Suppose you’re a game developer, and you create an immensely popular game. What do you do for a sequel? Well, if you’re BioWare, and the game is Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR), you hand the responsibility off to Obsidian Software, and you concentrate on the Xbox role-playing game Jade Empire instead. That seems like an odd choice, but Obsidian Software consists mainly of former Black Isle Studios employees, and BioWare and Black Isle worked well together in the past (with Black Isle using BioWare’s Infinity Engine to create games like Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment).

So with the ball in their court, Obsidian Software pretty much decided to make Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords (KOTOR II) into a more complicated version of KOTOR. That’s not a huge surprise. KOTOR was a pretty casual game -- which probably didn’t hurt its popularity any, since it meant anybody could play it -- and so KOTOR II could hardly have been less complicated, and Obsidian surely wasn’t going to make a carbon copy. Fortunately, the added complexity doesn’t mean the game is more difficult to play -- you can still just whack people with your lightsaber if you want -- but it means there are more layers to deal with, and there are more ramifications to what you do.