Group announces fan remake. Group get cease and desist. Internet tells them they should have just dropped it one day out of the blue. A tale as old as time. Im sympathetic. But its idiotic to announce a fan remake of anything unless you have the written consent of the owners. (and even then its risky because they can always revoke those permissions at random)
The announcements of fan works are always to drum up more fans to contribute to the work. And honestly 99/100 it doesn't result in legal threats, it makes sense to do. Fan works don't get made in secret, in secret they get to version 0.01 and sit on one person's hard drive for a decade
I'd really like Larian to do their own thing and not be an IP slave to WOTC and Sony/Disney though. I loved BG3 but want them to continue making OC. There's so much rehashed stuff these days, having original content is just so...uncommon in the AAA and AA spaces.
Another game the size and scope of BG3 would probably kill the company, and I can tell people would expect them to make a KOTOR remake of the same size.
Their source is a reporter at Giant Bomb? GameSpot and Giant Bomb are owned by the same company.
Don't get me wrong, I don't have much faith in this remake, but citing the opinion of a guy who works for your sister company doesn't seem like proper journalism.
It's terrible journalism. If you skimmed past the first couple short paragraphs, the quotes from Jeff Grub (their "source") read like he's an insider at Aspyr or Embracer. In reality, the article is just linking to a 1.5 hour news podcast and quoting the host. The article doesn't even try to summarize Jeff's basis for his opinion, and the only quote they have from an actual insider is, essentially, "no comment."
Look, gaming "scoops", such as they are, boil down to somebody having a friend somewhere that will break NDAs to you on the basis of being your buddy, being somewhat intoxicated, or both. The reason you get much, much looser attribution with people like Grubb or Schreier s that those connections would probably lose their jobs, and for the most part nobody wants that, often including the studios that employ those guys.
But on the flipside, it does mean that you have to take them at their word, and like any long game of telephone that also means you have to take things with a pinch of salt. Things may be lies, the source may just be mistaken, opinions may get passed as facts, things can change later. Rumors are rumors until they aren't rumors.
But that being said, will the vaporware huge triple-A remake that was explicitly struggling during development come out in the middle of the great 2023 game developer purge?
Are they? I know CBS used to own them both but GB got sold on a few years ago, around the time the Giant Bomb guys left (Vinny, Brad, Jeff Gerstmann, etc).
Either way, I'm confused as to how a simple guess from Grubb could be constituted as actual sourced news. What an odd article.
I'm both disappointed and relieved. I love KotOR and was intrigued by what they would come up with, but I'm also quite sure it would have missed the mark in the end. It would've been nigh-impossible to recapture the magic. Shame this killed the fan-remake, though. We ended up with the worst of both options.