If you love Star Wars and you love gaming, there are probably a dozen classics from your childhood that you remember fondly, most of them worth replaying exactly as they are. But if your favorite title needs a little new life breathed into it for the tenth playthrough, mods can save the day.
Fortunately, there are some transformative fan projects that provide the perfect excuse to not only replay the classics, but to do so with a fresh coat of paint.
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Star Wars Battlefront II (2017): Skins, Heroes, SFX, and More
The more recent Star Wars Battlefront II is a great game on its own, providing a genuine Star Wars battlefield experience that can’t be matched anywhere else. More than many other games, Battlefront II looks and sounds like Star Wars, and even eight years after release, looks and feels good to play. I still go back and play a few matches fairly regularly. But it’s not a perfect game, falling short in many areas.
Most notably, the game ended up missing a lot of aesthetic customization that fans wanted (Galactic Marines, anyone?), as well as famous heroes such as Mace Windu or Ahsoka Tano. Naturally, since the game stopped getting updates years ago, it’s missing any sort of content from newer Star Wars installments as well. All of this and more can be fixed with mods. There are plenty of options both on Steam Workshop and Nexus Mods.
Most of these mods do not add brand-new content to the game, but rather, add new skins or reskin an existing hero, such as replacing Obi-Wan with Ezra Bridger or Captain Phasma with Qi’ra. That said, there are some mods that add reinforcements, weapons or completely change sound effects, in-game lighting, loading screens, and much more. I personally love replacing the Resistance faction with rebellious clone troopers.
At any rate, Battlefront II may not change much mechanically with mods, but it can definitely take on a whole new aesthetic with the huge array of mods it has available.
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Star Wars Empire at War: New Factions, Units, Mechanics and Battlefields
Empire at War is one of my favorite Star Wars games, primarily because it’s still one of the best titles for commanding large-scale space battles even almost 20 years after its release. The thing is, the Original Trilogy isn’t my favorite era of Star Wars, so it felt kind of limiting at times. Thankfully, there are some incredible mods out there that completely change the experience EAW offers if you can install them.
Some of my personal favorite mods, like Republic at War and Revan’s Revenge, change the era and factions EAW offers, allowing you to play in the prequel era and even the Old Republic era. This includes not only appropriate ground and space units, but also faction-specific mechanics, massively expanded galactic maps, and brand-new 4X strategy mechanics that make the game much deeper than it ever was before.
There are even plenty of full conversion mods that turn EAW into a game for a different IP, like Battlestar Galactica, Stargate, Halo, and Mass Effect. Needless to say, if you loved EAW in the past, it’s more than worth a modded replay even in this day and age—there’s just no other Star Wars game that offers the same level of complex strategy and RTS combat, and it can even stand-in for other IPs that never made such a game themselves.
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Knights of the Old Republic II: Items, Quest Lines, and Cut Content
Anyone who is a real fan of KOTOR II probably already knows about the Restored Content Mod. It’s been considered a must-have for years, as it restores all sorts of content that got cut from the final release of the vanilla game, including quest lines, dialogue, and entire segments of the game (though admittedly, that factory mission with HK-47 might be better off gone).
If you ever felt like this beloved game was missing just a little something, like the vision wasn’t completed the way the developers wanted, then getting the Restored Content Mod will help. That said, there are plenty of other mods available to give the game a fresh spin or make it worth replaying, especially if one of the big reasons you never replay KOTOR II is because you don’t want to go through Peragus and Telos again.
You can get mods that skip these introductory sections of the game and allow you to jump right into the meat of it all. I wouldn’t recommend it on your first playthrough and maybe not even a second, but diehard fans that already know all the twists and tension building in those slow, creeping sections of the game may have more fun if they can just skip it. I know I’ve put off a few KOTOR II runs because of the lengthy intro.
3
Star Wars X-Wing Alliance: Total Conversion and Massive Graphics Improvements
The X-Wing series of Star Wars games from the 90s were some of the first titles to let fans feel as though they really were piloting an awesome starfighter in daring missions and hectic battles. The first two titles, X-Wing and TIE Fighter, gave different perspectives on the galactic conflict and sported unique ships matching the factions that you played as. X-Wing Alliance was the last entry, with the best graphics and mechanics.
That said, us Imperial enjoyers felt cheated. How come the Rebellion got to have the most advanced entry in the series? It just wasn’t fair. There could have at least been a TIE Fighter sister entry, right? Well, with the TIE Fighter Total Conversion mod, we don’t have to feel cheated. It ports over the entire 1994 TIE Fighter game to the more advanced engine of X-Wing Alliance, adds several new campaigns, and ultimately gives players a total of 148 unique missions to play.
Oh, and since the mod is based on the X-Wing Alliance Upgrade Project, the graphics look nothing like it did in 1999—with mods, these admittedly ancient Star Wars games are easily on par with the modern era, completely revamping the experience of playing them. To top it all off, there are plenty of other full conversion mods out there, so this classic game can be altered for a dozen more replays, easily. Not bad for something over twenty years old.
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Star Wars Battlefront II (2005): Maps, Classes, Game Modes, Ships, and More
Don’t get me wrong, the 2017 version of Battlefront II is very good. But it stood on the shoulders of giants, namely, the original two Star Wars Battlefront games from the 2000s. Even two decades later, the 2005 Battlefront II is considered one of the best Star Wars games of all time, and you can bet that a lot of fans were disappointed when a third installment never saw the light of day (though we did get some great PSP spin-offs).
In the past 20 years, this game has been subjected to hundreds of mods changing just about everything you can imagine. Modders have added dozens of new maps to play on, hundreds of reskins, brand-new classes, and even entire game modes that didn’t exist in the original game, such as the ground-to-space combined battles that were Elite Squadron. Some mods completely overhaul galactic conquest, while others add in other eras of the universe, such as the Old Republic era. You can remaster the whole thing with mods alone.
Heck, one guy made a mod that recreates the first two levels of Metal Gear Solid in the Battlefront II engine, though I’m not sure what his grand vision is. At any rate, by merit of being old, popular, and pretty easy to mod, the 2005 Star Wars Battlefront II is a game that can have thousands of hours of replayability added to its already great vanilla self, being well worth replaying even if you’ve sunk a thousand hours into it already.
Plus, if you’re a Halo fan who ever wished that there was a Battlefront style game for the Halo universe, there’s a mod for that too.
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Star Wars Jedi Academy: New Stories, Total Conversions, Graphic Overhauls, and More
Jedi Academy is a great game all on its own. To this day, it still has one of the most robust lightsaber combat systems in a Star Wars video game. Despite being a completely excellent title with a narrative that demands at least two replays, there definitely comes a time when you’ve seen it all the game loses a bit of its luster. Thankfully, a lot like the original Battlefront II, the game is beloved and easy to work with, so there are tons of mods for it.
Most notably, there are a ton of narrative mods for this game, adding completely original stories with their own characters and levels to play with. A lot of them even have voice-acting. Some of these mods don’t add new stories per se, but create levels that allow you to play through iconic moments in Star Wars, such as duels from the movies or events from the Clone Wars animated TV series.
There are also conversion mods that change the game to an entirely different IP, as well as plenty of mods that focus on just bringing this old gem up to a more modern graphical standard, whether it’s complete HD overhauls or AI upscaling mods. Personally, I think the breadth of single-player content mods makes Jedi Academy worth several replays on their own, as they are each like an extra entry into the Jedi Knight series.
That said, don’t just limit yourself to Jedi Academy. There are plenty of mods to look into for the other entries in the Jedi Knight series as well, including the games that started it all, Dark Forces.
At the end of the day, almost all of the classic Star Wars games have some great mods for them, but the ones we’ve talked about today are examples of titles that can experience the biggest transformations with mods. If you don’t have a PC and modding isn’t an option for you, don’t worry—there are plenty of amazing Star Wars classics that are well worth your time if you haven’t played them before.
