Yesterday, the studio behind the Nintendo Switch port of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords announced that it’s finally fixed a game-breaking bug that had previously rendered the game impossible to finish.
Previously, those who bought the port of the Obsidian Star Wars RPG were forced to cheat their way past game-crashing cutscenes. This was resolved via an in-game cheat menu, but it was still a band-aid solution at best. Kotaku attempted to use this method to skip past a game-breaking cutscene at the end of a late game questline, but boarding the ship would just cause the game to crash again. But rejoice: the buggy cutscenes have finally been fixed. Sort of.
After updating the game, I was finally able to play the previously problematic cutscenes without being ejected to my Switch home screen. There’s one caveat though. KOTOR 2 has a special ability that increases your movement speed, and it’s indispensable for a game that forces you to traverse quite a bit of empty space. The trade off is that the game forces a blurry filter over your screen while the skill is active. The new patch may have fixed the cutscenes, but it makes it so that these blurry filters carry over to said cutscenes. So you get gross looking screenshots like this:
KOTOR 2 has a lot of cinematic scenes that automatically play when you cross an invisible boundary, so you can’t really turn off the filter manually when they start playing. The blurriness stops after the skill duration has elapsed, but it has arguably made my experience a little bit worse. But hey, at least I can get around to other planets now!
Did Aspyr knowingly release an unfinishable game? Yes. Am I annoyed? Also yes. But I recognize that the vanilla version of KOTOR 2 was also released in a broken and buggy state. Maybe it’s one of those games that’s always doomed to imperfection. In any case, I recommend keeping multiple save backups just in case more horrible bugs await you at the very end of the game.
