For a brief period other modders challenged Gizka, their responses to criticism gradually took on a tone of ‘well make your own mod!’ and others were happy to play ball. The backroom happenings that eventually dissolved Gizka are unknown, but people left. Content was added without the surrounding context, resulting in moments of confusion for players. Their method of implementing the content drew some criticism from modders and mod consumers they restored haphazardly. Gizka worked studiously for several years restoring what they could however there were problems. Initially several modders tried to restore the missing content and a group was quickly put together calling itself ‘Team Gizka’ working on the “The Sith Lords Restoration Project”. By mid-2005 KotOR 2’s modding scene was fully open for business. In 2005 a user by the name of Stoffe created the TSL Patcher, a modding tool that could sort out file structures and move mod files to be where they needed to be and to latch onto the files they needed to to be part of the game. The solution was a first priority for fans of the game. For starters, KotOR 2’s file system had some issues, which made it difficult to mod without causing conflicts.

The problems of restoring the content were simply immense. You’d think this would herald in a golden modding community teaming with creativity and productivity.

Sure enough they hit the jackpot unused audio, unused assets and hints toward an entire unused planet. When players got to the end and thought ‘is that it?’ players poured through the game’s files like eagles hunting for prey. However, the devs left players a little present: the files of all the content they hadn’t had time to finish. It is fair to say that neither players nor developers were happy with this, the devs were stressed by it and the players had to deal with bugs and unfinished content. LucasArts put them on a very aggressive schedule, asking them to make a KotOR sized game in roughly half the time the original had in development.

The missing content wasn’t strictly Obsidian’s fault.

When modders found out why, they couldn’t help but fix it. By the ending, the story just sort of stopped. However, it was obvious that parts of the game were missing docking bays on Nar Shadaar that were visible on the map but couldn’t be found, assets that didn’t quite look like they belonged where they were, that sort of thing. Those chats with Bao-Dur about war ethics, those uncomfortable lectures Kreia gives you on the merits of a Machiavellian lifestyle. You go on a journey of deep, uncomfortable moral self-discovery right up until the end. Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2, for me at least, was a lovely game to play and sits among my all time favourites.

Kotor 1 restored content