New lightsabers and character models? That is just the tip of the iceberg…

Most recently updated in July, Star Wars: Jedi Academy Enhanced improves playability on modern PCs with quality-of-life features and adds new customization options while building on the open-source mods of the Jedi Academy. A few new features are worth mentioning: full RGB-style lightsaber color tweaking, custom character models, fully modular lightsaber hilts, new weapon and lightsaber effects (including Darksaber) and Kylo Ren’s unstable lightsaber, and new NPC models and fixed HUD elements.

The Star Wars: Dark Forces and Jedi Knight titles have come a long way, as they were initially no departure from id Software’s perennial classic (to put it bluntly, they were nothing more than a DOOM clone in the guise of Star Wars), but over time, they have become the best lightsaber games while following classic FPS level design principles. Your positioning during combat is more important than in many other 3D hack’n’slash games…

Raven Software’s final game in the franchise, Star Wars: Jedi Academy, is essentially a theme park based on the Star Wars IP, with many locations popping up. And version 1.1 of its mod, Enhanced, can push the already excellent mod even further (we saw this kind of fan work with THUG Pro: fans reverse-engineered most Tony Hawk games to make a total conversion mod to Tony Hawk’s Underground 2, and you can even play it online – for many, this was the real THPS5).

If you visit JKHub, you can try the mod, which continues the team’s work modding the OpenJK engine. We’ll be curious to see which official games can come close to what we see here. As Electronic Arts no longer has exclusive rights to the Star Wars IP, Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment could be the first to aspire to this, but we wouldn’t bet on it either…

Source: PCGamer