“It didn’t feel like a scavenger hunt as much as it felt like digging for treasure. I thought of it as a director’s cut vs theatrical cut of a film,” said a modder known as VarsityPuppet who has worked on the restoration since 2008. To me, it sounded awesome simply because it was going to add a ton of missing content and flesh out the story. So I did a Google search and found The Sith Lords Restoration Project by Team Gizka.
“I think a friend from school mentioned in passing that you could mod the game. They called their product The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod, or TSLRCM, and they just released a new version of their mod last year. Sure enough, a group of modders who loved the game and were curious about its mystery started piecing together a narrative through the fragmented code. However, when KOTOR 2 was released on PC, all those incomplete files were left untouched on the disc, and any enterprising player could scroll through them and discover what was cut. What happened to that “droid planet” they talked about in the pre-release interviews? Why are all these loose ends left to a lengthy bit of exposition at the end of the game? Who were Darth Sion and Darth Nihilus really? For a long time it felt like those questions would never be answered. That’s nothing new, content gets cut all the time in the videogame industry, but it’s rare for whole worlds and entire endings to get abbreviated for a Christmas release date.įor months there were rumors about what KOTOR 2 was supposed to be. It was well reported that Obsidian had to cut content and crunch hard to get the game out by deadline, and so a lot of stuff fell by the wayside. I had to start a new character entirely when my campaign’s brain fell out somewhere in Nar Shaddaa. First you’d be overwhelmed with the aforementioned bleakness of the world-building, and then you’ll wonder why you’re repeating the same cutscene over and over again. If you played The Sith Lords when it came out, you’d notice a couple things. If you are cruel to the poor man, Kreia reprimands you.” If you help the poor man, Kreia reprimands you. I point to the infamous Nar Shaddaa landing pad conundrum. And the grey area, good lord the grey area. It was a Star Wars game first, and an RPG second,” a Knights of the Old Republic subreddit member named Nick Zabawa told me. That’s not to say I don’t love 1 immensely I do with all my heart. When you strike her down, you’re still not sure if you’ve won anything. You finish the game by yourself, all your party members left to ambiguous fates, and face off with the mysterious old woman who’s been guiding your destiny all along.
You venture to the seedy Hutt-dominated moon of Nar Shaddaa and get wrapped up with slumlords, assassination contracts, and human trafficking. There’s the abandoned Jedi strongholds of Dantooine, or the equally abandoned, equally destroyed Sith tombs of Korriban. The worlds you travel to in KOTOR 2 are nearly dead. In retrospect that seems like the one thing Obsidian Entertainment wanted to avoid when they set out to make Knights of the Old Republic 2. Making a Star Wars game isn’t that hard, if all you want to do is make a Star Wars game.
Give us a new fake Darth Vader, give us a new forbidden Jedi to fall in love with, give us a lightsaber duel in the foreground and a space battle in the background. It feels like they could’ve just done that again. Good and evil, love and hate, life and death, the beautiful two dimensions of the Star Wars canon. The game ended with either world domination or A New Hope’s medal ceremony depending on your allegiance. You had a fake Chewbacca, a fake Darth Vader, a fake Death Star, and the perfect “I am your father” plot-twist to tie the loose ends together. It came hot on the heels of its Bioware-developed prequel, which is still one of the most colorful, optimistic tributes to the Star Wars universe.
Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords seemed like a very easy game to make.