“Juliet was the code name for a project where we were going to do a full remake of KOTOR 2,” a deposition from Lucasfilm Games vice president Douglas Reilly acquired by Game File reads in part, “with modern art, modern gameplay, you know, keep the story and the characters and the general—the general content of KOTOR 2, but remake it for modern hardware and modern machines with updated graphics and all those kinds of things. First released just shy of eighteen months after the original game in late 2004, The Sith Lords, developed by the legendary RPG studio Obsidian, followed another Jedi soldier from the war against the Mandalorians, the Exile, five years after the events of the first game as they reawoke to their previously thought severed connection to the Force and reckoned with the Sith’s seemingly near-total extermination of the Jedi. The sequel is regarded in equal parts appraisal and infamy, the former for its darker, more morally complex character work and its critical positioning of both the player’s agency in an RPG and the nature of the Force in the Star Wars galaxy at large as tools of fate, the latter for the game’s extremely limited development cycle leading to a messy final product, littered with intriguing compromises, rushed denouements, and perhaps most infamously of all, a ream of cut and incomplete content hidden within the game’s files, never fully implemented.
Author: James Whitbrook
Published at: 2025-12-08 22:20:58
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