As I mentioned recently, A More Civlized Age has pivoted to covering Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 in order to remain compliant with the BDS movement in a way that aligns with their morals and ethics as a group. Which means this is the first video game I’m going to play for more than a few hours since I started playing Final Fantasy 14 back at the start of the year (literally January 1st). Furthermore, the group has released their mod list (which seems to have been put together by Austin Walker, the only person in the crew to have previously played this game), so I’ll also be spending a decent amount of time (an hour or two at most, I’m sure), setting up my own mods. While their coverage of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was a lot of fun to listen to, AMCA has mentioned that multiple people in their fan/Patreon community had a difficult time following along with the podcast if they weren’t playing the game. Which makes sense. While they cover a lot of the details of the game, lacking the accompanying visuals and all of the pieces that go between what they directly mentioned in the podcast would make it difficult to really get a sense of the game being played. This time around, Austin is playing ahead to hopefully steer the group toward a better structure for the show as a whole by figuring out where good stopping points are via his own play rather than trying to guess at them based on his recollections of having played the games in the past (which didn’t work out the best in their KotOR coverage for a lot of reasons but I bet that some of the planets being of very different lengths and levels of involvement didn’t help much). Additionally, Austin’s also recording his playthroughs and posting an edited version of them as a let’s play, skipping over the boring or repetitive bits (or the bits where he looks stuff up for six minutes), which he’s posting to their YouTube channel the week before each new episode releases. Between these two changes, I think AMCA should have the game pretty well covered even for their listeners who haven’t already played it or aren’t currently replaying it in parallel.

While this isn’t my first time playing the game, this is my first time playing it all the way through since high school and my first time playing it with any mods in place. Way back when I first played through it, I couldn’t really appreciate just how stilted and weird it felt in some places. I was young and mostly just excited about playing the sequel to one of my favorite games but this time being able to start the game as a Jedi rather than needing to become one partway through the game. When I tried to replay the game in college, I lacked that fascination with the basic premise and disocvered there wasn’t enough left to actively carry me through the disjointed experience of the game. I’d played plenty of other Star Wars games by then and the odd, unpolished feel of the game put me off it. I actually looked into the game’s online community at that point, trying to figure out why it was such a beloved game and why I felt so differently about it from so many other people, which is when I learned that most people played a modified version of the game. There was a strong modding community built around the original KotOR game and it only grew as the second game, KotOR 2, was released in what many felt was an incomplete state. A thing they were absolutely correct about. The sequel released less than two years after the original and it was a rushed, hurried, and incredibly unfinished product, by the developer’s own admission. Since they weren’t allowed to publish a patch or update to complete or fix the game, they instead turned to the modding community (who had already begun work on this much-loved disaster) and gave them all the tools they’d need to help fix the game.

At this point in time, there’s two main “restored content” mods that I’m familiar with. One focuses on actually filling in the game’s strange gaps, makes use of existing text and voice lines, and unlocks a lot of stuff that had been stripped away to get the game out the door (this is what AMCA is using). The other does this and also unlocks additional other content that they found in the game of varying degrees of polish. Both of these are compatible with numerous other mods, have their own smaller tweak or bug-fix mods, and are often discussed within the community in opposition. One clearly “restores” every little thing that got left in the game’s unused data files, whether it fits into the established story or not. The other seems to focus more selectively on the pieces that are clearly missing from the base game’s story. These opposing mods highlight one of the big discussions in the modding community as a whole (and in my own decision to not play a modded version of KotOR last year when AMCA covered it): if you are changing the game this heavily already, is it better to extract every bit of potentially playable software or to stick with what feels like the spirit of the game. Most of the time, the base game is finished enough that the second option almost doesn’t exist except as an excuse to produce highly specific and tiny mods, but games like KotOR 2 can spark a great deal of debate about how much a game can be changed before it’s not really the same game any more and how should a developer’s intentions factor into the game.

Thankfully, we can sidestep the conversation rather completely in this case because the “unofficial official” mod support from the game’s original developers makes it pretty clear that they’d prefer players stick to the “fill in the gaps” version rather than the “extract every bit of ‘playable’ material” version. I have no idea how much of this conversation exists in places that can still be found (other than the fact that the official Switch releases include much the same stuff as this “spirit of the game” restored content mod), but learning this from the excellent coverage that AMCA did in their Character Creation and First Steps episode went a long way to reassuring me that plugging in their mod list would create a more interesting and engaging story (which I love) rather than just producing a longer gameplay experience (which I am not a fan of for its own sake). So now, I just have to follow their mod list (you can find a link to it and some very helpful installation instructions beneath both of the videos that are out on AMCA’s YouTube channel as I’m editing this post) and then I can maybe actually enjoy a full playthrough of this game without getting bogged down in all the difficult story moments that go nowhere like I did a bit over a decade ago. It’ll be fun to partially revisit a game I last played about two decades ago and partially experience, for the first time, the game that the developers wanted to release but couldn’t. Since I never got very far in my second playthrough, I can only just barely remember scattered parts of the game, so I’m interested to see what I think of it this time around. My opinion of KotOR didn’t change much, only growing a bit more nuanced about some parts of it, but all I really remember of KotOR 2 is the major plot beats and not how the game made me feel as I played through it, so this could make for a really fun experience now, in my thirties. I’ll just have to make time for it around my incredibly busy Final Fantasy XIV schedule. Can’t fall behind in that, after all. I’m sure I’ll find the time somewhere… Maybe I can sacrifice some more sleep…