Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 is an unfinished game. Impressively unfinished, really. So unfinished that it doesn’t so much have a final level as it does an idea for one that you just kind of percolate through until you hit credits. I can’t blame Obsidian; the studio had an incredibly short time with which to actually, you know, make the game.
It’s a game that would be well-served by a remake, in other words—something that had the time necessary to give the original’s vision the attention it deserved. Turns out, just such a remake was—perhaps is—notionally in the making. That’s according to Game File’s recent scoop on Aspyr’s ill-fated attempt to get The Sith Lords Restored Content Modification (the popular mod that restores a lot of cut-but-still-on-disc content to the game) onto the Nintendo Switch. More on those efforts later.
Court filings from the now-settled gamer’s lawsuit against Aspyr—initiated by a fan upset at the studio’s “false advertising” of TSLRCM on Switch—have revealed the existence of project Juliet. That’s the name Aspyr and Lucasfilm used for a full-on KOTOR 2 remake.
“We were going to do a full remake of KOTOR 2,” Lucasfilm Games VP Douglas Reilly told the courtroom in March, “with modern art, modern gameplay, you know, keep the story and the characters and the general—the general content of KOTOR 2, but remake it for modern hardware and modern machines with updated graphics and all those kind of things.”
Around 2020, at least, Lucasfilm was actively discussing Juliet with Aspyr at the same time as it was discussing the challenges of bringing TSLRCM to console. A full remake—where in-house developers would recreate original KOTOR 2’s lost and cut content themselves—would at least not have those challenges. “The plan was we would remake the content that was in the RCM as it relates to Star Wars in that Juliet project,” said Reilly.
And before you assume—with some justification—that Juliet must have died long ago, Reilly told the court that a KOTOR 2 remake was “still technically on the road map.” But, of course, “we’re starting with the remake of KOTOR 1.”
You probably know how that’s going. Since it was revealed at a Sony showcase all the way back in 2021, the KOTOR 1 remake’s had a rocky road. Originally in development at Aspyr, a reportedly rocky early demo saw the whole thing yanked out of that studio’s hands and put in another’s.
Previously, the rumour mill has said that the new studio is Saber Interactive. Per Reilly, though, it’s actually one of Saber’s owned studios: Mad Head Games, whose previous output seems to mostly consist of hidden object games. The KOTOR 1 remake graces our pages, oh, once a year or so, when some exec or another pops their head up to say that it’s still technically alive.
I hope we do get it some day. Not because I’m desperate for a KOTOR 1 re-do—frankly, I’d be happy with a gloss of 4K paint and controller support on the original—but because KOTOR 2 is a rare game that actually kind of needs a remake. It’s an excellent game, unquestionably one of my favourites, but it’s riddled with potholes and wounds that a remake could easily fill.
We’ll see. As for Aspyr’s attempts to get TSLRCM on Switch? That’s a sad story. For its part, the court filings really make it seem like Aspyr’s devs were genuinely keen on getting Switch players access to the mod. A plan to distribute it via Mod.io fell through following pushback from Lucasfilm and Disney. Another, to have Aspyr essentially recreate the mod using its own devs—thereby avoiding any sticky legal questions about who owns what—ran into the simple obstacle that it almost certainly didn’t make financial sense.
The plan that got furthest? Having TSLRCM’s original leads put their names on paperwork giving Aspyr, Lucasfilm, and Disney the right to bundle the mod into the Switch version of the game, perhaps as DLC.
That got far enough to put signatures on documents, but ran into the rocks when certain members of the original team couldn’t be contacted. Oh, and Disney got a little worried about one of the modders using the nom de plume ‘Garfield’ in the mod’s credits, which is at least kind of amusing. “In our efforts to credit everyone who contributed to the mod, we have spooked Disney legal and now they have put a new blocker in place,” Aspyr wrote to the TSLRCM team in 2022.
That was pretty much that, save for one final roll of the dice on another plan to distribute the mod via Mod.io, but it didn’t pan out and here we are. It’s sad, but who knows? Perhaps one of these days Juliet will exist for real, and even our console brethren will get to experience KOTOR 2 with its full vision intact.
Read the full article here
