why has technolodgy, clothing, weapons, vehicles ect not changed at all in the thousands of years between the kotor era and the movie years?

It's a good question but you would seriously have to think about all the hassle it would cause to hire new artists and petition new styles just for a new release when really people will just ask that simple question and move on, not caring.

Because video games.

Because Bioware wanted to make up their own universe without removing anything that is iconic for star wars, like the sabers, speeders and just overall character design.

If you want actual lore for why it hasn't changed, then I can't help you.

There could be several reasons, theoretically. One could be that their technology has simply stagnated because they've brought it as far as they possibly can on their own, only ever offering minor tweaks and upgrades from time to time.

It could be that because there's an entire universe to spread technology to that it spreads so slowly that it takes an incredibly long time for updates in technology to actually change - For example. Electric cars are a thing now in our world. Of the people that own cars, however, hybrid cars are in an extreme minority. People can't afford to buy new cars that often and companies aren't willing to give that technology and product away for free so that everyone can have it. Or, on a global scale, look at cell phones. All of us here know what cell phones are, how they work, etc. However, there are still people in our world that don't know what cell phones are, or how they work/function, and most people can't do any self repairs or anything on cell phones because they don't understand what makes them work mechanically, just that they do. And that's just one planet. Imagine trying to fill out an entire galaxy.

Another problem is probably all of the wars. From in game they very much make it seem like when the Republic is at peace, everything's pretty ok, they have the money and resources to help support the planets under their protection. When war hits, shit hits the fan. They don't have enough resources to even give proper food and medical supplies to their own troops, let alone their citizens, which suggests that they also don't have enough to probably fund research in advancing technology that often. The Empire, on the other hand, is such a controlling ruling body that even if they advanced technology, they wouldn't want anyone to have it.

Clothing is clothing, how much do you expect it to change? Besides, fashion is cyclical, the fashions in the day of TOR are just coming back around baby! Really though, I've never paid enough attention to the fashion statements in the Star Wars universe to even notice if clothing styles haven't changed. But much of the clothing choices are probably driven by necessity or tradition, so..

There is an interview on GB with the lead writer from SW:ToR(Jeff and Ryan did the interview. The duder said they wanted to incorporate first trilogy, second trilogy and cartoon Star Wars into the game. People have different eras of Star Wars they love and they want to encompass all of it. Any explanation beyond that is just to plug holes in the lore to support the second sentence of this paragraph.

Actually, this question pops into my mind every hour of gameplay in any Old republic games. They should have set this only a hundred of years before, or even after the SW episodes we know. It makes everything lacks credibility. I mean, in 3000 years, they haven't got a single technological advancement? For real? Worse ; they went... backwards?

Yeah, it's all a little silly. I remember reading a star wars comic or something that took place even earlier than KOTOR, and people's lightsabers were tethered to a battery pack or something like that on their hips, it was kinda hilarious.

But really, it's mostly just because all that design is iconic and kinda makes star wars what it is. Ultimately, they just wanted a game that is easily recognizable as star wars.

Probably a rebuild/destruction scenario spurred by an unending religious war between two factions of insane monks, or something related to a technology singularity created with the invention of hyperdrive.

Reality it's probably cyclical. You are constantly going through ruins of advanced civilizations that suggest that for every new advance in warfare galactic society creates, they forget or lose three other prototypes. The societal stasis is easily explained by the Force, it literally exists to keep all things in balance or harmony through all time. Naturally if the galaxy is policed by a group of insane monks who demand all things maintain, you're not going to see grand sweeping changes.

Hell, the world we live in is both as barbaric and idealistic as any era previous. Greeks invented democracy and subsisted on slavery, Rennaissance Italy reintroduced republic and freedoms but still depended on the peasant class, it's hard to say we're much different today. That's 2000 years right there.

If you're specifically asking about the KoTOR games, it's because this is the way that era has been represented in books and comics predating the games.

If you're asking why it was like this in comics and books, because lazy writing. Or maybe they reached the near limits of their technology and could only make incredibly minor advances over many hundreds of years.

The same reason technolodgy, clothing, and weapons have not changed in the 200 years between Oblivion and Skyrim. Most fantasy universes don't ever really advance all that much, with a few exceptions (Fable).

They actually have changed. In the Kotor universe ships aren't quite as effective as they are in regualr StarWars. Also Kotor is coming right after the invention of lightsabers. Those verboswords you see in the game is what Jedi used to use. That's also the explained reason why Sabers are so big in TOR, as with all technology it starts big and becomes smaller.

What most people above has said, but also modern evolution of technology moves at an astounding rate. It wasn't always this way, and after a certain period of scientific boom things are bound to even out once everything is more fully understood.

Why does the ships in Episode 1 look more modern than the ships in Episode 4? It's just how Star Wars is, it's never been about tech like Star Trek. The same thing could be said for many fantasy universes. For example doesn't Skyrim take place several hundred years after Oblivion yet the technology seems exactly the same.

You just have to expect that those universes don't work the same way as ours.

Because Lucas has a say in everything...

Warhammer 40k.

That is all.

@Helimocopter said:

Warhammer 40k.

That is all.

Pretty good explanation...if you actually understood it.

To many wars and stuff basically means they lose a lot of tech, even though war does also force technological advances. Also, i don't think there's a lot of advancement availalbe once you reach a certain point, at least, not that we can imagine anyway. Beyond hyperspace drives and crazy stuff like that what other technology is there? Time travel? Dimensional travel?

Hey wait, does this explain why lightsabers can't cut through anything like they do in the movies? Cause they're old crappy lightsabers?

Reading these comments just makes me want a homeworld mmo.

It's called soft Sci-fi. It's a genre all on it's own, it's basically pulp. They don't explain any of that stuff because it's irrelevant to the story and the action as a whole. If you want hard Sci-fi you should read a book, Aasimov's Foundation cycle is a good place to start.

Because video games.

That's a good thing about the Dune universe, the books take place over thousands of years and there are very notable advances and changes in technology and society and all that.

@Klei said:

Actually, this question pops into my mind every hour of gameplay in any Old republic games. They should have set this only a hundred of years before, or even after the SW episodes we know. It makes everything lacks credibility. I mean, in 3000 years, they haven't got a single technological advancement? For real? Worse ; they went... backwards?

They didn't have the deathstar 3000 years ago, 3000 years later they developed their ultimate weapon.

There you go. Now settle down. I can't understand how this can possibly be an issue for you.

Did you play kotor 1 and 2? They do have different technolodgy, clothing, weapons and vehicles... I haven't played ToR though, it just reminds me of the new trilogy in too many ways.

                   

@Klei said:

Actually, this question pops into my mind every hour of gameplay in any Old republic games. They should have set this only a hundred of years before, or even after the SW episodes we know. It makes everything lacks credibility. I mean, in 3000 years, they haven't got a single technological advancement? For real? Worse ; they went... backwards?

They didn't have the deathstar 3000 years ago, 3000 years later they developed their ultimate weapon.

There you go. Now settle down. I can't understand how this can possibly be an issue for you.

                   

               

I'm glad that I'm not the sort of person who would worry about this sort of thing.

@SuperSambo said:

I'm glad that I'm not the sort of person who would worry about this sort of thing.

It does feel good, doesn't it?

If you ask this on a Star Wars forum they will list a million massive innovations between 4,000 BBY and the movie trilogies. It just doesn't seem that way to us, the casual observers.

The same reason they still use Chainswords in Warhammer 40k: It's cool.

@FateOfNever said:

There could be several reasons, theoretically. One could be that their technology has simply stagnated because they've brought it as far as they possibly can on their own, only ever offering minor tweaks and upgrades from time to time.

Well they are building mass weapons to destroy worlds with in kotor. Having those weapons avalible for several thousand years wouldnt work would it? And in the Star Wars movies era ofc they are still building weapons of massdestruction, its the way of life. :)

More likely there is some kind of mass effect cycle involved in Star Wars aswell, maybe the big twist is its actually the same universe and Shepard will find a strange looking beamsword in some crazy old ruin

Because that's how fantasy universes generally work. Look at a Song of Ice and Fire, for example, which has a history going back millenia, with little technological advancement in the meantime.

If you want to justify it, I suppose you could say that science just doesn't take off the same way in a universe where magic is real. For most of human history, disciplines like science, philosophy and theology were not distinct, but bound up in a big sticky ball of scholarship. So you'd have someone like Isaac Newton, who on the one hand invented calculus and developed the laws of motion, but was also an alchemist and was determined to discover the Ark of the Covenant.

The scientific revolution and the increasingly rapid pace of technological development essentially arose from the growing realization that empiricism and the scientific method were far more effective tools for discerning truth, and it became a separate collection of disciplines. Would science have jumped out so far ahead in a universe like Star Wars where magic is real, and mastery of it can be just as effective, if not more so, than developing technology?

It's less a video game issue than a general feature of all fantasy fiction.

Lots of fantasy universes like to inflate their timelines in order to impart a false sense of grandeur, but don't really devote any serious thought to how the passage of time will affect the world. So it doesn't affect the world at all.

@JeanLuc said:

The same reason technolodgy, clothing, and weapons have not changed in the 200 years between Oblivion and Skyrim. Most fantasy universes don't ever really advance all that much, with a few exceptions (Fable).

Actually that's incorrect, since the entirety of the Elder Scrolls series has taken place over roughly 600 years. The lore dates back much farther than that, yes, but Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall, Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, and Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion all took place in the Third Era. Technology was in various states of progress around the empire until the whole Oblivion Crisis, when things went to shit. Skyrim takes place 200 years after Oblivion, so that's a long time for shit to go south. The thing is, it really seems like technology and civilization can advance at a rapid pace, but the truth is that the 20th Century is a bit of an anomaly. In the last 100 years we've gone from horse-drawn carriage to automobiles, from trains to aeroplanes, from secular communities with libraries to the goddamn Internet. When you think of the 20th century in the context of the last 2000 years of human history, we're the weirdos, not the slowpokes who came before.

Time to put on my lore hat.
 
As I understand it, before the release of the original KotOR, a comic was released detailing the war of Exar Kun ( I think, might have been another war) that took place 50 years before Kotor1. In this comic, the technology was well below what it was in the movies - you could barely travel, giant space breathing bugs functioned as starships, completely different lightsabers, radically different architecture etc. However Bioware for what ever reason, decided they wanted their game to have roughly the tech level seen in the movies 4,000 years later (If I had to guess, I would say it was for marketing purposes).
 
So basically, Bioware rewrote Star Wars lore so that they could make a star wars game that didnt have to involve giant beetles.