James Ohlen, the former director of BioWare MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, has discussed his exit from the storied RPG maker in 2018 — after an attempt to reboot the game that ended up squashed by publisher EA.
Ohlen was a BioWare veteran of 22 years, with a string of high profile credits on BioWare classics such as Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. In more recent times, Ohlen led Archetype Entertainment, a studio staffed by several former BioWare veterans making big budget Mass Effect-like Exodus, a huge project starring Matthew McConaughey that will be eight years in the making by the time of its release in 2027.
Last year, Ohlen also moved on from Archetype — and now, he’s given a wide-ranging interview on his various departures, discussing in detail the effects of burnout he has felt over his long career in video games, as well as his long-scrapped plan to reboot Star Wars: The Old Republic under a new guise.
“I always told everybody I should never be the head of a studio because it’ll kill me,” Ohlen told PC Gamer, talking of his more recent departure from Archetype. “And it nearly killed me. It was six years of nearly killing me.
“I was running on fumes, and it was hurting my health, and my personal life, and everything. I just needed to step away,” he continued. “As a creative you care about everything so much, and then as the head of the studio, you have to be cutting the baby in half all the time, and having people attack your vision constantly. I definitely wouldn’t put myself in that situation again; that’s not a healthy place to be.”
Before Archetype, Ohlen rose through the ranks quickly at BioWare (“the last time I was truly in love with my job,” he claimed), and is credited as lead designer on beloved BioWare single-player RPG Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. This then led to BioWare’s bosses Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk asking if he would oversee a new BioWare Austin studio tasked with making the MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic.
“I was like, ‘I hate massive multiplayer games. But all right, I’ll do it,'” Ohlen said — before realizing it would be a “never-ending” project where he frequently had to spend time simply ensuring “big ego designers… didn’t kill each other.”
“I’m just not someone who can manage hundreds and hundreds of people to go in a different direction,” he said of The Old Republic’s early days. “Everyone wants to build [World of Warcraft] in space, and it’s my job to say no, we’re making [something different], and I wasn’t able to do that.”
Ohlen ultimately realized he would move on after what sounds like a lengthy and extremely difficult pitch to Lucasfilm and EA for a full reboot of the game, which would see it renamed Star Wars: The New Republic. Ohlen spent half a year on a plan before getting the greenlight from former Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, as well as Star Wars creative boss Dave Filoni.
“He was like, ‘If you set it a couple hundred years before the fall of the Republic, we can have a tie in,'” Ohlen recalled of Filoni’s eventual agreement. (It’s a time period that sounds not dissimilar to Lucasfilm’s The High Republic, which the company has since mined for its storytelling potential.)
“I remember I got super excited because the big challenge was Patrick Söderlund [former EA chief design officer, who now heads up Arc Raiders developer Embark Studios],” Ohlen said next. “I think [he’s] great but hates Star Wars: The Old Republic. And I convinced him… it was one of the greatest accomplishments of my career.”
Unfortunately, everything then came crashing down. While Söderlund was sold, EA’s board of directors was not.
“[They] remembered spending $300 million,” Ohlen said, referring to The Old Republic’s high development costs. “They’re like, ‘Why the fuck are we gonna spend a bunch more?'”
“That was the beginning of the end for me,” he continued. “The only way you get through life is by having empathy for everybody, including people that are causing you pain. I was thinking of it through the lens of EA. And I’m like, there’s no way I’m ever going to win in this. It just doesn’t make sense to empower someone like me. If I was there, I wouldn’t. So I gotta get out. This is just not for me.
“I would tell people, I’m actually a highly paid, completely useless person. It’s just that everyone thinks that I’m super useful because of my reputation. No one seems to be able to tell, except me. There’s research that shows that when you just feel like you’re not accomplishing anything, it’s actually the biggest thing to bring about burnout.
“My wife was like, ‘But you could have ridden it out. Don’t lots of execs do that?’ And I’m like, ‘I know, but they’re not creatives. They enjoy the politics, and I don’t blame them. But that’s not what I like.”
Ohlen is now in the middle of authoring various RPG adventure books, working alongside his former Archetype and BioWare colleague Jesse Sky (who is now Exodus’ creative director). The promising-looking Exodus, meanwhile, is on track to finally release next year, and scratch the Mass Effect itch for many BioWare fans of old.
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
