How Fans Fleshed Out KOTOR II and Why It’s Worth Revisiting

The release of a new update for the Steam version of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords has sparked new interest in the game on part of players and the specialized press, and it’s the latter that offers us the articles that we’re rounding up.

Gamasutra’s Bryant Francis contacted Aspyr Media and the modding team that worked on the Restored Content Modification, a mod lauded for reintegrating much of the content that was left on the cutting floor due to the game’s notoriously rushed release schedule. A snippet:

Hunter says that Aspyr approached them a month before it planned to push out KOTOR II on Steam (mostly to open up ports for Mac and Linux), but wasn’t able at first to properly say why they were interested in talking to the KOTOR II modders.

When they learned of Aspyr’s plans though, Hunter and Stanwiecz dove in to patch the mod to be Steam Workshop ready.

(They pretty much laid down for us what we had to do to make [the mod] work for the Steam Workshop so everything could go as smooth as possible at release,” says Hunter. “And now hopefully we can get rid of all the remaining bugs and annoyances still in this version, and be in the unique position to fix things we couldn’t as modders. I can’t say that we or anyone else expected this to happen at this time or date, so that was a pretty nice surprise.)

For its part, Aspyr Media’s primary goal was to include Steam Workshop among a large batch of featured updates, including controller support, Steam Achievements, and playability on Linux and other platforms. Product manager Michael Blair explains that they knew the mod would be a huge feature to have on launch, which was why they reached out to Staniewicz and Hunter to get them on board.

While Richard Cobbett penned a retrospective on the title for Eurogamer. Cobbett sees the title as an interesting counterpoint to the original Knights of the Old Republic more than a sequel and claims it’s one of his favorite Star Wars games, though the cuts, the bugs and the occasionally cheap design keep it from being one of the best:

It’s not the best Star Wars game by a long stretch, but it is one of my favourites – a bit like Planescape: Torment, in part because it was so completely different to what I expected. It’s back in the news now because along with a port to Mac and Linux, developers Aspyr have added Steam Workshop support to it. Why? Why not. It’s not likely to spark a whole modding scene, but it does add one big advantage – easy, one-click access to the Sith Lords: Restored Content Mod. This is pretty much essential if you want to play.

Without it, and to some extent either way, KOTOR 2 is a mess. There’s no getting around that. Few games have made it to the shelves in recent years so patently unfinished, and we’re not just talking a few missing textures. It was made on a tight schedule and then had its deadlines cut near the end, so it’s not too surprising. Still, it’s a game whose opening hours are torturously boring, with a finale that just collapses on a world full of dropped plot elements and endless corridors masquerading as fun, and with a boss battle involving flying lightsabres that desperately needs someone to patch in the Benny Hill music. Modders, get to it.

It’s a testament to its writing and ideas that it’s hard to look back in anger at this, so much as disappointment that it deserved better. That’s part of why the Restored Content Mod is so important – it doesn’t fix everything, and the scar tissue still bleeds if you poke it, but it does a lot. Vast amounts of dialogue and chunks of game, like a plant manufacturing HK assassin droids, were still in the game to be either restored or polished up. Other small bits have been tweaked, from the wrong line being played, to using in-engine cut-scenes instead of cutting away to crappy quality pre-rendered movies. There’s really no point playing without it, and hopefully if Aspyr manages to do a mobile port, it’ll get the okay to integrate the changes somehow.