It's a fan-made mod (http://www.gibberlings3.net/kivan/) by a a lovely lady called "Domi" (she also wrote a really great multi-pathway romance for Coran in the first game, I think she wrote the Dynaheir romance mod as well, but I don't tend to play male characters in BG.) It's much more creative than anything the game developers put out, because she had the advantage of time. She also understands how to trigger really creative script events that means Kivan "knows" the player character much better. He will ask her opinion on things and remember what she "said". And he does listen to her, rather than being ram-roded through set events.
Example: if you've played the first BG game you might remember that Sarevok has an underling called Tazok, in the unmodded game Kivan is looking for Tazok because he murdered his wife (because of this he also has racial prejudice towards ogres, in addition to being a bit of a stuck-up eleven pillock, for which the PC can give him a hard time about, including going about how he's really attractive looking as a drow, in whatever that drow city is called and eventually he will realise she's right). In the unmodded BG2, you find Tazok working with the red dragon guy.
Kivan's reaction to finding out that he is still alive is to kill him and then cut his heart out. This is important because it means he can't be raised ever and it's a desecration of nature that is against everything elves and rangers believe in. That's how damaged he is by the death of his wife, he will completely destroy himself and his principals for revenge she wouldn't even want. He's so tortured he makes Carth look like a shiny happy bunny with pink slippers. The main character can talk him out of it, but if you let him do it, he carries the heart around as a trophy and it unlocks another little mini-arc of the friendship/romance.
She's always tweaking things and finding bugs and releasing updates, which I'm love forward to, but she's going to get someone to revoice Kivan's lines (because Kivan is not an OC his romance dialog is not voiced, but in BG that doesn't matter so much and you can fill it in from what his basic soundset is like anyway), so I'm a bit conflicted about it.
If you can get past the occasional cliche and the fact he uses Elvish like oxygen (it's all translated though and is justified because he calls the character different epithets regarding how he feels about her), it's really fun. If you're interested in playing it you need a bunch of other stuff to get the full series spanning experience, but I won't go into it right now, because its techy and this is long enough already.
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Example: if you've played the first BG game you might remember that Sarevok has an underling called Tazok, in the unmodded game Kivan is looking for Tazok because he murdered his wife (because of this he also has racial prejudice towards ogres, in addition to being a bit of a stuck-up eleven pillock, for which the PC can give him a hard time about, including going about how he's really attractive looking as a drow, in whatever that drow city is called and eventually he will realise she's right). In the unmodded BG2, you find Tazok working with the red dragon guy.
Kivan's reaction to finding out that he is still alive is to kill him and then cut his heart out. This is important because it means he can't be raised ever and it's a desecration of nature that is against everything elves and rangers believe in. That's how damaged he is by the death of his wife, he will completely destroy himself and his principals for revenge she wouldn't even want. He's so tortured he makes Carth look like a shiny happy bunny with pink slippers. The main character can talk him out of it, but if you let him do it, he carries the heart around as a trophy and it unlocks another little mini-arc of the friendship/romance.
She's always tweaking things and finding bugs and releasing updates, which I'm love forward to, but she's going to get someone to revoice Kivan's lines (because Kivan is not an OC his romance dialog is not voiced, but in BG that doesn't matter so much and you can fill it in from what his basic soundset is like anyway), so I'm a bit conflicted about it.
If you can get past the occasional cliche and the fact he uses Elvish like oxygen (it's all translated though and is justified because he calls the character different epithets regarding how he feels about her), it's really fun. If you're interested in playing it you need a bunch of other stuff to get the full series spanning experience, but I won't go into it right now, because its techy and this is long enough already.