And in this review, I will air my grievances with the game in context of its state today:
While my main review for this game said it "ages like a fine wine" I mean that in regards to the story. At a technical level, it only feels slightly more stable than before, and only if you include the Restored Content mod and the community bugfix.
I've just played through the whole thing again for what must be the first time in nearly a decade. It's not that I haven't tried — I've tried many times. But somehow on every attempt between now and the pre-Steam editions of the game, I discovered yet another major bug that either deflated my momentum or broke my save file entirely.
It's been 7 years since Aspyr took the reigns on this game to begin porting and updating it, and yet there are still bugs that have been with us since the original release and new ones besides. When the Switch edition came out earlier this year, I was excited think that'd be the culmination of all the care I thought this game was getting over the years.
Instead, I hit a new game breaking glitch on my way off Peragus and that playthrough was scrapped yet again.
It's going to be more broken for more people now that high refresh rate monitors are more common and enabling v-sync to fix the loss of movement after battle won't work. You have to get a 3rd party program to limit the framerate to 90 or less.
The command queue is still janked. If you had actions queued on a target that dies, instead of clearing them they'll retarget randomly as generic attacks. Pathing issues will sometimes clear queues even if you are already in range; abilities will sometimes get double cast; etc, etc.
One absolutely choice issue — which I'm not sure how much is the Restored Content mod and how much is the game — but if the engine ever fails to find or load a voice over line, it will set the display time of the associated text to zero, skipping the line entirely. This has been happening on the Steam version at least as long as I can remember, and regularly causes entire conversations to be skipped.
The bink video playback was surprisingly stable for me this go around, but it has been a large culprit of crashes in the past, and I think I figured out why: I enabled ReShade on the game after a while for kicks and giggles and it seemed to reinitialize after every video finished, leading me to believe that the graphics API itself is being reinitialized after videos.
A rather dangerous task to do so frequently.
On that point there are a plethora of other QoL and simple improvements Aspyr could be adding but for some reason are still relegated to mods that likely won't be maintained for too much longer. Like the "stretched UI" fix, why the hell do we still need a mod for that?
Also the kerfuffle with the Switch release of the restored content mod is laughable to me since a good amount of it was just fixing locked content that was already in the game. Why aren't those kinds of fixes part of the main release now?
Some games, like Halo 3, should be preserved in as close to their original state as possible... but Halo 3 wasn't blatantly unfinished when it came out.
It would have been cool if we were at the point where Aspyr could be tinkering around with adding optional new improvements to the game, like Ambient Occlusion, a high poly model pack, a high res texture pack and the like... but it seems we're still somehow a long way from that.
It also really doesn't help that I've fallen out of love for D20 based combat systems, and that's as someone who started playing Neverwinter Nights at the age of 4 and to this day still regularly plays D&D. The balance in this game is completely whacked. That could be argued to be some of its charm at this point, but I doubt this game will appeal to a new crowd as it is. D&D 3.5 based systems give you all the rope you need to hang yourself.
There's a quick and effective solution to this, too: put a respec option in the game (and for the purist let it be disabled by some means).
I've ranted enough now, though. Despite everything I've said, this is still one of my favorite games of all time, and I want other people to be able to enjoy it and appreciate this very different take on the Star Wars universe.
But as it stands now I can't in good faith recommend people gamble their time on it.
While my main review for this game said it "ages like a fine wine" I mean that in regards to the story. At a technical level, it only feels slightly more stable than before, and only if you include the Restored Content mod and the community bugfix.
I've just played through the whole thing again for what must be the first time in nearly a decade. It's not that I haven't tried — I've tried many times. But somehow on every attempt between now and the pre-Steam editions of the game, I discovered yet another major bug that either deflated my momentum or broke my save file entirely.
It's been 7 years since Aspyr took the reigns on this game to begin porting and updating it, and yet there are still bugs that have been with us since the original release and new ones besides. When the Switch edition came out earlier this year, I was excited think that'd be the culmination of all the care I thought this game was getting over the years.
Instead, I hit a new game breaking glitch on my way off Peragus and that playthrough was scrapped yet again.
It's going to be more broken for more people now that high refresh rate monitors are more common and enabling v-sync to fix the loss of movement after battle won't work. You have to get a 3rd party program to limit the framerate to 90 or less.
The command queue is still janked. If you had actions queued on a target that dies, instead of clearing them they'll retarget randomly as generic attacks. Pathing issues will sometimes clear queues even if you are already in range; abilities will sometimes get double cast; etc, etc.
One absolutely choice issue — which I'm not sure how much is the Restored Content mod and how much is the game — but if the engine ever fails to find or load a voice over line, it will set the display time of the associated text to zero, skipping the line entirely. This has been happening on the Steam version at least as long as I can remember, and regularly causes entire conversations to be skipped.
The bink video playback was surprisingly stable for me this go around, but it has been a large culprit of crashes in the past, and I think I figured out why: I enabled ReShade on the game after a while for kicks and giggles and it seemed to reinitialize after every video finished, leading me to believe that the graphics API itself is being reinitialized after videos.
A rather dangerous task to do so frequently.
On that point there are a plethora of other QoL and simple improvements Aspyr could be adding but for some reason are still relegated to mods that likely won't be maintained for too much longer. Like the "stretched UI" fix, why the hell do we still need a mod for that?
Also the kerfuffle with the Switch release of the restored content mod is laughable to me since a good amount of it was just fixing locked content that was already in the game. Why aren't those kinds of fixes part of the main release now?
Some games, like Halo 3, should be preserved in as close to their original state as possible... but Halo 3 wasn't blatantly unfinished when it came out.
It would have been cool if we were at the point where Aspyr could be tinkering around with adding optional new improvements to the game, like Ambient Occlusion, a high poly model pack, a high res texture pack and the like... but it seems we're still somehow a long way from that.
It also really doesn't help that I've fallen out of love for D20 based combat systems, and that's as someone who started playing Neverwinter Nights at the age of 4 and to this day still regularly plays D&D. The balance in this game is completely whacked. That could be argued to be some of its charm at this point, but I doubt this game will appeal to a new crowd as it is. D&D 3.5 based systems give you all the rope you need to hang yourself.
There's a quick and effective solution to this, too: put a respec option in the game (and for the purist let it be disabled by some means).
I've ranted enough now, though. Despite everything I've said, this is still one of my favorite games of all time, and I want other people to be able to enjoy it and appreciate this very different take on the Star Wars universe.
But as it stands now I can't in good faith recommend people gamble their time on it.