A decade later, Obsidian's KOTOR II gets a big modder-assisted update

Mac port house Aspyr Media brought BioWare's classic RPG Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords to Mac and Linux this week, and in so doing it solicited feedback from the game's vibrant modding community on how best to update the original game with a slew of new features.

This is notable because, despite the efforts of companies like GOG and Aspyr, it's still rare to see an 11-year-old game ported to new platforms. Moreover, it's almost unheard of for that process to include patching the original PC release to support modern conveniences like gamepads, widescreen support and Steam Workshop. 

But that's exactly what happened to Knights of the Old Republic II this week, which shipped at the end of 2004 with glaring technical difficulties and missing plot elements that the game's modding community has since worked hard to address.

Zbigniew Staniewicz, a modder who contributed to the well-respected Restored Content mod for KotOR II, told Eurogamer that "I wasn't directly involved. I gave some feedback about achievements and our team made some suggestions [to Aspyr] about things that could be fixed, that we couldn't fix ourselves."