I don’t much mind bad graphics but I have to make an exception here for just one of Kotor 2’s planets: the jungle moon of Dxun stands out as the single ugliest level I have played in any video game newer than say… 2000. The game just doesn’t run well with my modern system)
* (Just a quick note on bugs because everyone will experience them differently: on my Windows 10 PC, dialogues skipped, cutscenes broke, graphics exploded, characters fell out of the map, voice lines didn’t play, framerates collapsed and I crashed over and over again across my 65 hours and 1.5 playthroughs. I don’t really have an argument here beyond a series of impressions on vague categories including level design, gameplay, characters, dialogue and narrative, role-playing features, and the so-called “philosophy.” Spoilers abound, but whatever, the game lacks a big twist like the original and it’s been 15 years anyway, so who cares. I only care about the game Kotor 2 is now, and even with support from post-release patches and fan-fixes via the Restored Content Mod, it’s still just… not much fun. The publisher (Lucas Arts) pushed the developer (Obsidian Entertainment) into an early release, forcing the devs to scrap much of the work-in-progress content and rush out the remainder without much time to polish or address bugs.* But let me make this clear: I do not care about the game Kotor 2 could have been if it had completed its original production schedule. It’s awful or, at the very least, it does not hold up 15 years later.įirst though, I suppose that I should address the elephant in the room early: Kotor 2 seems incomplete because it is. But the game still feels like such an incomplete, disjointed experience that I can’t recommend it to anyone. It has a solid enough narrative outline (but as I will explain, the actual narrative sputters) and I restored much of the content the developers cut to meet publishing deadlines with this mod. I can’t find a single serious negative review for it - even though it’s a buggy, broken, imbalanced mess that suffers from obvious development limitations. I try to avoid calling anything overrated, but the praise I see for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords ( Kotor 2) just baffles me. And then deep beneath the surface, you can feel the pain of the unfinished product… But to clear eyes it’s damaged by a severe lack of polish and glitchy, confusing details. I’m always looking for visual metaphors and here it is courtesy of a common motion-blur graphics bug: if you squint, Kotor 2 looks pretty good as a low-resolution outline.
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