Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords Wrap Report, Part 2

One difficult aspect of the development process was cutscenes - we had a great team of gameplay programmers hammering away at them in the game, including Anthony Davis (did the Aldon's Crossing RPG for anyone who likes playing games on their palm pilots), Adam Brennecke (straight out of Digipen), and Ben Ma (UCI, went back to finish his degree) all working together to implement the in-game cutscenes, but getting the timing and choreography right for some of the animations and effects proved to be a much tougher challenge than we had thought. We got some amazing cutscenes in the game (Kreia's flashbacks, for example), but they took a long time to pull off, and probably weren't the best use of our resources in the short time we had.

Audience Response Chris Avellone: I think it's been received favorably by gamers and the media, and maybe we're being too hard on ourselves (as well as being too close to what we're working on), but it's actually been better received than we thought it would be. There was a lot of pressure and expectations from the first game, and our ability to even come close to that level of quality in roughly a third of the time was a pretty backbreaking amount of work. I wish we'd had two more years to work on it, but it wasn't in the cards.

Between the reviewers and the media, most reports are positive. The gamers have more critical feedback, which is awesome, and I think some of the comments stem from using the same engine as the previous game and the attempts to make the game feel more like The Empire Strikes Back. I think those comments are justified, but a lot of them stem from conscious technology decisions in the timeframe provided. If we ever do a sequel, then I doubt those issues will prove to be a problem.

I'm a little surprised by the lack of reaction to being able to train your party member Jedi, since I thought that would be a cool feature, but I was even more surprised by some of the positive feedback on some of the locations and characters.

if we were to do a KOTOR III, I think it would be a large divergence... a completely new engine, redo the rules system, and take care of a host of other 'things'

Looking Ahead Chris Parker: Obsidian Entertainment has always planned to be a two-project studio. We could even go to three at some point, but we don't have any desire to grow bigger than that. We are even worried about three projects - we enjoy the unity and closeness of having less than 50 people. Everybody knows each other, we hang out together, and LAN gaming is super sweet.

But to address the two-project thing, we have been working on NWN2 for several months, and are currently seeking our third project with a number of publishers. That is something we'd like to start in January or February of 2005.

I can't speak of what LucasArts wants or if we've had discussions with them, but if we were to do a KOTOR III, I think it would be a large divergence from the first two. We'd need to create a completely new engine, redo the rules system, and take care of a host of other 'things'. Of course, we'd stick to the Star Wars feel and story-driven gameplay. But that's outside of anything we should talk about here.

And unfortunately, we can't really talk about any other things that we are looking to do, but I think we'll always be in the realm of RPGs, although we are also looking at doing some very RPG lite stuff - as much as we love the hard-core RPG, we have no desire to get pigeon holed with a super hardcore reputation. At the same time, while BioWare has been more than amazing and gracious in helping us get started, we would like to do a game that isn't a sequel to one of their products - we can't really prove ourselves until we do that, can we? So that's important for us, too.

In the end, we are just going to try to create an environment where we all like to work and where we make games that kick *ss. We want to make the games that we want to play - it's unfortunate that by doing so, we never get to - but we love games and we want to make ones that set the standard.

Personal Thoughts Chris Avellone: I like it when you get enough influence with HK to get him talking about the KOTOR I party members. I love the vision quests in the game, having members lose their limbs was a huge pain in the *ss from the art and programming side (for which I'm sorry), and the entire cutscene with Kreia's flashback to her origins deserves kudos to all the animators and gameplay programmers (Zaza, Trent, John and Adam). It was a hard, crazy ride to get from the start to finish of The Sith Lords, but it was worth it, and we hope you enjoy playing it.

Chris Avellone Lead Designer Obsidian Entertaiment

Chris Parker Producer Obsidian Entertainment

[Since introducing them in November of 2003 to offer post-release viewpoints from the respective teams, it has been our pleasure to publish Wrap Reports on a number of other titles. Lists of the previous ones on both RPG Vault and Action Vault may be found on the next page. - Ed.]