2003 · BioWare
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
BioWare's d20 epic — Neverwinter Nights' engine, a galaxy far, far away.
D&D’s rules, four thousand years before the films
Knights of the Old Republic is not a licensed Dungeons & Dragons game — but under the hood it very nearly is one. BioWare built it on the Odyssey engine, an evolution of the Aurora engine that powered their own Neverwinter Nights, and ran it on Wizards of the Coast’s Star Wars Roleplaying Game, a d20 system derived directly from the third edition of D&D.
That heritage is visible everywhere: character classes and prestige classes, feats and skills, ability scores, saving throws, and combat resolved on a (paused) d20 attack roll. BioWare’s designers essentially reskinned the D&D 3e chassis they already knew — the cost-efficient choice — and dressed it in lightsabers and the Force. The result was a critical landmark, frequently named one of the greatest RPGs ever made and the model for BioWare’s later original-IP CRPGs.
It earns a place on this unofficial shelf precisely because of that lineage: a hugely important game whose mechanics are D&D 3e in all but name and license.
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