Slashdot Mirror

Bah, Civ 4. Civ 3 ftw!

Also, how were NEITHER of the Baldurs Gates mentioned yet?

SW: KotoR, SW: KotoR 2

Amazingly, there are still people working on finishing the other... you know... 40% of SW:KotoR 2, they can be found here: http://www.team-gizka.org/, although I think progress, and what seems to be so close to the end product, has stalled.

You probably already know, but there's a project to try and restore the missing segments of KOTOR2. I didn't play it so I don't know how bad it was or how good the restoration project is but it might help give you some sense of closure :)

If you're going for unfinished business in video games, I don't think you can find examples more extreme than KotOR II (Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II). Huge swaths of game-land (including at least one additional planet) were programmed and hundreds of lines of voice-acted dialogue were recorded, only to be removed before the game's release. The entire ending planet/sequence was scrapped and replaced with an anti-climactic, confusing hodge-podge of fights.

Interestingly enough, the raw resources and recorded lines are still on the commercial CD's, just not accessible in-game. As a result, these guys (as well as a few other teams) are working to re-implement as much of the original material as possible. The project is slow going (> 4 years), as--in addition to being comprised largely of college students--the mod team is seeking to release a nearly bug-free final product. They just released a First Release Candidate to their beta testers this past Saturday, however, so hope has been rekindled in the community!

KotOR is one of my favorite games of all time. The story is great, there's tons of stuff you can do off the beaten path, and it has a ton of replay value. The actual gameplay is subpar, though. KotOR 2 is one of my biggest disappointments of all time because it fixed the gameplay of KotOR but was so buggy and had so much cut content you couldn't actually enjoy it. A bastard child hybrid of the two might be the best game never made.

You know about the Sith Lords restoration project I hope? They are still active, but I'm starting to lose hope that they will ever finish, since new bugs pop up all the time. Perhaps they are in the final phase of playtesting, but... I have been waiting for many years now.

I really would have loved to see a properly finished KOTOR 2 with the dark ending that Chris Avellone intended.

http://www.team-gizka.org/ is working somewhat towards that goal.

I support that goal as much as anyone (I think KOTOR2 was a great game), but at this point I think it's safe to say that Team Gizka has abandoned the project. Their last update was almost a year ago.

I really would have loved to see a properly finished KOTOR 2 with the dark ending that Chris Avellone intended.

http://www.team-gizka.org/ is working somewhat towards that goal.

Well at least somebody is trying to fix the fucking thing. Lucasarts should really have had its arse whipped for the state of the game. As for this MMO, they're owned by EA now so it'll likely be shit and have a half arsed release every 12 months.

If they had actually finished the game, we might JUST be expecting a release about, oh... now.

Oh, wait: we are.

Not necessarily. KOTOR 2 was bug-ridden and had missing plot-lines because LucasArts wanted to rush it out the door in time for Christmas. The Obsidian team left the data files for a much more complete version of KOTOR 2 on the XBox disc, and a group of modders calling themselves Team Gizka http://team-gizka.org/ are trying to restore the lost content. They seem pretty close to completion.

KOTOR 2 = unfinished. That is not the proper ending; it's a butchered mess because the game had to ship before it was properly finished.

However, the rest of the ending scenes were shipped on the disc in a mostly intact state, just not implemented in the game itself. So it's been possible to restore them. It's taken a long time, but release now looks to be just around the corner...

You will find the Internet is full of surprises. At long last the community effort to restore the missing ending is nearing completion; it appears that the main functionality is fully armed and operational, although there are a few exposed thermal exhaust ports they're working to clear up before the public release.

I hope Obsidian Entertainment isn't adversely affected by BioWare's latest deals with EA and LucasArts. I'm one of the (few?) people who actually enjoyed KoTOR II and am actively looking forward to Team Gizka's restoration mod. As Obsidian Entertainment has used technology developed by BioWare for some years now, I just hope BioWare manages to maintain their close relationship.

It is a shame that KOTOR:2 was rushed, and treated so poorly by LucasArts. That was ALMOST a truly great game.

Yes, I have great hopes for Team Gizka's restoration project.

Rest of the post contains plenty of **SPOILERS**.

Like the fact that Chris likes to take the RPG/CRPG conventions and turn them into plot elements - for instance in PS:T, the fact that your character in computer games always is immortal (since you can just reload) - there you play the Immortal One.

Same with KOTOR 2. We choose to ignore the fact that our characters in RPGs gain godlike powers in very short time. If this was normal, wouldn't everyone be doing it - be out whacking rats and progressively more difficult wildlife to gain robust health, superstrength and intelligence? Here it is suddenly part of the plot - no, not everyone can do it. It seems that you, and you only, have a rather sinister power to gain supernatural strength by absorbing the life force (XP) of those you kill. The character might have thought a lot about this, but since there is no voice over a la Blade Runner, the player doesn't know it.

Sounds like he MAY be going down a similar path with the soul eating in Mask of the Betrayer. But we will see.

Bioshock might have been taken a leaf out of the same book. Some people have complained that "it is so unrealistic that the player injects himself with a syringe that is just laying there in the beginning of the game, ruined the immersion for me". Well, it turns out later that he was compelled to do it. The character might have fought against it, filled with horror, but again, this the player does not know until later in the game. So they use the literary device known as "the unreliable narrator". The reader/player identifies with the character (even more so in games of course), but it later turns out he/she did not tell everything.

Well, if we are lucky, the Sith Restoration Project may yet save KOTOR:2.

http://team-gizka.org/

It wasn't your fault. That wasn't a crash; it was the actual ending. No, I couldn't believe it either...

There's a project to restore some of the missing material, a lot of which was included in a Hot Coffee sort of way on the disks but not used in the actual game. They seem to be making steady progress, too.

I'd suggest you download and try TSLRP before you discount it. The amount of work that's being done on the project is significant, largely because the amount of cut content being restored is huge.

And before somebody asks the obvious question... when it's done. Probably some time between Christmas and Duke Nukem Forever.

Ask, and ye shall receive...
http://www.team-gizka.org/
They're making great progress, but don't ask for a release date.

KotOR2 Restoration Project

There's the KotOR 2 Restoration Project, which I believe is what you're thinking of. There's a ton of cut dialogue and sequences in the the game files, including a huge amount of material for the ending, which I believe is what they're restoring.

Would have been nice if this would have been included in the article summary, but anyway...

http://team-gizka.org/

I have been putting off playing KOTOR 2 for a long time waiting for them to actually release. Hopefully it'll be soon.

I had written a LONG post, but Firefox crashed... Second and much shorter attempt:

I agree with him for most games (99% or so), but there are some notable exceptions. Planescape:Torment for instance, that whole game is centered around questions such as "Can anything change the nature of a man? Would you REALLY want to be immortal? What is a valid philosophy of life (Dustmen, Godsmen, Sensates)?"

When I was asked the question "What can change the nature of a man?", with along list of possible answers such as "love, death, faith, regret, nothing", I froze. I had to go for a long walk before I could answer that question.

That if anything goes deeply into what it means to be a human, and it did it in ways few other media or artform could.

Some other games that, while maybe not asking such big questions about life, have touched me emotionally:
Final Fantasy 7
Grim Fandango
Longest Journey
Fallout
Knights of the Old Republic 2 (would have been even better without the butchered ending(s)).

You might want to take a look at this:
http://www.team-gizka.org/

Most of the material that was cut at the last minute was still available on the disk (if you extracted the sound files, there were whole trees of dialouge that was left out of the retail game). Just about the only thing that was left unfinished before being cut was the droid planet; everything else exists in some form.

These folks have been trying to reintroduce the removed content via player-made mod. They aren't done yet, but if you check the progress reports, they're getting there.

They aren't "cut down in their prime", they're stillborns. Cut down in their prime are games like Star Wars Kinghts of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, where a game that is fantastic up until 2/3-3/4 of the way through becomes disjointed and a major disappointment. The first in the series was ground-breakingly good, developed by Bioware and published by LucasArts. For the sequel LucasArts wanted a game as good as the original done in less time. Greedy bastards. The new developer, Obsidian, were arrogant enough to agree to do it and then arrogant enough to try to massively improve upon the original despite the amount of time it took Bioware to produce the first one -- part of this arrogance was from their misplaced belief that LucasArts would allow them extra time once they saw the work-in-progress. Of course, the soul-less money-grubbers at LucasArts wanted their money and wanted it NOW, and the game was released unfinished.

Fortunately, Team Gizka have decided to complete the game for us :)