5 Essential KOTOR Mods

Recent news of SWTOR going free-to-play may have you thinking back on the spiritual predecessor of the MMORPG: Knights of the Old Republic. Maybe you’re a veteran of the series who has played through KOTOR multiple times, or maybe you’re buying it now to get some context for SWTOR. Whatever the case, you’ll want to play with mods.

So for anyone intent on playing KOTOR, we’ve assembled this list of five essential mods that will enhance your experience. Note that this isn’t strictly a list of the best mods, but rather the mods that you shouldn’t do without.

5. Brotherhood of Shadow: Solomon’s Revenge

This mod is essentially a fan-made expansion pack, boasting an epic storyline which encompasses new quests, new party members, new fully voiced characters, new items, and new areas, adding hours of additional gameplay to KOTOR. It even includes custom-modeled areas in addition to reskins of existing location models, and has been executed, overall, with a high level of polish.

4. Bastila Romance Enhancement

I don’t know how prudish the developers thought we are, but the whole fade to black before even seeing characters kiss is a degree of unnecessary censorship that can only be explained as a cop-out to avoid animating a kissing scene. Here’s a mod that actually shows some kissing during Bastila’s romance scene, and it includes a vital fix to a bug that could prevent the romance path from progressing entirely after the scene.

3. K1 Force Pack (2.0)

This mod adds 18 distinct Force powers to the game, available during character level-up. Seven of these are lightsaber forms, and the rest are regular powers, with 4 Light Side powers, 4 Universal powers, and 3 Dark Side powers.

As the mod effectively doubles the total number of selectable Force powers, the author vastly increased the number of powers that can be chosen each level-up to allow players to make use of the new powers. Some balance tweaks are included as well, such as slightly increased opponent difficulty and the elimination of cross-class skill penalties.

2. Enhanced Merchants for K1

Here’s a mod that makes merchants more useful. 90% of all the merchants you see will carry both a greater quantity of items in general, as well as a greater amount of useful items. A veteran KOTOR player can easily rack up more credits than he can spend — this mod seeks to fix that.

1. Super Skip Taris

Fed up of having to go through the Taris sequence every time you replay KOTOR? This mod allows you to skip Endar Spire, skip Taris while taking the Light Side options, skip Taris while taking the Dark Side options, all without sacrificing what you would normally lose by skipping the content. That means you receive all the items you would have otherwise received, all party members, Dark Side or Light Side points, experience points, and credits.