Reddit reviews Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

This was a FANTASTIC article posted on the Star Wars website. I highly recommend you all follow the writer, Alex Kane, on Twitter—he's very smart and good at what he does. He wrote a book about Knights of the Old Republic, which I know a lot of people (myself include) regard as one of the best video games—let alone Star Wars games—ever.

That's because Tales of the Jedi was written at a totally different time and with a completely different design direction. TOTJ was produced from 1994 to 1998 and Lucasarts wanted it to have a "Conan the Barbarian" aesthetic (that's literally how they described it).

But KOTOR was a videogame, and it had to be identifiably Star Wars which is why it was the first Bioware RPG and one of the first RPG's ever (Morrowind came first) to completely invest itself with full voice acting for every character. That's also why they invested a lot in proper design for the music, sound effects, etc. too. Because they knew it was an Audio/Visual experience that would sell it to Star Wars fans.

There's a book on the making of KOTOR, I have it on Kindle. It's worth the read. Here's a pretty good summary though.

Also, this is the reason why KOTOR II created outrage over retconning the Basilisk, which was eventually fixed by the amazing KOTOR comics (100% worth buying, Zayne Carrick is literally me IRL LMAO) which reverted the Basiliks back into their Tales of the Jedi version.