Star Wars KOTOR Successor Dumps AI and 200-Hour Bloat

"I just find AI to be creatively soulless. It's hard to imagine where it's actually helpful in the process. I'm just really unimpressed with it." That's Casey Hudson, the former Mass Effect director now leading Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic, talking to Bloomberg about generative AI. In the same interview, he took aim at the other trend eating modern RPGs alive: absurd runtime bloat.

Hudson, who heads up Arcanaut Studios, was blunt about both. On game length: "Bigger isn't necessarily better. If I'm excited about a game and then I find out that it's 200 hours long, even if I have no ambition to actually finish it, I wonder, if I put 20 hours in, will I even be out of act one? A lot of players just want to play something and finish it." Instead of padding runtime, Hudson says Fate of the Old Republic will offer alternate plotlines to encourage replays. I love hearing this from someone who actually shipped Mass Effect, a trilogy that proved you can build enormous narrative depth without demanding triple-digit hour counts.

The Bloomberg report also revealed the money behind the project. Simon Zhu, former president of global investments at NetEase, has formed a holding company called GreaterThan Group with up to $100 million in private investment. Zhu resigned from NetEase after the company pulled funding from several Western partners, and his bet is that the industry's retreat from game investment in favour of AI and tech has gone too far. "You can have player satisfaction. You can have commercial success. You can have the achievement of art. You don't need to compromise or sacrifice one thing for the other," Zhu said. GreaterThan is also backing BulletFarm, founded by Call of Duty veteran David Vonderhaar.

Hudson wants to keep Arcanaut's headcount small, saying he wants to "avoid having hundreds and hundreds of people" after seeing how unwieldy production became at BioWare. Contractors will fill gaps instead. He's also reiterated that Fate of the Old Republic will ship before 2030, adding: "Making games that take five or seven years, none of us want to do that."

A director publicly rejecting generative AI while simultaneously promising a tighter, more respectful RPG runtime is a rare double stance in 2026. Most studios are quietly integrating AI tools and inflating playtime numbers as marketing bullet points. Hudson going the opposite direction with a Star Wars RPG backed by serious money feels like one of the more encouraging things I've heard out of this industry in months.