Let's face it: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords is going to be one of the biggest games this year. It's Star Wars, and it's the sequel to one of last year's best titles on any platform--and that pedigree alone is enough to situate it firmly at the top of many gamers' most-wanted lists. But thankfully, KOTOR II is also being developed by the dedicated team of individuals at Obsidian Entertainment, a group that has collectively worked on some of the most hallowed RPGs of the last decade. In other words, it's a safe bet that the game won't be relying on name and legacy alone.

In our first Knights of the Old Republic II designer diary, we'll hear from LucasArts' Mike Gallo (who worked on the original KOTOR) and Obsidian's Chris Parker (whose resume includes classics like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale) about the trials and tribulations of creating an early demo version of KOTOR II for this year's E3.

Post-E3 Thoughts

Introduction

Obsidian has some sizable shoes to fill as it creates the follow-up to last year's biggest RPG.

We had a lot to do at E3 this year. And it's not like we just needed to show any game...we were showing the sequel to KOTOR, which won over 40 different "Game of the Year" awards in 2003! It was a tall task for both Obsidian Entertainment and LucasArts to illustrate all the ways we wanted to improve the game and ensure the fans that we had every intention of bringing a worthy sequel to the plate.

This article was written collectively by Mike Gallo, LucasArts producer, and Chris Parker, Obsidian producer. We both knew this E3 would be important, and we both knew that since it was so soon after the release of KOTOR, gamers would be apprehensive: can it be done, will it be done right, and will it live up to the first game?

Getting Ready for E3

We started talking about E3 when The Sith Lords was still in its infancy. The story overview for the sequel was drafted before the first game hit the shelves. Sure, it saw a lot of revisions, and even some major rewrites between then and now, but we had already been working on the game for over nine months by the time the show rolled around. E3 was going to be important from day one because it's the only E3 the game is going to see. Originally, we came up with a huge list of the stuff we wanted to show. To be honest, it would probably have taken a solid half an hour to do a demo that included all of the things we wanted to do. Unfortunately, that doesn't make sense for most of the E3 crowd. For every editor and gamer, there's at least one buyer or mass media guy. And even the editors are pretty much booked solid these days. In the end, you maybe have about 5 to 10 minutes to show your game at E3 if you are going to try to show it to everybody, so we had to cut down our list.

Cutting down the list of what we wanted to show was actually pretty easy for a variety of reasons. Because the game was on a short schedule, it was therefore scheduled unlike any game Obsidian (with their Black Isle Studios experiences) had scheduled before. It was scheduled out in stages, which would be most beneficial for the designers to make radical changes with the least impact. While being concepted, game levels were blocked out with rough geometry so the designers could start placing creatures and characters. After it was determined that these ugly but semi-functional levels worked, we went on to build the level geometry first pass or we went back to make changes. These levels often had base lighting and miscellaneous errors. Finally, after everything had been checked out in these passes, we would go through revision and polishing stages while we resolved any remaining issues.

Rough, low-polygon versions of the levels were used for concept purposes.

The team quickly built out three of these rough levels for E3.

None of the levels were polished to a shipping state when we were ready to choose E3 levels. So, a month before the show, we just picked three levels and put them on the schedule to actually finish them.

We knew we could get some levels looking good, and it came down the wire that the demo we had been doing needed to fit into five minutes. LucasArts started working on a script and Obsidian provided feedback on what would be featured in the demo.