“Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy” celebrates its 20th anniversary this year! Reason enough to dust it off and play it yet again. This time I went to hunt for mods to make it more interesting this time around and I found JKHub.
This has a list of recommended mods for the game here featuring cosmetic ones, new textures, new lightsabers, new character models but also conversion mods, new missions and more!
But first things first: installation. I own the GOG version of the game so I used Lutris to install the game with this script. It makes use of OpenJK, an open-source reimplementation of the game engine which also has a Linux build so you can now play this game natively on Linux! What a time to be alive!
I picked a few entries from the list of recommended mods which seemed worthwhile, notably:
- JAEnhanced (includes other optional mods)
- HQ Textures
- Jaden Remastered
- Better human female customization
- Coruscant and Korriban reimagined mods
- Single player missions expansion
I’m now jumping around as a female Chiss with a white-ish lightsaber featuring the hilt of Darth Revan. Initially I wanted to go with one having a crossguard Kylo Ren style but it keeps on logging errors to the screen which is somewhat off-putting.
I haven’t gotten to the part where the missions expansion comes into play so I’m looking forward to this. I’m also using most, if not all, of the mods optinally included in JAEnhanced. So far I’m having a good time and it’s quite close to the original game that I’ve played so many times already. It’ll be interesting to explore more of the conversion mods. I might report on them at a later date.
One thing to note: I came across a bug where cutscenes would not play properly which apparently has to do with screen refresh rates. To fix it I opened the menu and in “Setup -> Video” set “Video Sync” to “On”. That did it.
Happy lightsabering everyone!