Tell us how about the recent update for KOTOR II came about. Were you surprised when you were asked, or did you pitch to do it?
Aspyr had ported the original KOTOR to Mac, and eventually to iOS, but we never did KOTOR II, despite wanting to. It’s long been on our wish list of titles that never made the leap. So we decided to approach LucasArts about bringing KOTOR II to Mac, and they said yes. Once we dug in on the project, we realised that to just port the game to Mac was an incomplete story. The game had a huge modding community since its original launch, but that community was always disconnected from Steam, where the game was now primarily sold. Additionally, there was a lot of clean-up work to make the game better for today, including widescreen resolution support, controller support, bug fixes and Steam feature integration (cloud, achievements, Workshop, et cetera). While we felt these improvements were important in order to release the game on Mac, we also felt it’d be unfair to leave the other Steam platforms (Windows and Linux/SteamOS) hanging. Fortunately Disney was supportive of the update.
Can you think of any instance where you – or any studio, for that matter – have ever put so much work into updating a game so old?
Ha – that’s a good question. Not off the top of my head, but honestly, it’s something we’re happy to do more of. We actually really enjoyed the work and are so happy the audience has appreciated it so much.
What went into bringing 5K resolution support to a 10-year-old game?
This is a benefit of our Mac expertise. Retina/4K/5K resolutions are things we’ve been solving for ever since Apple introduced them to their hardware lines in 2012. We’re not always able to support those resolutions with modern games due to the intense graphic needs of newer games. Since KOTOR II is an older title, and less graphically intensive, we were able to take advantage of these resolutions on Mac and also PC.
How long did the whole process take, and how many people were involved? Were there any unexpected issues? What was the most time consuming part of the whole process?
The process took longer than it probably should have just because, frankly, we weren’t great on the planning side of things, but in total it was around six months with a few engineers and a great QA/Production team. We got started and had a lot of “Oh yeah, we should do xxx” conversations during development that could have taken less time had we made those decisions on the front end – all lessons learned. I think the biggest win was really our coordination with the modding team behind the super popular The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod. We wanted the mod to be Steam Workshop-compatible, but we didn’t know what their reception would be to what we wanted to do, and we had to do some forum chatting and Skype calls to get things going. Fortunately, they were excited about what we were doing with the updates and were able to be there with the biggest mod on launch day.
It’s been well over a decade since the original game launched – why did you decide right now was a good time to bring it back to today’s audiences? How did you decide what achievements to add into the game?
Really the decision was driven by our desire to do the Mac version, then asking ourselves what the best Mac version would be. That, in turn, affected development on the other platforms. There are plenty of older titles that never made their way to Mac that we’d still love to do, so time isn’t that huge of a factor for us. It’s really our desire to complete the Mac library of content that motivates us to try and get those games.
As for achievements, that was really our QA/Production team having fun! And now that we’ve launched, there are actually a lot more great achievement suggestions in the forums, some of which we may even be able to implement in a future update. Doing all this work on an old game is really us just trying to do something cool.