apt-get install

Ugh. Ugh ugh ugh. So I just invested a little over 40 hours playing Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (on my Ubuntu machine under Cedega, of course). For the first 30 hours, I was entranced. The story was building to what seemed would be a fantastic crescendo, something eclipsing the original KOTOR (one of my favorite games ever).

And then, bad things started happening. First, the main character The Exile, becomes far too powerful, and begins ripping through any and all enemies without a challenge. Overpowered character leads to boredom, which leads to anger, which leads to the Dark Side. Or something like that.

Anyway, aside from an Exile who can’t be touched, story lines start being completely dropped. The hours I’d invested up ’til that time building my NPCs suddenly seem foolish, ‘cuz those characters just kinda disappear. Story scenarios are built up, but never come to fruition. One character is seemingly dead, but you can’t be sure because the game never shows him dying. You just see a mysterious holo recording from him, hinting that he must be dead. Many characters just never re-appear after a certain part in the game.

As I was playing through this, wondering what the hell is happening, suddenly there’s the standard Star Wars closing credits scrolling on my screen! The game is over, with no closure, no real ending, and no warning. The end fight with Darth Traya is a breeze, then she chats for a while, then the credits roll. What the fuck?

So after being righteously pissed off for a while that the game didn’t deliver anything to reward me for investing so much time into it, I decided to do some searching. I Googled “KOTOR2 weak ending” and found tons of websites with gamers raising the same objections I did. And a few websites talking about missing content.

So I did another Google search, this time on “KOTOR2 missing content.” And lo and behold! Turns out that there is a ton of content that was written and, in many cases, voice-acted and recorded, but then was left out of the final game. There’s a fairly-complete list on Tubertarian.com. Much of the missing content fills in the huge, gaping storyline holes. The rest of it gives more background to characters, fleshing out the characters and the story. With the missing content restored, KOTOR2 would’ve been an amazing game. As it is, KOTOR2 is a good but unfinished farce. There’s no reason to play something through if the ending isn’t there. Why bother? I would’ve skipped KOTOR2 completely if I had known that the ending was this bad.