High Republic transmedia series, set just a scant few centuries before the main movies, still explored a period of Star Wars history separate from the saga we are already very familiar with. At some point down the line, we’re meant to get that Dawn of the Jedi James Mangold movie, set at an origin point for the Jedi as an institution, which itself is meant to take place long before the period known as the Old Republic.

But that means there are eons of untouched history ripe for exploration, a period that does not have to be beholden to so much of the familiar. It is a broad enough time that, yes, Fate of the Old Republic could just largely transpose the events of Knights and its sequel into that time frame, and Star Wars at large would not be impacted. But it’s also broad enough that Fate could light the way for whole swaths of stories to exist alongside it in that era, to create a period of Star Wars as rich and as explored as the time of the Empire or the twilight of the Republic—one emboldened by that fertile narrative soil to do new things with Star Wars, and experiment with what we know Star Wars can be already, and create something that feels truly distinct.

Whatever Fate of the Old Republic ends up being, it’s going to be something new. And in a franchise that is often truly wary of that, it is exciting to see the legacy of Knights of the Old Republic carried on in that way.

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