Star Wars: Republic Commando's sniper made it out alive, says developer

Fans of 2005's Star Wars: Republic Commando — and there are many to this day — will be heartened to know the fate of Delta Squad's beloved sniper, according to rough plans for a sequel video game that never materialized.

Cinelinx has the details, and more, in a tease of a fuller interview with the game's lead developer coming soon. While plans for a sequel to Republic Commando have been widely known, the resolution of the cliffhanger in the original game wasn't.

Douville says two stories were sketched out for the sequel. In one treatment, put forth by lead level designer Kevin Schmitt, the player would take the unit through the execution of Order 66, hunting and killing Jedi as a team, one-by-one.

The second was proposed by director Tim Longo. It had Sev, the sniper character (serial RC-1207), surviving to become the progenitor of the Rebellion's army. Douville mentioned the working tagline for such a game ("Every Rebellion begins with a single soldier") so it seems this version had a little more traction internally. LucasArts in the later half of that decade, though, was not a stable place, and "very few people involved with Republic Commando ended up staying on" with the studio, Douville said, one reason among many why the game was never realized.

Fans of Republic Commando, a very good, very intriguing squad-based tactical shooter for Xbox and PC, remember that the unit left Sev behind in its final mission. He doesn't make it out in the final extraction, and though Delta Squad hurries to organize a rescue they are commanded to abandon him.

The video game launched alongside a series of spinoff paperbacks that chronicled the exploits of the Republic's elite soldiers, Delta squad included, but Sev's outcome was never explored in the books, according to the author, because that character was LucasArts' property.

Rumors of a Republic Commando sequel or revisiting crop up occasionally, usually without much supporting evidence. At any rate, that video game license (except for the Lego-branded games) is under exclusive control of Electronic Arts, which launched Star Wars Battlefront in November and will be focusing on a year's worth of DLC for the game in 2016, all of it situated in the Original Trilogy's canon.

Cinelinx has more goodies from its talk with Douville, with a promise of a deeper interview coming next week.