Have fun waiting for the original trilogy to come out on anything other than VHS. Lucas will die before they put out the original trilogy again.
Anyways, I'm going to get it although I'm not sure when.
Obsidian isn't a satellite developer of BioWare although it probably looks like it now. Obsidian is an upstart developer that has a pretty good relationship with BioWare from their Black Isle days. So BioWare kind of "hooked them up" with some projects since they want to focus on their own IPs instead of doing licensed projects.
That's the short version.
When it "goes gold" it doesn't take that long to manufacture it. The manual and box art are done beforehand so all they have to do is manufacture enough copies. It's all up to Lucasarts though, and what day they want to release it. IIRC KotOR I (Xbox) went gold a few weeks before it came out. Although if KotOR 2 is finished this year Lucasarts won't be waiting weeks to put it out, they'll want to get it out immediately so people can buy it during the holiday season.
As for when the first patch will be released? Who knows, it really depends on how well the game runs.
I really doubt there will be a collector's edition.
I would go for a concept art book and maybe some other things. We'll probably just end up with another keychain lightsaber.
We already know that HK and Revan are in the game. They may not be party members (I think HK will be though) but they're in the game. I'd like to see Bastila return personally.
Akari worked this weekend.
Anyways, Akari was just too busy working on the game to post. No offense to Akari, I really enjoy the weekend programmer threads, but I'd really like to see some of the designers post more, like say MCA, Morgan, or Chu.
JKA=Jedi Knight Academy I presume?
If so then no, that wasn't me. I have Jedi Academy but I've never played it online. I did play Jedi Outcast online a little bit but I wasn't a big fan of it.
To add to what Grand_Commander13 said you can do whatever you want when you're developing the game. Putting HK-47 on Taris isn't that hard to do when you're making the game. The screenshots you're referring were released before KotOR came out.
How's the PC interface coming along? Does it actually feel like a PC game now?
I'm not sure if this has been asked before, but do you know how many lines of dialog there are in K2? I know it will probably change from now and when the game comes out, but I was wondering if it's more than the 12,000 lines BioWare boasted about before K1 came out.