Bad Quail Games // G. Michael Truran

I love how the writers extrapolated what Jedi pedagogy looked like from Luke's tutelage under Obi Wan and Yoda. One master, living alone on a remote planet, taking on mostly adult students. It feels more like a knight-and-squire relationship. Or wizard-and-apprentice.

Knights of the Old Republic (BioWare, 2003) tries to split the difference between the 90s Expanded Universe vision of this period and what's seen in the prequels that were coming out during development.

I think this is a mistake.

During the time of Ulic Quel Droma and Exar Kun the Old Republic is (relatively) young. Sure, it's been around for over a thousand years already. But it still has, what, 4000 more to go before the "present" of the setting we see in A New Hope?¹ And, was still in a stage of expansion, adding new worlds like Onderon. The Jedi Order we see in the comics is barely an Order at all. It feels more like a loose association of independent teachers who espouse the same philosophy. It's more like a martial arts tradition where there are many independent dojos with lineages of descent from shared masters. Not yet institutionalized into the religion we see in the prequels (and, now, the High Republic).

Knights of the Old Republic (BioWare, 2003) is set ~50 years after the defeat of Exar Kun and shows the Jedi as being much more institutionalized. There is a council of Jedi masters. What we see of Jedi pedagogy is not a master-apprentice relationship, but Jedi being trained by a number of masters. This could be a reform the Jedi instituted in the wake of Ulic Quel Droma and Exar Kun's betrayal, maybe? Try to systematize Jedi training so that apprentices and knights are less independent? But, more than any in universe explanation, I think this is an effort to make the Star Wars video game look more like the Star Wars on movie screens at the time, despite the closer source material actually being the 90s comic books, to the point that the Knights of the Old Republic title actually comes from the first arc of the comics.

1. The scale of the timeline of Star Wars is kind of ridiculous, but lets take it on face value.