Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II Q&A

Chris Avellone has added another entry to his official blog, though this time he’s decided to answer some fan-submitted questions about the development of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II.

6. Would the game (K2) have turned out different (story/characters) if you would have worked on it today or five years before you did (1999) that is. (If we pretend you had the same amount of resources and technology)

Totally – it would obviously be a much more polished experience. However, it would suffer from the fact that if it had been worked on in 1999, some of the character arcs (notably Kreia) would not have been present, since much of that was spawned from NPC ideas in Torment.

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8. How did the first draft of KotOR 2 look like, and did any ideas survive to the final product?

The Handmaiden did, some characteristics of Kreia, and so did the planet Peragus, but almost nothing else did, which was for the best after playing K1. The original premise had the player drafted for help by the Handmaiden to free her world from matriarchs led by a figurehead reminiscent of Kreia. After playing K1, we ditched the storyline – and it sucked that we wasted 2 months on it considering how little time we had over the course of the project, but LucasArts couldn’t legally give us copies of K1 to examine or play until the contract was signed, so no one’s to blame, it was just circumstances.