Trivia / Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords

• Awesome, Dear Boy: Not initially, as Avellone had stopped being a Star Wars fan a long time ago when he was tasked with the game (in his words, "his excitement had peaked with The Empire Strikes Back"), but he regained his love for the franchise through the process of playing the first game.
• B-Team Sequel: Created by Obsidian rather than the creators of the first game, Bioware, which recommended them for their work together in Baldur's Gate.
• Christmas Rushed: Originally the game was to be published around Christmas 2004 and have a relatively short development cycle, but mid-way into development LucasArts announced to Obsidian that, due to their impressive results, they were delaying the game's release to take advantage of the hype around Revenge of the Sith. Obsidian took this delay to greatly expand the game, only for LucasArts to suddenly hit a financial rough patch and revert back to a Christmas 2004 release. Unfortunately for Obsidian, the agreement about the delay had been a spoken agreement and not a signed one, leaving them no choice but to comply. A great deal of the game's content was thus cut, unfinished, or riddled with bugs.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: An article about the game in a Spanish magazine showed an image of Darth Nihilus over a text going on about Revan, which caused plenty of confusion. Due to the fact that Nihilus appears multiple times in the game without being called by his name and Revan gets mentioned a lot without appearing physically (except a living flashback in Korriban where he is silent and masked — just like Nihilus), many players in Spain who had not played the first game reached the battle of Telos without fully understanding the background and assumed the guy with the white mask was a returning Darth Revan.
• Creator Backlash: Avellone was quoted in an interview saying that he wasn't proud of all his writing in the game, simultaneously lamenting that he never had the chance to meet Kreia's voice actress (Sara Kestelman), whom he felt "made even the crappiest lines [he] wrote sing".
• Development Gag: "I'm Atton. I actually wasn't supposed to make it into the final game, but I was created at the last minute. Blame my agent. I was actually slated for a spin-off to Jedi Knight, but I don't want to talk about what happened there."^note Atton Rand was the original name for the player character for Jedi Academy during its development, who was named Jaden Korr in the final product.
• Dummied Out:
  • While the first game had an ordinary amount of dummied out content, the second game has a metric ton of it, making the final leg of the game only barely decipherable in how it ties up the loose ends. The game is notorious for the amount of almost completed cut content that is still in the game files. The fan made "TSLRCM" Game Mod was able to take advantage of this to restore significant amounts of content back into the game.
  • There are many empty rooms in the final areas (including Malachor V) which normally can't be accessed, but can be restored using mods.
• Executive Meddling:
  • KotOR II is one of the poster children for this trope. You wondered why the last act felt so rushed and the ending so inconclusive? That's why. Not only did they insist that the game be released by an unrealistic deadline, they even went so far as refusing to let Obsidian release a patch later to restore the missing content due to the Xbox version not being Xbox Live enabled, thus unpatchable.
  • The reason Hanharr cannot be turned into a Jedi is at the time Lucasfilm had a company-wide "no more Wookiee Jedi" rule in place.
• God Never Said That: Some of the game's detractors claim that Chris Avellone openly despises Star Wars and its fans and wrote the game as a personal insult. This is hyperbole at best — the most that he's said to that effect is that he "hates" certain aspects of the expanded universe lore. Beyond that, he's gone as far as to say that he loves Star Wars, and he highly praised the first game.
• Screwed by the Network: Twice even. LucasArts, the publisher, wanted to ensure that the game would be ready for a Christmas release. This led to an unrealistically short development cycle of 13 months, which ultimately left the game incomplete in many respects. Obsidian, the developers, were so annoyed about having to release an incomplete game that they offered to make a mass-content patch which would have restored it to its planned glory. LucasArts denied this request due to the Xbox version being unpatchable, as it was not Live-enabled. Modders have done their best to compensate, though.
• Shrug of God:
  • When asked about the popular "Kreia is Arren Kae" theory, Chris Avellone simply stated "Can't comment, but good catch. Sorry." He had used the phrase in the past when writing the Fallout Bible, where it generally meant "not intentional, but I like it", though there are still people who believe it might have a wider meaning this time (among many other hints, because his own revelation that Kreia was originally conceived as the Handmaiden's matriarch...).
  • In the same interview, Avellone was also asked about the similar "Nihilus is Zayne Carrick" theory, to which he replied, "Carrick didn’t exist at the time of the K2 storyline, but that's not to say there isn't a connection."
• Troubled Production:
  • Not only did the game had a very short development cycle slated and a stubborn publisher, but the company was just getting together and didn't even have an office yet. They set up in Feargus Urquhart's attic, and when someone turned on the microwave, the fuses would blow up and computers would go down. Also, the team of rookies was small and had to learn how to work with the new Odyssey Engine.
  • Due to delays on the part of LucasArts, Obsidian didn't have access to the original game until relatively late into production, when Knights of the Old Republic was released, which wasted a lot of time and forced them to scramble things right and left. The team had been actually forced to blindly pitch several ideas without knowing the previous game's plot beyond a simple description, which resulted in Avellone being forced to scrap basically everything from his first version.
  • According to Feargus Urquhart, they originally signed for a short development cycle, but after hitting a few milestones, LucasArts was pleasantly surprised of the rookie studio's work and decided to give Obsidian a few months of extension to complete the game... except they forgot to formally amend the contract, leaving this as a mere verbal agreement. Inevitably, after LucasArts experienced some financial difficulties, they changed their minds and said the game would be released earlier as originally planned, and Obsidian found itself suddenly running against the clock. Avellone and the rest of the studio have admitted they made a mistake by not trying to fight for more time as it had been originally stipulated.
  • With time running out, Obsidian had to abandon many of their most ambitious plans for the game and cut a lot of content, leading to aborted arcs, low music sampling quality and tons of unresolved bugs. Due to the rushed nature of these changes, it wasn't made in the best way, which Avellone would later lament (he later realized they should have reduced the number of party members and cut the minigames).
• What Could Have Been:
  • As part of BioWare's original concept for KOTOR2, they planned on giving the PC a master of the same species as Yoda, but secretly treacherous and evil, as an Evil Counterpart to Vandar. Although Obsidian abandoned this, it can be said Kreia inherited a lot from this role, while BW eventually transplanted it to their next original game, Jade Empire, where Master Li secretly trains you to take out Emperor Sun Hai, then kills you in turn and takes the throne for himself.
  • Before having access to the first game's plot, Avellone had thought to keep Revan as the game's protagonist. When he finally played the game and discovered Revan's story as an amnesiac Sith who had been forced to re-learn everything, Avellone decided to create a new protagonist, as "trying to reset Revan’s powers again felt like a bad move, and expanding them would have required more added to the system’s mechanics." Avellone has stated he felt Revan should have had more presence in The Sith Lords, but time and production didn't allow it.
  • In Avellone's original pitch, the game's protagonist would be contacted by the Handmaiden in order to help her free the Echani world from an evil council of matriarchs, which would be lead by the character that went to become Kreia. Only those characters and Peragus were retained in the new script.
  • LucasArts nixed a couple ideas for the game, among them Alderaan being one of the planets present in the story (see here) and Hanharr being trainable as a Dark Jedi like other party members (which went against an edict from George Lucas at the time banning Force-sensitive Wookiees).
  • Originally, it was going to be possible to recruit both the Handmaiden and Disciple, regardless of gender. The Mutually Exclusive Party Members would instead be Handmaiden for Light Side, Visas for Dark Side.
  • At some point, Nihilus was going to be revealed as the Exile's Literal Split Personality, which took its own form when the Exile renounced the Force at Malachor V. Avellone doesn't consider this canonical to the final game, although there's nothing that refutes it either.
  • As mentioned in Troubled Production above, a massive amount of content (which might have been up to one third of the game) was left by the wayside in Obsidian's rush to get the game out for its original scheduled release. Most of the removed material, though not all, would have been restored by a patch if LucasArts had not prevented them from releasing it.
  • Before the content cut, players were originally supposed to find clues on Korriban that lead them to a droid planet called M4-78, where they would encounter Lonna Vash alive along with a padawan, Kaah Ohtok, who had gone renegade after mistakenly believing that Vash had died. In the end, Vash would've sacrificed herself to buy the Exile time to escape Darth Sion. Some dialogue for this was recorded, but then M4-78 ended up getting cut. With no time to implement anything new for her (and too late to simply cut her entirely), they just had her killed off-screen by Sion on Korriban.
  • Obsidian planned an additional storyline about Atris which would have given birth to an entirely different final confrontation in Malachor V, but it was discarded due to the lack of time. Apparently, certain events could end up with Atris becoming a full-fledged Sith and stealing the identity of Darth Traya from Kreia. Their roles would be reversed: you would fight and possibly redeem Kreia in Telos, and then travel to Trayus to fight Atris there. Even after all of this was cut, the producers still thought of having Atris wear her Sith robes when you fight her in her academy, but they changed it because test players found it confusing.
  • In a related point to the previous, Atris herself was going to be a playable member of your party at some point, probably in a route after the Battle of Telos where she didn't become Traya.
  • Bao-Dur was going to die in the Battle of Telos while helping HK-47 get to the HK-50 factory and shut it down. A line about this, "make my sacrifice matter", remained in the game's files, and in the released game it's hinted at the very least that he doesn't survive the crash on Malachor V, given that instead of getting a playable segment of his own, it's instead his remote getting A Day in the Limelight, with him only making an appearance via pre-recorded hologram.
  • According to Avellone, one idea for the ending that could not be implemented was having the party split up between Light-Siders and Dark-Siders and fight between them.
  • Obsidian had plans for a sequel that unfortunately never got off the ground. In fact, the game presented Revan's departure and the True Sith Empire (as well as possibly Kreia declaring that there will always be a Darth Traya, even if it had its own sense within the story) as a Sequel Hook for future games or stories. The work that counts as a sort of direct sequel, Star Wars: The Old Republic, picked up this lead somewhat, but only in a completely different format and after in-story centuries.
  • Aspyr had announced that the Restored Content Mod would be released as free DLC for the Switch port in Q3 2022, but it never materialized and was ultimately cancelled for reasons currently unknown on 6/2/2023.