The Game: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (2004)
Original Platform: Xbox
Version We Played: (deep breath now) Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords Restored Content Modification, available via Steam
Verdict: The best fan project since Troops.
BioWare’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is widely considered one of the greatest Star Wars games ever made, easily ranking up there with Rogue Squadron, Jedi Outcast, and the original Battlefront duology. Released in 2003 at the height of prequelmania, it largely eschewed the familiar – no Skywalkers, no Galactic Empire, no Rebels – in favour of its own, original storyline, set four millennia prior to the events of the films.
While I don’t quite think it’s as spectacular as others insist – for one thing, for a game ostensibly set so many thousands of years back, why does it look, feel, and sound so much like the movies? – there’s little doubt that KOTOR holds a unique place in gaming history, and long ago earned its standing as one of the best Xbox games of all time, if not one of the best Western RPGs ever made.
KOTOR’s phenomenal success – it’s the seventh-best-selling Xbox game of all time – immediately begat plans for a follow-up, even as Edmonton-based BioWare resisted the urging of their corporate overlords at LucasArts to rush out a sequel. Instead, at BioWare’s suggestion, development on KOTOR II was handed over to longtime BioWare collaborator Obsidian Entertainment, who were given an abbreviated fifteen-month timeline to churn out something in time for Christmas 2004.
By all accounts, the KOTOR II: The Sith Lords which hit North American shelves on December 12, 2004 was a flawed, albeit enjoyable, shadow of its predecessor. Unsurprisingly, given the time constraints – and the fact that LucasArts, after temporarily affording Obsidian some breathing room, reinstated the December 2004 deadline on short notice – KOTOR II did not ship in entirely fit state, with obvious quality control problems, incomplete quest lines, and a broken-down ending that played a lot like Poochie returning to his home planet.
This being 2004, that’s how things stood for quite a long while. No day one patch, no “ultimate edition” re-release to correct the mistakes. Just The Sith Lords; KOTOR but not the KOTOR you know and love; a broken but still somehow loveable rough cut of a game.
That is, until the modders got their hands on it.
It is a perilous time for the
galaxy. A brutal civil war has
all but destroyed the Jedi
Order, leaving the ailing
Republic on the verge of
collapse.
Amid the turmoil, the evil
Sith have spread across the
galaxy, hunting down and
destroying the remaining
Jedi Knights.
Narrowly escaping a deadly
Sith ambush, the last known
Jedi clings to life aboard a
battered freighter near the
ravaged world of Peragus….…
So begins the opening crawl for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, a game that tried, failed, but nevertheless did a damn fine job trying to live up to the legacy of its acclaimed predecessor.
But perhaps a bit more recap is in order: at the conclusion of the first KOTOR [warning, incoming spoilers from a long time ago…] we learned that its amnesiac protagonist was, in fact, Darth Revan, the Sith Lord presumed dead before the events of the game. (KOTOR following in the proud Star Wars tradition of launching in media res.) The shadow of Revan looms large over that first KOTOR, the action largely driven by the galaxy-dominating machinations of Revan’s former apprentice, Darth Malak.
Surprise, surprise, it turns out Malak betrayed Revan and left them (the player decides Revan’s gender) to die, only for the Jedi – betraying the same poor sense of judgment that allowed Anakin to be trained despite the grave danger – to save Revan, wiping their memory in a cockamamie scheme to defeat Malak. Though maybe the Jedi were onto something: in the canonical “good ending” which serves as the launchpoint for KOTOR II, Revan ultimately abandons their Sith ways and helps the Jedi defeat Malak and his “Star Forge”, bringing some measure of peace to the galaxy.
When KOTOR II begins, five years have passed since the events of the previous game, the early hours doing little to clarify for players what has happened in the intervening years to Revan and their lovable band of rogues, smugglers, Jedi, and homicidal robots. Instead, we’re thrown into the patent leather boots of a brand-new character, known only as “The Exile”, a former Jedi exiled from the Order for reasons which become clear over the course of the game. Falling in with a new band of misfits – some returning favourites, but mostly new characters – The Exile soon find themselves on an intergalactic reunion tour, tracking down their former Jedi allies.
KOTOR II wisely doubles down on the dual-morality system of its predecessor, allowing players to choose, mission by mission, planet by planet, whether to recruit The Exile’s former allies, or kill them in revenge for how they once treated you. Eventually, as the precise reasons for The Exile’s, well, exile, become clear, that choice – to try to reintegrate in the Jedi way, or to wreak vengeance against those who banished you – becomes the driving force in the game.
Which is not to say KOTOR II isn’t also just a big fun galaxy-spanning adventure in the vein of classic Star Wars. There are five planets to explore, plus several expansive starships – three in total, including a space yacht – which are levels unto themselves, bringing the total number of levels to eight (down from ten in KOTOR). You can also, as in KOTOR, freely explore the player’s ship the Ebon Hawk, which serves as a mission hub and place to hang out with your NPC companions. (Think of it as a much smaller version of the SSV Normandy.)
Speaking of – the cast of KOTOR II isn’t nearly as memorable (pun intended) as KOTOR, though it has its standouts. The fact of The Exile’s dark leanings is never in doubt, the game embracing this dynamic by populating your team with rather shadier types than your typical Star Warses. So it is that your companions include, among others, a former Sith Assassin named Atton Rand (voiced by the late Nicky Katt, who sadly passed away earlier this week), a droid that rewrote its own programming to launch a smuggling empire, and a full-on Sith Apprentice. (Not an ex-apprentice, but an active apprentice who joins your team convinced that you’re basically the Sith Messiah.) There are also some wayward Jedi, a bounty hunter, and, if you fulfil certain optional side-mission requirements, even a returning homicidal assassin droid. (You know the one.)
Narratively, KOTOR II does a decent job of expanding on the KOTOR lore while carving out its own, unique story. Players will appreciate how, instead of replaying the hits, KOTOR II goes both darker and more intimate than its predecessor, focussing not on some giant all powerful Star-machine, but rather a personal story of revenge (or reconciliation, depending on your choices). Eventually, The Exile’s path takes them into direct confrontation with many of their former Jedi allies, as well a trio of Sith Lords engaged in a genocidal campaign against the remaining Jedi, and an ex-Jedi whose own moral shades of grey rival that of The Exile’s.
Gameplay in KOTOR II is phenomenal. Deploying the same quasi-real-time combat present in World of Warcraft – or further back, the O.G. Parasite Eve – the system relies not on precise aiming, but rather on a persistent menu of turn-based commands which, once selected, play out in real-time. Damage is determined not by your accuracy with the controller, but rather through an under-the-hood calculation predicated on distance, location, and your character’s stats and equipment.
So while you can’t manually swing your lightsaber, for example, it does mean that lightsaber combat looks fantastic, the game capable of freely generating a choreographed sequence of swings and dodges based on a suite of canned animations. Meanwhile, your companions can be trusted to aid as needed during battle, buffing your health, firing blasters to keep reinforcements occupied, and so on. It’s not quite as cinematic as other Star Wars games, but it’s among the very best Action-RPG systems ever devised.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords Restored Content Modification is one of those wonderful, if exceedingly rare, examples of an unofficial mod receiving the official stamp of approval. Like Counter-Strike before it or Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds to come, the Sith Lords Restored Content Mod existed first as a passion project for and by the fans, their only intent with this (free!) modification to give life to the KOTOR II that could have been, but which Obsidian did not have time to pull together.
Relying in part on the extensive unused code left in the game files, and in part on the mod team’s shared vision for various quality-of-life improvements, the project launched in 2009, and was still being updated in 2015 when I bought it on a whim during a Humble Sale. Even in its cleaned up form, the seams still occasionally show on KOTOR II, but it’s still one heck of an achievement, a previously “unfinished” game given new lease thanks to a formidable team of tech-savvy fans.
When, in 2015, the mod was officially endorsed by new KOTOR rights-holders Aspyr Media, it was a singular moment in gaming history – and a reminder that, back before the Disneyfication of it all, George Lucas and LucasArts were among the fan-friendliest creatives in Hollywood. (If you’ve somehow never seen Troops, by the way, you owe it to yourselves to give it the ten minutes it more than earned back in the day on all those bootleg videotapes.)
It’s hard to imagine what KOTOR II played like in its original raw form, but I’m glad the Restored Content Mod means I’ll never have to. Among its host of improvements, the RCM restores several absent or unfinished quest lines, most notably an entire subplot involving the returning HK-47. (Just make sure you recruit him!) Key dialogue sequences play out longer – relying on audio files left untouched in the original code – providing valuable detail and ensuring plot beats feel less like bullet-points and more like the meaningful result of character choices. The RCM also, mercifully, fixes a ton of bugs and other technical deficiencies – things which Obsidian always intended to fix, but ran out of time for. This includes several game-breaking bugs that were the bane of Xbox players’ existence when this game debuted.
Of course, even in “restored” form, KOTOR II is not without its flaws.
The desire to pull away from the Revan story is admirable, but none of the villains – except the fantastically named Darth Nihilus – comes close to matching the Revan/Malak duo of the original. Similarly, the fact that the best and most interesting AI companions are those returning from KOTOR is another reminder, as if we needed it, that BioWare is the master of personality, with Obsidian at best offering a (very good) imitation.
Like many a restored cut before it – looking at you, Jedi Rocks – the modders also overdid it in their quest to bring to life everything found lurking in the game’s files. Some things were cut for a reason, and certain minor characters or side-missions only serve to pad out the time, rather than adding anything substantial. (The fact that the character in that video I linked is the sole NPC lacking any voicework in the original files, necessitating surely the strangest one-off voice-acting gig of all time, tells you everything you need to know.)
KOTOR II is also, inevitably and through no fault of its own, inferior to what came next.
As we now all know, while Obsidian was busy doing its best to churn out a functional sequel on a shoestring and at hyperspeed, BioWare was quietly, carefully preparing its own take on the space opera, one that would blow Obsidian’s – and pretty much everyone else’s – right out of the water. The legacy of KOTOR II as the forgotten stepchild of Mass Effect is perhaps an unfair one, but it’s a comparison that, I think, the original Obsidian team would likely understand. (For what it’s worth, Obisidian also went on to make the funniest video game of all time, working with a very different IP.)
Moreover, thanks to the modding community – led by the tireless efforts of modders DarthStoney and Zbyl2 – Obsidian’s semi-forgotten stepchild has now lived to see another day, in all its flawed glory.
In this case, being late to the game was worth it.
***
The Sith Lords Restored Content Modification is available on Steam here. It requires a bit of practical know-how to install – just make sure you’ve downloaded the core KOTOR II game first – but it’s fairly intuitive to get it up and running.
The tie-in Knights of the Old Republic comic book series, which ran fifty issues under the Dark Horse imprint from 2006 to 2010, is also fantastic and definitely worth checking out, with some fascinating connections to the games.
