Working with an intrepid international team of modders, project co-lead Zbigniew “zbyl2″ Staniewicz managed to revive cut content from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, and making the mod, TSLRCM Version 1.8, available for download.
The project, which began in 2009 and involved contributions from people all over the world (including Poland, Holland and the USA), restores a whole host of content that was originally left out of the final game due to time constraints. Zbyl2 spoke to PC Gamer about this painstaking process, talking about why and how specific elements were restored (or in some cases constructed), his own impressions about the content, and the time and energy that was put into it.
When asked if the team had salvaged any work from a similar, defunct project once attempted by Team Gizka, he answered that he and the rest of the team had in fact started "from scratch." The team made hundreds of fixes and restorations, detailing all of them in an impressively long list on their forum.
He even admitted that there are more changes to come: M4-78EP, which involves the cut Droids' Planet elements of the game, not only needs to be restored but actually recreated, including recording voice acting for missing dialogues.
"Indeed, M4-78EP, which is going to add M4-78, the Droids’ Planet that was cut from the game, back. Reason it’s not part of TSLRCM is fact that there aren’t many dialogs left, so we have to create lot of content ourselves, which doesn’t really fit under “restoration” category. Of course, it’s going to be fully compatible with TSLRCM 1.8," he said, adding,
"One thing I’d like to add here, so it doesn’t seem like M4-78EP is going to be 100% new content – we use models that were left in game files, and some main plot points are based on what we were able to recover from game dialog files. Also, living Master Vash is restored (she was originally supposed to be on droid’s planet, not Korriban), along with her dialog, which is fully recorded, though unavailable in game, even with TSLRCM."
Read the rest of the interview here.
