What Really Happened With Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2

How KOTOR II: The Sith Lords was critically acclaimed despite a rushed release…and how a team of modders restored its subversive Star Wars story.

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The Star Wars franchise, philosophically, is very black-and-white. Literally so: the titular ‘wars’ within the Star Wars movies – be they between Empire or Rebellion, Republic or Secessionist – are all proxies for the conflict between the Light and the Dark Sides of the Force, the good Jedi and evil Sith who wield them. So what do you get when you ask a critically acclaimed video game scriptwriter with a love for existential philosophy to write a Star Wars story? You get Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, the premier release of Obsidian Entertainment, a Star Wars saga of moral ambiguity and philosophical musings that was nearly rendered unplayable by a very short development cycle.

When Black Isle Studios, the publisher of classic RPGs like Baldur’s Gate and Planescape Torment, went under, some of their designers – Feargus Urquhart, Darren Monahan, and Chris Avellone, among others – went on to form their own studio, Obsidian Entertainment. In time, Obsidian Entertainment would achieve its own measure of acclaim with spin-off titles like Fallout: New Vegas and original franchises such as Pillars of Eternity and the Outer Worlds. At the start, however, Obsidian Entertainment was a small team of designers and writers with a daunting task: making a sequel to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the hit RPG developed by BioWare and released by LucasArts in 2003.

Chris Avellone, the lead writer and designer for what would become Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, had already left his mark on the gaming industry with Planescape: Torment, an isometric RPG that broke new ground in the field of video game storytelling with a narrative that contemplated the nature of belief, pain, and immortality through a nameless protagonist that was immortal both in gameplay and narrative. For the first title of Obsidian Entertainment, Chris Avellone strove to homage the Star Wars franchise while deconstructing it at the same time – examining the war between Light and Dark, Jedi and Sith, seeking to uncover the sinister implications of such an eternal struggle.

The customizable protagonist of Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is a figure haunted by their past, as so many of her traveling companions are. Banished from the Jedi for their war crimes, pursued by Sith Lords with disturbing supernatural powers, this Exile must reunite the fractured Jedi Order and relearn the ways of the Force…but their brown-robed mentor, the mysterious, acerbic Kreia, has her own secret agenda and goals that may well threaten the existence of the Jedi, the Sith and the Force itself.

The plot of KOTOR II, like many Chris Avellone-written games, is less intent on making a fixed moral statement than making players think – about their choices, their beliefs, the way they view the world. The character of Kreia, jaded and burned from her brush with both sides of the Force, is used by Avellone to stir questions in the minds of players: are the ways of the Jedi sustainable, if the strain of living by their Code drives so many of their members to the Dark Side? Does the existence of the Force, a power that obeys and influences its wielders, really make the galaxy a better place? Can moral-choice systems seen in video games like the first Knights of the Old Republic capture the complexities of real-life morality?

The resulting moral grayness and introspection made KOTOR II’s story unique, unlike any other Star Wars work that had existed up to that point. The conditions were ripe for KOTOR II to be a masterpiece that would put Obsidian Entertainment on the map…and it was, despite the glaring plot-holes and technical issues the game suffered during its December 2004 release.

KOTOR II’s issues, in the main, stemmed from Obsidian Entertainment getting only 14 months to make their premier title, a production schedule that would have been tight and stressful for an experienced, well-established game developer. As a fledgling studio, Obsidian wound up biting off more than they could chew: despite extensive assistance from programmers and developers at LucasArts, they were forced to axe multiple portions of their game – incomplete levels were replaced with cut-scenes, bugs were left unpatched, older graphics were not updated, and key scenes of dialogue and plot were left out, making the game’s climax messy and unclear. Critics and fans alike wound up viewing KOTOR II with rueful respect: admiration for what this Star Wars game tried to do and wistfulness for what it could have been.

Fortunately (only fitting for a Star Wars game) a New Hope arose. Rebel Modders, striking from their hidden bases on the internet, came together to form the Sith Lords Restoration Project, a quest to restore the missing chunks of KOTOR II and make it a more complete game. This rag-tag rebel modding team had a secret weapon; much of the missing content was still present within the code of the game – unimplemented levels, enemies, cutscenes and lines of dialogue that could be restored with right work. The resulting mod, The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod, is now seen as an indispensable part of the KOTOR II experience.

Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II, for all its technical flaws, has cast a shadow on the Star Wars franchise ever since, the themes it explored inspiring large chunks of Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO and paving the way for other writers to create their own subversive takes on the Star Wars franchise. Chris Avellone, his colleagues at Obsidian, and the dedicated Rebel Modders showed fans that they could question the black-and-white morality of Star Wars while still enjoying the thrilling spectacle of this galaxy far, far away…

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