Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic is set four thousand years before the main Star Wars movies. War wages between the Republic and the Sith Empire as the Jedi try to fight back against an unstoppable force millennia before the rise of Palpatine. Released back in 2003, the game was set in a whole new era of Star Wars, a new era where things could be radically different. And yet there were ships like TIE Fighters and proto-astromech droids and an ersatz Millennium Falcon.
Granted, there are some differences (The T3 droids definitely look like a much older astromech compared to an R2 unit), but overall the technology of the world feels very, very similar to the stories set four thousand years later. Which feels a little weird, since you’d expect there to be some technological change over the span of four millennia. Things don’t just stay still. Compare today to forty years ago and tech we take for granted (touch screen everything, cell phones, the darn internet) have been huge leaps.
It’s hardly particular to Star Wars, though. The history of Middle-earth spans thousands of years, and yet the technology of it all feels firmly stuck in the medieval, from the the creation of Arda through the destruction of the Ring. House of The Dragon, the prequel to Game of Thrones, is set two hundred years prior, and yet nothing would look quite out of place were it in the latter series. Sure, there’s some in-universe explanation for both of these, insofar as there is the sense of an ending golden age around them — Tolkien’s ‘long defeat’ certainly allows for a world f fading glory, one where the skills of the Númenóreans and the Eldar are long since lost. All the same, the trope is prolific enough that TV Tropes has an impressively long list of settings just not changing.
The new TV show The Acolyte is set a hundred years before the Fall of The Republic (or around 3,824 years after the no-longer canon Knights of The Old Republic). It still feels like Star Wars, but it also very much feels like a Star Wars of a different era. The ships look different and don’t feel like they’re the immediate predecessor to a familiar ship (in the way KOTOR’s Sith Fighters and Ebon Hawk did). But more than that, there are subtle changes in tech that make the world feel older. The comlink cylinders are bigger and macrobinoculars chunkier than the ones we saw in the Original Trilogy. Even the culture around the Jedi feels markedly different from that of the Prequels and Clone Wars, making things feel like a much different place in time. It’s subtle, and probably not the sort of thing that you’d notice unless you’re, well, me, but it all adds to the overall effect.
Knights of The Old Republic felt like an alternate Star Wars, one very separate from the stories we knew with its own sandbox to play in, but also it never felt quite that far apart. The Acolyte, conversely, very much feels like a history to what’s already come. While there’s space for both, I enjoy how small choices in the design of The Acolyte show a changeable world, where comlinks — like a trusty Nokia cell phone — get smaller over time.
Essays, Not Rants! 
