First off, welcome to my new blog! Not sure how much I'll actually be posting here, but that's not the point.

One of the most prominent KOTOR2 mods there is the the M4-78 enhancement project, and I can't imagine that anybody who's looked into these mods at all hasn't heard about it. (Although that might just be because I have a poor imagination.) In any event, what many do not know is that there was another M4-78 mod made and released much earlier (2007, to be exact). Sith Holocron recently unearthed this mod, and, at his request, I have done a playthrough of it (if a bit of a rushed one) and am now reviewing it for all who are interested.

According to the handy if basic walkthrough that is provided with the mod, there are now two computer terminals that refer to the planet and will give you datapads, which can then be used by T3-M4 to give you one more datapad which will allow you to travel to M4-78 via the Ebon Hawk's security panel. Using warps, I verified the existence of the terminals, but did not test the remaining parts of the leadup, having instead warped directly to M4-78 to play the planet. Suffice to say that the leadup to the planet gives plenty of mystery (and in a good way). On the other hand, M4-78 is not a part of the central story and instead takes the role of a side quest.

Once you get to the actual planet itself, the gameplay is rather straightforward. You learn a little bit about the planet from a greeter droid, then go into the central zone where you meet L5-65, one of about five to ten nonhostile droids in the entire planet. He gives you a basic rundown of the situation (which is that the whole colony's been messed up), and then you can go right into the archon chamber to meet the archon IS-24. From there, you have to fight through one zone to get to the other archon, ES-05, then unlock and fight through the last zone to get to the central intelligence M4-78. Going through the zones consists almost entirely of fighting through a ton of droids that don't hit particularly hard, but have a lot of hitpoints, which makes the fights take extremely long for characters of lower levels (with better gear, you might get through faster, but later parts will still take a while). Once you get to the archon chambers, you just have to go through a long conversation and then move on. There are a couple of basic "puzzles" which consist of interacting with a terminal with the right datapad that was acquired either from the remains of an adversary or from one of the few nonhostile characters. For your trouble, you are rewarded at the end with knowledge and two superpowered lightsaber crystals. Unfortunately, a couple of bugs in the mod prevent progress, and so the entire planet cannot be experienced (some parts I saw, like the main behavior core, I could only get to using the cheat console).

Storywise, through most of the mod, we get the story of the Sith being the colonists of the planet, but Archon ES-05 realizing that they were not the original colonists and releasing deadly radiation. The player's role is to reactivate the central intelligence unit M4-78. This is the same basic story that the current M4-78 EP has, and I believe it come from the original M4-78 files. Once you get to the end and talk to M4-78, there's an interesting backstory provided for the planet. The basic gist of it is that M4-78 was originally built by the Rakata of the Infinite Empire, and was more recently found and used by Revan for his conquests. Somehow, this is overlapped with the story of the Sith colonists, which really seems to be underdeveloped in this mod. It's an interesting little backstory, but there are also continuity issues in the form of a claim that both T3-M4 and G0-T0 were manufactured on M4-78. But in any event, the majority of the gameplay is really devoid of story.

Other than that, I have elsewhere seen a basic "tour" of the data that was left in the game files when M4 was cut, and this mod appears to be pretty much just inserting that content back into the game with a couple of little additions such as some dialog. The only voiced character is IS-24, whose voice files (sounding quite similar to Dhagon Ghent's) were left in the files. There's really not much around besides a bunch of enemy droids and containers with random loot, with a few additions such as a workbench and two vendor droids, and of course the story-related material (found only in the main behavior core). Amusingly enough, this also has the result of the two Archons and M4-78 taking the form of the firaxa sharks from Manaan in KOTOR1 (which had been used as placeholders prior to the planet's being cut). Oh, and the Central and Environmental Zones are also apparently flooded with readiation, although this has no real effect other than limiting visibility.

So, is this mod worth playing? In my opinion, it may have been nice to have back when there were no other M4-78 mods out there, but now we have the M4-78 EP, which is far superior. The gameplay is rather simplistic, almost entirely tedious fights with droids that have a lot of hitpoints, and the story is a bit less plausible and certainly less integrated than that in the EP. This mod is not a great addition to the game, but it is an interesting way to get a mostly accurate look at the remains of Obsidian's work on the planet, and gives me an appreciation for how much work went into the EP.

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-Eauxps I. Fourgott