Part 31: Let's Break KotOR

Part 31: Let's Break KotOR

In this short bonus update (which still keeps the regular numbering so I don't have to screw around with the update titles when I send this thing to the archive), I'm going to show off one of the most famous glitches/bugs in KotOR, or at least the Xbox version of KotOR. The PC version, while it still features its share of bugs and glitches and general jankiness, at least got rid of this major glitch that everyone playing the game on Xbox probably gets at least once per playthrough.



We'll start aboard the Ebon Hawk, ready to leave Tatooine.



Now, we'll head to the planet where we found our last Star Map prior to the Leviathan. In our case, it's Korriban. Wookieepedia states this glitch only triggers if we set Dantooine as our destination before getting captured by the Leviathan, but this information is completely false as I'm about to demonstrate.



Along the way, we fight off some Sith fighters. This has to happen for the glitch to trigger. I'm not certain if skipping any of the FMVs triggers the glitch more reliably, but this time I did skip the Tatooine liftoff and "fighters inbound" cutscenes.



With the fighters exploded into space dust, we'll land on Korriban. I let the cutscene play here.



Upon landing, we find ourselves in the main hold of the Ebon Hawk instead of in the cockpit like usual. Not only that, but our entire crew is also hanging out in the main hold. Well, almost. This is the same setup from the post-Leviathan debriefing (including the music playing in the background) so Bastila is gone because Malak, and Juhani's absent because BioWare didn't have time to put her in the scene after adding her back into the game at the last minute. We can talk to them but they just repeat their normal lines.



Now, I like Wookiees but this is ridiculous. For whatever reason, Zaalbar has cloned himself. One of the Zaalbars just stands there like he did in the actual scene, while the other one follows us around. I have no idea why there are two Zaalbars and why one of them acts like a party member, but there you have it.



Would a Zaalbar clone be called Zaaalbar or Zaalbaar? is Zaalbar himself a clone of a Wookiee named Zalbar?



The Ebon Hawk's hyperdrive is gone for unknown reasons.



So is the workbench. The swoop bike is still there, though.



We also don't get the "Exit Ebon Hawk" prompt when we approach the loading ramp. I ended up accidentally getting too close to the actual exit, so the game tries to load... something.



Not only that, but it also autosaves. That, by the way, is the generic loading screen you see at the very start of a new game, so who the fuck knows what the game is saving or loading.



The answer to the latter question appears to be nothing, because the game just crashes at this point. I didn't try loading the autosave it made because I was afraid it'd corrupt something, although the more likely scenario is that it just throws up another infinite load screen.

I didn't finish exploring, so let's repeat the glitch. It's easy to trigger if you know what you're doing, but it thankfully doesn't happen every time we travel to Korriban post-Leviathan or otherwise we'd be screwed out of stuff like Mika Dorin's special store.



We're back on the glitchy Ebon Hawk, and this is the cargo hold. All the containers are gone, and in their place is another swoop and a weird astromech the game calls a "swoop droid".



We can talk to the swoop droid, but it's not making much sense. According to Wookieepedia, the swoop droid was meant to be an early version of the fast travel system:


In the final game, we only get fast travel to the Ebon Hawk and back, and being able to fast travel to any destination on any planet actually sounds really nice and would've cut down on backtracking.

There is nothing in the crew quarters or the medical bay, so let's make our way to the only remaining area of the ship - the cockpit.



In the cockpit, we discover something very, very bizarre. This whole glitchy nonsense we've seen is commonly known as the Galaxy Droid glitch, and here's the droid itself.



What's interesting about the Galaxy Droid is that it can actually warp us to any major location in the game.



This includes the Endar Spire, Taris, the Leviathan, and a couple of areas we haven't seen yet. I believe the Endar Spire and Leviathan will crash the game, and if you warp to Taris... well, I hope you like Taris, because you're back in that abandoned apartment with Carth and there is no way back aside from playing through the game again or loading a save file.



I told the droid to take us to Tatooine. That's still clearly Korriban we see outside the cockpit windows, but presumably if we were to leave the ship now we'd find ourselves back on Tatooine. Or maybe the game would crash again, because I've read some forum posts reporting that sort of thing happening on the Xbox One.



So what is the Galaxy Droid? It kind of seems like it was meant to be a debug feature that'd make it easier to access any of the major locations of the game, and perhaps this whole glitchy Ebon Hawk module was intended as a debug environment for testing the party member conversations, as well as companion AI and other features with the clone Zaalbar following you around. Or maybe the Ebon Hawk module used in the post-Leviathan scene was from an early development build, with the Swoop Droid still around and the galaxy map functionality not yet implemented - hence the presence of the Galaxy Droid in the cockpit. Since you can't control your character during the scene, you won't notice anything weird so BioWare kept it intact in the final game. Juhani's absence would also hint at the scene having been created early on in development.

As for how the glitch actually works and why we can access this module after completing the Leviathan, your guess is as good as mine. Clearly, the module shouldn't normally be accessible, but for some reason it is very easy to access in the Xbox release. I also don't have any way to find out if the glitch still worked after the balance patch that was distributed on Xbox Live, but what I do know for sure is that it does not exist in the PC version.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this exciting "Let's Break" bonus update. Next time, we'll join back up with Zila in the infinite white void she found herself in at the end of the last main update.