Knights of the Old Republic II – Restoration Mod Review

Now with character closure!

Knights of the Old Republic II was a deeply flawed game. Legend has it the developers were pushed to release the game in time for the holiday season and as a result giant chunks of plot, missions, even entire worlds were left out of the game and it was riddled with bugs.

I played (or should that be suffered?) through the original version once, sent Matt a text immediately afterwards saying “OMFG worst ending EVAR!”, then uninstalled the game and tried never to think about it again. Little did I know, however, that others reached the end and instead of sending derisive text messages they decided they could improve the game. Now there are dozens of third party mods and patches for the game which do everything from improving its graphics to resurrecting missions that were cut from the original to … uh … making the characters wear less clothes. Bless you, shut in programmers!

The most complete effort to date has just been released in beta format – the TSL Restored Content Mod v1.4. Snappy title, huh? It won’t litter the game with n00dz and it won’t make your lightsaber any bigger, but what it will attempt to do is restore all the bits of plot that were cut from the original game.

Installing the mod is relatively straightforward. You download the file, remove the read-only status on a bunch of the original game files, hit the install button and then start up a new game. Yes, you need to start from the start to see the new stuff which means yes, you’ve got to play through the gawdawful boring early missions again. The mod changes pretty much nothing on the game’s first two planets.

You can still start the occasional Jackie Chan style all-in brawl

After you clear the initial worlds though bits of information, conversations and cut scenes that weren’t in the original start to crop up. Much of it is trivial and it’s kind of like watching the deleted scenes on a DVD – a 20-second snippet where Atton and T3 play pazaak aboard the Ebon Hawk, for example. Amusing enough? Sure. But did it miss the original cut because the programmers ran out of time or because it just didn’t need to be there in the first place? I have no idea, but while some of the restored content has real meat to it, a lot of it feels like it falls into the latter category.

By far the biggest thing that has been restored is the fabled HK droid factory. The mission will take you a good hour or two to complete, there’s some genuinely amusing content in it and, of course, there’s gratuitous use of the word “meatbag”.

One thing that irked me though is the HK factory mission feels like it cues in a weird place: the mission starts itself when the time comes, you don’t get to choose when you do it. I suspect maybe that’s part of the reason it was cut in the first place. Amusing though the mission is, if the HK-50 storyline had’ve just been cleaned up a little bit I don’t think I would’ve missed it in either version of the game.

Initiating assassination protocols: HK-47 finally has his side mission restored

So far, so good. My biggest problem, however, is that while this mod restores a bunch of stuff that should’ve been included in the first place, it also proves the old adage that you can’t polish a turd. Because if we’re honest about it, it wasn’t just the plot gaps that we disliked in the original version.

The game had many other bugs and the mod only addresses the plot-related ones. So many conversations still have an annoying habit of looping back on themselves. The combat system seems extra clunky now that other games have moved on so far forward from it. NPC intelligence is pretty much non-existent, they’ll still spend a lot of time doing things like getting stuck crates that they could just walk around (I cussed out the tw’ilek you’re supposed to rescue in the Telos military base more than once for this).

If you’ve played the game before you’ll know all this already and none of it is changed by the restoration mod. But if you’re anything like me, now that the genre has moved on to much greater heights (*coughMassEffectcough*) you’ll find that things which used to just be acceptable quirks have now become a terminal pain in the arse.

Before we finish up, I suspect there’s one more question everyone who’s played the game before wants answered: did they fix the terrible ending? The answer is no, not really. There might be a few little tweaks and additions to the final conversation but it’s essentially the same.

If you’re a super-hardcore fan of the series that desperately wants to wring every last bit of value out of the game then you’ll no doubt want this mod. Hell, you’ve probably got it already. If you thought HK-47 was one of the best parts of the original game then maybe you want to give it a crack just for his extra mission – though you will have to play for about 30 or so hours to access it. And if for some reason you’ve never played the game before but want to give it a go now I’d definitely recommend you install this mod before you start.

For the rest of us everyday meatbags though, I fear this mod will be little more than a curiosity.

The Verdict:

Pros: The plot definitely seems better rounded out and even though the beta has some problems, the team behind it are being very thorough about fixing them. And the HK-47 bonus mission brings the lulz.

Cons: Pretty much all of the game’s other bugs remain. You’ll have to expend a lot of time to access what seems like just a little extra content since the mod doesn’t work with old save games. Quite a few of the restored sections are trivial and the ending still blows.

Overall: The mod does exactly what it says on the label and even for a beta it’s pretty well polished.  But the game still retains all its other problems and they’ll probably still detract from your enjoyment of the game.  3 out of 5.

One last thing. Before you start playing, make sure you read the instructions carefully, install the official game patches then install the mod and all of its available patches. As it’s a beta, there are various bugs (some of them game breaking) that are still being fixed. The team behind the mod have been super-dilligent about following up bug reports and issuing new patches to fix problems. For this they deserve massive amounts of praise, but check the forum regularly during your playthrough and download any new patches they release – as of this review the mod was up to patch version 1.4c.