Yesterday, the studio behind the Nintendo Switch port of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords announced that it had finally fixed a bug that broke the game that had previously made the game impossible to finish.
Previously, those who bought the port of the Obsidian Star Wars RPG were forced to cheat beyond the game’s crash scenes. This was solved using an in-game cheat menu, but it was still a band-aid solution at best. Kotaku tried to use this method to skip a scene that broke the game at the end of a mission line at the end of the game, but boarding the ship would only cause the game to crash again. But rejoice: the movie scenes have finally been fixed with bugs. Sort of.
After updating the game, I was finally able to play the previously problematic cut scenes without being ejected from my Switch home screen. However, there is a caveat. KOTOR 2 has a special ability that increases your movement speed, and is indispensable for a game that forces you to traverse quite a lot of empty space. The downside is that the game forces a blurry filter on the screen while the ability is active. The new patch may have fixed the movie scenes, but it does cause these blurry filters to move to these scenes. So get dirty-looking screenshots like this:
Screenshot: Aspyr / Obsidian / Kotaku
KOTOR 2 has many movie scenes that play automatically when you cross an invisible limit, so you can’t turn off the filter manually when they start playing. The blur stops once the skill duration has elapsed, but it has certainly made my experience a little worse. But hey, at least now I can go to other planets!
Did Aspyr consciously launch an endless game? Yes. Am I upset? Also yes. But I recognize that the vanilla version of KOTOR 2 was also released in a broken and buggy state. Perhaps it is one of those games that is always doomed to imperfection. In any case, I recommend that you keep several backups in case more horrible mistakes await you at the end of the game.