You’re speaking about Knights of the Previous Republic 2. KOTOR 2 had a troubled improvement cycle. The writer, LucasArts, had a reasonably aggressive launch schedule deliberate for the KOTOR video games which mainly made it untenable for the unique KOTOR dev Bioware to deal with making the sequel inside the timeframe LucasArts needed. Bioware’s management advised providing the title to Obsidian as a consequence of their good working relations on previous titles. LucasArts signed Obsidian to construct KOTOR 2.
ALTLucasArts initially gave Obsidian 14-16 months after the launch of KOTOR 1 to complete KOTOR 2, which ought to have put them with a tentative launch date of early 2005. Obsidian went into improvement being extraordinarily formidable with their planning for the sport’s scope… overly formidable, the leaders would later admit in interviews. This brought on them to run aground when LucasArts moved the ship date up from 2005 to the top of 2004 – they had been already considerably delayed as a consequence of their overly formidable mission scope; dropping a number of months of improvement time they had been relying on was not one thing they predicted.
ALTWhen the brand new ship date got here down, Obsidian needed to make a bunch of very exhausting selections with the intention to ship one thing. The partially-built endgame content material was locked off from the sport however left on the disc. That is, largely, as a result of leaving unused belongings on disc often ensures extra stability than it dangers by eradicating these belongings in case any of them are behind-the-scenes dependencies for different belongings or sport options. It’s additionally as a result of it takes so much much less effort to simply lock these belongings off than it does to ensure they’ve been absolutely faraway from the disc. Obsidian mainly crunched themselves into goo with the intention to cobble collectively an entire new, completely different, simplified ending and ship the sport on time.
ALTThese incomplete belongings, nevertheless, had been nonetheless locked away on the disc when the sport shipped. Time handed and sport modders found out how the sport labored. They later found these belongings within the sport recordsdata and found out the way to extract them and make them work with the sport. They had been collectively capable of put within the dev time wanted to deliver that alternate ending content material to a playable state. It was really fairly widespread within the previous days to depart minimize (however inert) content material on disc for stability causes. Knowledge miners and modders generally discovered the recordsdata, however that content material is usually innocent because it’s inaccessible more often than not. That content material received minimize for a purpose – often as a result of we would have liked to seek out room within the schedule to do one thing greater precedence. On the finish of the day, we solely have a finite quantity of dev time to work on the mission, so it’s essential to complete the best precedence duties first.
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