Eclipse and the KOTOR Remake Are 'Still Alive' — With the Same Footage They Had in 2021
Lucasfilm Games marked National Video Games Day with a sizzle reel confirming Star Wars Eclipse and the KOTOR remake are still, technically, alive. The catch: both games are represented by the exact same footage shown at their 2021 reveals — five years later, still not one new frame.
Five years is a long time to hold a single scene in reserve. Star Wars Eclipse and the Knights of the Old Republic remake were both announced in 2021 with teaser trailers that, at the time, felt like a genuine statement of intent from Lucasfilm Games — a Quantic Dream-developed High Republic epic and a from-the-ground-up remake of one of the most beloved RPGs ever made, both landing the same year. This week, in a Lucasfilm Games sizzle reel released for National Video Games Day, both titles showed up again. So did the exact same footage. The KOTOR remake clip is, once more, the Revan reveal from its original teaser. Nothing new has been shown since either game's first announcement.
What "Still Alive" Actually Means Here
I wrote about Eclipse back in April, when reporting suggested the project was in serious trouble internally, and the honest framing then was that a five-year silence on a AAA game usually means one of two things: it's being quietly retooled into something unrecognizable, or it's already dead and nobody's willing to say so publicly. This week's sizzle reel doesn't really resolve that question — it just confirms neither game has been formally cancelled, which is a genuinely low bar to clear. Lucasfilm Games didn't share a release window, didn't tease new footage, didn't even bother cutting fresh b-roll for the reel. They used the same footage because, as far as anyone outside the studio can tell, there isn't any new footage to use.
That's worth sitting with, because "still part of our lineup" is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence. A game genuinely on track for release doesn't need five years of silence broken only by recycled clips — it gets gameplay reveals, developer diaries, State of Play slots. Cyberpunk 2077 had rocky development too, but CD Projekt Red kept showing actual new material through most of it. Eclipse and the KOTOR remake have shown a combined zero seconds of new footage since Christmas 2021. That's not typical AAA development opacity. That's a studio that either genuinely doesn't have anything shootable yet, or is hedging against having to explain a cancellation.
The Contrast That Makes This Sting
Here's what makes the timing rough: this reel dropped less than three weeks after Star Wars: Zero Company launched to genuinely excellent reviews — the best-reviewed Star Wars game in years, by most critical consensus — only for it to come out that developer Bit Reactor had furloughed roughly 80% of its staff before launch because the studio ran out of money. Put those two stories next to each other and a pattern starts to look less like coincidence: this is a gaming division that can produce genuinely good work, but struggles badly with the business side of actually finishing and shipping it. Zero Company got made and shipped, barely, at real cost to the people who built it. Eclipse and KOTOR haven't even gotten that far after half a decade.
Why the Remake Specifically Deserves Better
Of the two, the KOTOR remake is the one that stings more for me personally, because the source material doesn't need reinventing — it needs faithful modernization. The Old Republic era is, as I've argued before, one of the richest unexplored corners of this galaxy: Darth Revan's fall and redemption, the Jedi Civil War, an entire generation of Star Wars fans who fell in love with this universe through a PC RPG rather than a movie theater. A well-executed remake isn't a risky creative swing, it's close to a guaranteed win if the studio can just get it across the finish line. Five years in, "guaranteed win" is starting to look like the kind of thing that gets quietly deprioritized in favor of whatever's actually shippable, which — going by this week's reel — is apparently still just a single Revan reveal scene.
Where That Leaves Fans
I'd love to be wrong about this. Games get held for good reasons sometimes, and a rushed KOTOR remake would be worse than a delayed one. But "still part of our lineup," repeated every year with the same clip, isn't the reassurance Lucasfilm Games probably thinks it is — it's a reminder of exactly how long these projects have been sitting untouched. Until an actual new frame of footage shows up, the honest read is that both games remain in limbo, technically alive, functionally invisible. May the Force be with whoever's still working on these — five years in, they've earned the benefit of the doubt more than the marketing team currently recycling their b-roll has.
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