When you strike her down, you’re still not sure if you’ve won anything. You finish the game by yourself, all your party members left to ambiguous fates, and face off with the mysterious old woman who’s been guiding your destiny all along. You venture to the seedy Hutt-dominated moon of Nar Shaddaa and get wrapped up with slumlords, assassination contracts, and human trafficking. There’s the abandoned Jedi strongholds of Dantooine, or the equally abandoned, equally destroyed Sith tombs of Korriban. The worlds you travel to in KOTOR 2 are nearly dead. In retrospect that seems like the one thing Obsidian Entertainment wanted to avoid when they set out to make Knights of the Old Republic 2. Making a Star Wars game isn’t that hard, if all you want to do is make a Star Wars game. Give us a new fake Darth Vader, give us a new forbidden Jedi to fall in love with, give us a lightsaber duel in the foreground and a space battle in the background. It feels like they could’ve just done that again. Good and evil, love and hate, life and death, the beautiful two dimensions of the Star Wars canon. The game ended with either world domination or A New Hope’s medal ceremony depending on your allegiance. You had a fake Chewbacca, a fake Darth Vader, a fake Death Star, and the perfect “I am your father” plot-twist to tie the loose ends together. It came hot on the heels of its Bioware-developed prequel, which is still one of the most colorful, optimistic tributes to the Star Wars universe.

Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords seemed like a very easy game to make.

Kotor 2 droid planet