Games
How Knights Of The Old Republic II made the jump to Mac after more than a decade.
A long, long time ago in a galaxy not particularly far away from here, beloved RPG developer Obsidian released Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. The 2004 sequel to BioWare’s groundbreaking original – and precursor to Mass Effect – the game let you cut your own path (quite literally, thanks to your trusty lightsaber) as a do-good Jedi or a sociopathic badass Sith. Despite some teething issues at launch (which fans of Obsidian have now become all too accustomed to expect of the studio) such as an entire scrapped planet hidden on the disc, the game was a hit, and in the decade since its reputation has only been enhanced.
Then last month, out of nowhere, the game itself got enhanced. The Mac version fans had given up on asking for years earlier dropped, along with an update to the PC and Linux editions to bring them in line. This was no mere ‘free DLC’, but an enormous upgrade that added widescreen and gamepad support, restored content cut by Obsidian at the last minute and even future-proofed the ancient game with support for 4K and even 5K displays (more than four times the resolution of full HD).
Obsidian, now hard at work on the MMO Armored Warfare, had nothing to do with this surprise update: in fact, it was the work of Aspyr Media, a small Texas studio that’s been porting Windows PC games to Mac since the days of Tomb Raider II, and more recently adapting them for iPhone too. To find out just how this unprecedented game upgrade came about and whether it points to a release for KOTOR II on iPad, we caught up with Aspyr’s vice president of publishing, Elizabeth Howard. Who shot first? Obsidian, EA or Aspyr? Read on to find out.
You guys have been around since 1996, and you’ve dealt with bringing some of the biggest games to Apple’s platform – what’s behind the process of bringing those titles to Mac?
Elizabeth Howard: The process is heavily reliant on our relationships. We really love the people we get to work with in our industry and have known them now for years. One of the core reasons these big games exist on Mac is because our partners have the customers’ best interests at heart – meaning that from a monetary perspective, as Mac is still a relatively small platform.
We start with relationships and pitching ideas for potential new content. Once we hear “Yes!” we get moving on development. We natively develop all of our games – as opposed to emulation – so we require source code access. If we’re allowed, we get started when the PC counterpart is around Alpha and we launch simultaneously with the PC version.
Do you think attitudes to Mac gaming have changed in recent years? Is the platform less of an also-ran now?
I think the Mac is definitely gaining legitimacy as a gaming platform. More and more people are carrying around capable gaming machines in the form of MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Plus, Apple is making some big moves with Metal for Mac in terms of enabling more flexibility for developers to push the hardware. It’s exciting and growing.
How do you decide what games to port over? Do you have certain agreements with publishers? Do they come to you, or do you go to them?
For the Mac, almost all of our content comes from us approaching a publisher; very rarely do people seek us out. In terms of content, we have established partners who we feel we have a better shot of licensing from. Other than that, we really look at the quality of the game and what the market opportunity is. There are certain thresholds we look for to make sure that there is a positive return on investing money, time and resources in a game.
Tell us how about the recent update for KOTOR II came about. Were you surprised when you were asked, or did you pitch to do it?
Aspyr had ported the original KOTOR to Mac, and eventually to iOS, but we never did KOTOR II, despite wanting to. It’s long been on our wish list of titles that never made the leap. So we decided to approach LucasArts about bringing KOTOR II to Mac, and they said yes. Once we dug in on the project, we realised that to just port the game to Mac was an incomplete story. The game had a huge modding community since its original launch, but that community was always disconnected from Steam, where the game was now primarily sold. Additionally, there was a lot of clean-up work to make the game better for today, including widescreen resolution support, controller support, bug fixes and Steam feature integration (cloud, achievements, Workshop, et cetera). While we felt these improvements were important in order to release the game on Mac, we also felt it’d be unfair to leave the other Steam platforms (Windows and Linux/SteamOS) hanging. Fortunately Disney was supportive of the update.
Can you think of any instance where you – or any studio, for that matter – have ever put so much work into updating a game so old?
Ha – that’s a good question. Not off the top of my head, but honestly, it’s something we’re happy to do more of. We actually really enjoyed the work and are so happy the audience has appreciated it so much.
What went into bringing 5K resolution support to a 10-year-old game?
This is a benefit of our Mac expertise. Retina/4K/5K resolutions are things we’ve been solving for ever since Apple introduced them to their hardware lines in 2012. We’re not always able to support those resolutions with modern games due to the intense graphic needs of newer games. Since KOTOR II is an older title, and less graphically intensive, we were able to take advantage of these resolutions on Mac and also PC.
How long did the whole process take, and how many people were involved? Were there any unexpected issues? What was the most time consuming part of the whole process?
The process took longer than it probably should have just because, frankly, we weren’t great on the planning side of things, but in total it was around six months with a few engineers and a great QA/Production team. We got started and had a lot of “Oh yeah, we should do xxx” conversations during development that could have taken less time had we made those decisions on the front end – all lessons learned. I think the biggest win was really our coordination with the modding team behind the super popular The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod. We wanted the mod to be Steam Workshop-compatible, but we didn’t know what their reception would be to what we wanted to do, and we had to do some forum chatting and Skype calls to get things going. Fortunately, they were excited about what we were doing with the updates and were able to be there with the biggest mod on launch day.
It’s been well over a decade since the original game launched – why did you decide right now was a good time to bring it back to today’s audiences? How did you decide what achievements to add into the game?
Really the decision was driven by our desire to do the Mac version, then asking ourselves what the best Mac version would be. That, in turn, affected development on the other platforms. There are plenty of older titles that never made their way to Mac that we’d still love to do, so time isn’t that huge of a factor for us. It’s really our desire to complete the Mac library of content that motivates us to try and get those games.
As for achievements, that was really our QA/Production team having fun! And now that we’ve launched, there are actually a lot more great achievement suggestions in the forums, some of which we may even be able to implement in a future update. Doing all this work on an old game is really us just trying to do something cool.
How about bringing the original KOTOR to mobile – do you think it works well on touchscreens?
We really think KOTOR is a great example of a premium or fully-featured 60-hour-plus game on a mobile device. Fortunately, the gameplay style in KOTOR lends itself to mobile really well in terms of pacing and how you interact with the story. It especially sings on iPad, where the Retina display makes the graphics look sharp, even by today’s standards, not to mention the extra space for your fingers. We love it on mobile.
What challenges did you face with that port? Was it mostly user interface?
User interface and file size are the biggest challenges in bringing over these types of games to mobile. A lot of time went into user interface, and we still go back and think there are ways we can improve that experience. The game is also quite large, which is further complicated by supporting more languages. We’ll always be learning, and since we’re Aspyr, probably updating even though the world may not think it makes much business sense.
How did the game perform? Can you tell us if there are any plans to bring KOTOR II to mobile?
From Aspyr’s perspective, KOTOR on iOS and Android did great! [Google Play lists Android downloads for the game between 100,000 and 500,000] Frankly, premium is a tough market on mobile, but we believe there is still a lot of room for great experiences on mobile platforms. We’d love to see KOTOR II on mobile, but there currently aren’t any plans to speak of. We get asked this a bunch, for good reason, so we encourage folks to sign our petition. Maybe we can make enough noise to make it happen!
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