Disney lawyers stopped Star Wars KOTOR II port DLC from hitting the Switch, a full remake was discussed

When Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords was revealed for the original Switch back in 2022, one line at the end of its reveal trailer excited long-time fans: “Coming soon: Restored Content DLC”. It promised a release, in an official capacity, of a much loved fan-favourite mod for the 2004 original. Now, thanks to detailed reporting from Stephen Totilo, we know why that DLC never actually materialised.

The promised add-on was effectively an official console release of the famous Sith Lords Restored Content Mod. This fan-made project restored cut scenes, dialogue, character moments, and even added in an expanded finale based on cut content. Because of this, the mod became widely regarded as the “complete” way to play KOTOR II on PC.

According to internal emails, contracts, and testimony uncovered by Game File, Aspyr worked directly with key modders to bring this content to Switch. Permissions were seemingly granted, files were delivered, and Nintendo was said to be supportive. The sticking point turned out to be legal ownership.

Because this wide-ranging mod included contributions from many volunteers, including coders, voice actors, translators and more, Disney (and in turn Lucasfilm) were required to clear rights from every contributor before it could actually ship as official DLC. Several of those people could either not be located or didn’t respond.

Michael Blair of Aspyr noted that these “efforts to credit everyone who contributed to the mod” ended up spooking Disney’s legal team.

Ways to get round this roadblock were explored (such as rebuilding the content in-house), but after more than a year of looking for a good solution, a path forward wasn’t to be. Aspyr announced in June 2023 that the Restored Content DLC would not be released on Switch and offered game codes as a way to make-good on the broken promise.

Of course, a false advertising lawsuit over the cancelled DLC, followed. This has since been settled.

Stephen’s excellent reporting on this story goes in to great detail, covering all the ins-and-outs of the legal process here — it’s well worth a read. For Switch players however, one thing is clear: this version of KOTOR II on the Nintendo Switch will remain unmodified.

The big tidbit to take away from this report? Well, Game File notes that a project within Lucasfilm, going under the codename ‘Juliet’, describes a full-on modern remake of KOTOR II. This remake was seen within internal roadmap documents as late as March of this year.

Deposition documents shared the following exchange:

“Juliet was the code name for a project where we were going to do a full remake of KOTOR II with modern art, modern gameplay, you know, keep the story and the characters and the general—the general content of KOTOR II, but remake it for modern hardware and modern machines with updated graphics and all those kind of things. It was something we were discussing with Aspyr.”

Sounds like the project is being spoken about in the past tense here, but it’s interesting all the same!