Today I found a leaked version of the Knights of the Old Republic II The Sith Lords Restoration Project (Or KOTOR2TSLRP for short) from June 2008. For those who don't know this was a game which saw a three month cut in it's development time due to Lucas Arts being an idiot. As a result when released it was buggy to the point of being broken and had seen drastic cuts to content. One whole planet winked out of existence and many key character moments, including at least one death, were excised.
A small team called Gizka have for four years been working in a bizarrely secretive manner on restoring the tragically twunted Knights Of The Old Republic II. The makers turning down most offers of help and not releasing much in the way of details regarding each new beta. The Project has seemingly been in a closed beta for 3 years and the leak is from a year old version with the mod team refusing to release to the public despite many claims from the beta testers that the current version is stable. Things took a turn this time last year where one tester posted a torrent for the beta and the effect was overwhelming condemnation both from the makers and elements of the forum community.
Now I can understand these feelings if this had been a commercial project (loss of revenue, copyright bypass etc) but a free fan project? This is compounded by the fact the Mods website had been seemingly dead for a year with the last announcement being a year old at the time.
I was wondering what you, relatively distanced mind thinkers, feel about this. Is any leak that goes against the makers wishes inherently wrong? Was it wrong for Gizka to be so secretive in the light of fervent fans who were still talking about the project 3 years on? Should the project have been open source and more community based from the start?
Personally, my feeling is that even in it's currently twunted state, KOTOR 2 is one of my top five RPGs ever and though sorely tempted the claims of late glitches put me off the leaked patch. Still news that a new version, the first in 18 months, has been put into a closed beta and that there is only one version left before the public release might give all this a happy ending after all.
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4261077/KOTOR2__TSLRP_1.0b8_(The_Sith_Lords_Restoration_Project)
A small team called Gizka have for four years been working in a bizarrely secretive manner on restoring the tragically twunted Knights Of The Old Republic II. The makers turning down most offers of help and not releasing much in the way of details regarding each new beta. The Project has seemingly been in a closed beta for 3 years and the leak is from a year old version with the mod team refusing to release to the public despite many claims from the beta testers that the current version is stable. Things took a turn this time last year where one tester posted a torrent for the beta and the effect was overwhelming condemnation both from the makers and elements of the forum community.
Now I can understand these feelings if this had been a commercial project (loss of revenue, copyright bypass etc) but a free fan project? This is compounded by the fact the Mods website had been seemingly dead for a year with the last announcement being a year old at the time.
I was wondering what you, relatively distanced mind thinkers, feel about this. Is any leak that goes against the makers wishes inherently wrong? Was it wrong for Gizka to be so secretive in the light of fervent fans who were still talking about the project 3 years on? Should the project have been open source and more community based from the start?
Personally, my feeling is that even in it's currently twunted state, KOTOR 2 is one of my top five RPGs ever and though sorely tempted the claims of late glitches put me off the leaked patch. Still news that a new version, the first in 18 months, has been put into a closed beta and that there is only one version left before the public release might give all this a happy ending after all.
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4261077/KOTOR2__TSLRP_1.0b8_(The_Sith_Lords_Restoration_Project)
