Speaking on the Eurogamer podcast, Obsidian Entertainment's Chris Avellone has described the final instalment in the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic series that was never greenlit for production.

Knights of the Old Republic 3 was in pre-production at Obsidian, said Avellone, and would mark the return of Revan, who was largely absent from the second game.

“I always liked the idea that Revan, as smart and powerful as your player-character was, was actually even more of a brilliant strategist than became apparent in the first game,” said Avellone. “The entire second game is littered with clues as to ‘why didn’t Revan destroy the infrastructure here? What was he trying to make sure was still intact? What did he/she see that no one else saw?’”

“I thought that was giving a nice nod to ‘wait a minute, Revan realises there’s an even larger force at work here, and he’s focusing his efforts on that and keeping the big picture in mind’. That was one thing – the idea that there was a larger, global conspiracy.”

“The idea was that even before the ‘modern day’ Sith came into being in The Old Republic there were even more distant Sith Lords that were considered the true Sith, and the idea that they were still lurking out there in the galaxy waiting for a chance to strike, kind of like the Shadows in Babylon 5, I thought would be a cool finale for that Old Republic trilogy.”

In the game, the player would assume the role of The Exile who sets out to find Revan among these true Sith.

“If they could shape entire planets or galaxies or nebulas, and they had all these slave races at their disposal, how cool would that be, to go into the heart of darkness and you're the lone Jedi and/or new version of the Sith confronting these guys? What would that be like? I thought that would be pretty epic.”

Obsidian was unable to convince LucasArts to greenlight the game, and Avellone said he was unsure what their reasons were.

“To be honest I don’t know all the reasons that went into this, whether they wanted to have an internal team do it, whether the logistics didn’t work out. Ultimately, it felt like we were pitching and pitching and it just wasn’t going anywhere, and at some point people just drew a line and said ‘it’s just not going to happen’, which made us kind of sad, but, OK, if that’s the business, that’s the business.”

The full podcast can be found here.