Star Wars is like poetry; it rhymes, to paraphrase George Lucas. A few years ago, we were all agog at the news that Knights of the Old Republic, one of the most beloved Star Wars video games ever made, was going to be getting the lavish modern remake treatment. Then those plans seemed to largely fall apart, and whether or not the return of Revan was still on the cards remains nebulous. Now, there is another: a tiny glimmer of hope, and a lot of familiar uncertainty, that one of the other most beloved Star Wars video games ever made, KOTOR‘s sequel The Sith Lords, may have also been getting the remake treatment.
The news comes out of an extensive report by Stephen Totilo’s Game File, analyzing reams of legal documents covering attempts to bring an infamous fan-created PC mod for Knights of the Old Republic II to consoles as part of the game’s modern ports by video game studio Aspyr. According to those documents, Aspyr, who had previously also been working on the announced, modernized version of Knights of the Old Republic back in 2021 alongside Saber Interactive, was also developing a video game codenamed “Project Juliet,” a similarly scoped modern remake of Knights of the Old Republic II.
“Juliet was the code name for a project where we were going to do a full remake of KOTOR 2,” a deposition from Lucasfilm Games vice president Douglas Reilly acquired by Game File reads in part, “with modern art, modern gameplay, you know, keep the story and the characters and the general—the general content of KOTOR 2, but remake it for modern hardware and modern machines with updated graphics and all those kinds of things. It was something we were discussing with Aspyr.”
First released just shy of eighteen months after the original game in late 2004, The Sith Lords, developed by the legendary RPG studio Obsidian, followed another Jedi soldier from the war against the Mandalorians, the Exile, five years after the events of the first game as they reawoke to their previously thought severed connection to the Force and reckoned with the Sith’s seemingly near-total extermination of the Jedi.
The sequel is regarded in equal parts appraisal and infamy, the former for its darker, more morally complex character work and its critical positioning of both the player’s agency in an RPG and the nature of the Force in the Star Wars galaxy at large as tools of fate, the latter for the game’s extremely limited development cycle leading to a messy final product, littered with intriguing compromises, rushed denouements, and perhaps most infamously of all, a ream of cut and incomplete content hidden within the game’s files, never fully implemented.
It is that latter infamous reputation that is the subject of Game File’s full investigation, a deep dive into a piece of fan-made content almost as famous as The Sith Lords itself: the The Sith Lords Restored Content Modification, or TSLRCM for short. The mod made multiple extensive tweaks to the PC version of KOTOR II, reintegrating reams of dialogue and cutscene elements from the unfinished content, including tweaks to the game’s endings and a whole late-game dungeon based around the returning KOTOR party member, the nefarious assassin droid HK-47. Now considered an almost essential accompaniment to playing the game in the contemporary, TSLRCM has only ever been available to PC players… and that almost changed when Aspyr brought KOTOR II to the Nintendo Switch in 2022.
The studio originally shockingly announced that its remastered port of KOTOR II on Switch would include content restored by the TSLRCM, the first time that content would ever be available in an official capacity and on console. But a month and a half after the Switch port was released in the summer of 2022, Aspyr announced that plans to bring the TSLRCM to the Switch version of the game had been scrapped.
According to the court filings uncovered by Game File as part of a false advertising suit brought against Aspyr, the planned deal between Aspyr and several modders involved in the creation of TSLRCM ultimately fell apart due to legal concerns from Disney over accurate crediting for the mod’s content. But the depositions also mentioned that the in-development remake of KOTOR II had also planned to remake and integrate that deleted content in some capacity as well.
The actual question that remains is whether or not the KOTOR II remake is still in development, as is the perpetual case with the actually-announced KOTOR remake. According to Game File, “Project Juliet” was still being worked on as of March 2025, at the time of the deposition, but there’s been no confirmation if development is ongoing, leaving the remake in an even more nebulous state than the remake of the first game, which has largely operated in radio silence since its official unveiling four years ago.
Time will tell if either entry in the KOTOR duology will ever see the remade light of day, but some hope is better than no hope at all.
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