Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic - Retrospective @ RPS

PatrickWeekes said:

In the second game, I got actively pissed off when dialog options that were only sarcastic earned me dark side points. I don't complain if talking about love of battle or people deserving to die gives me a dark side point, but if being snarky is enough for me to suddenly grow black veins on my face, that's just stupid.

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Actually, funny you should say that. I recall many instances in NWN/expansions where saying sarcastic things does shift your alignment toward either evil or chaotic. For that matter, in Bioware romances, saying anything remotely not-nice to the would-be screwbuddy tend to either make him/her sulk or downright end the relationship. Not related to good/evil, strictly speaking, but that's still pretty dumb. On that note, what do you think of people having expressed surprise at what their Shepards spout when they choose certain dialogue options? Like, they see the one-sentence cap and think Shepard is going to say something snarky, but Shepard ends up instead pulling a gun. What's up with that? A clumsy attempt at ambiguity maybe? Oh, oh. Saying snarky things in ME, I believe, can earn you dark sid--uhm, renegade points.

BioWare can be clumsier, because that clumsiness is an attempt to make sure that everybody knows what's going on and what choices they're making at any given time. Obsidian's dialog can flow more naturally, and the choices are often more ambiguous morally. The bad news is that nuanced doesn't help when you put the game down for a week and then come back to try to remember what you were supposed to be doing -- and can also lead to times when the player is pissed off because the game didn't explain things to them.

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Wait, do you think games should accommodate people "going away for a week" and getting pissed off easily because the quest compass isn't pointing to the quest object and/or there's no step-by-step guide in the journal reminding you what you've done and what you need to do next? In short, that games should assume they're boring enough that people will go away for a week, or that gamers are sufficiently stupid/subliterate that they need step-by-step guidance and red/blue text to highlight which is the nice and which is the not-nice options?

I can at least understand the "dropped the game for a week" because sometimes you do have other things to do, and so forth, but if game developers are supposed to take that into account, where do you begin and where do you stop? BioShock's built-in walkthrough and no-penalty death?

I hated having Darth Old Lady explain moral ambiguity to me, when I knew that she was evil the whole time

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Oh, for pity's sake. *facepalms* Yeah, now I understand exactly why you prefer the Bioware way.

The only good way to do "good" and "evil" is to realise that there's no such thing, and simply let the player do what he feels like - and let the consequences be plausible rather than moralistic.

Thaurin said:

And yet, it is clear that Nietzsche was not an anti-Semite. I do not believe his sister was able to distort much of his work: although Nietzsche was not that very popular during his most active years, he did publish most of his books before his sister could put her corrupting hand to them. Several of his letters describe how he broke with his sister because of her anti-Semitism and how he was disgusted by the whole concept.

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Yes, right, but we have one problem: We'll never know for sure.

All we can do is getting close, so to say.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

Yes, right, but we have one problem: We'll never know for sure.
All we can do is getting close, so to say.

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The reason many want to make Nietzsche into an anti-semite is because they want to associate his thoughts with Hitler. The motive is similar when trying to associate Darwin or Freud with Hitler. Nietzsche's criticism against organised religion, Darwins evolution and psychology are all corrosive to the power of religious institutions, which is why people want others to reject their ideas and findings.

The best thing about the KOTORs was the writing, IMO. The player had lots of opportunities to indicate personality and style (nice!). The NPCs around him indicted plenty of their own (good...good...) while the player influence all of that and the entire direction of the game as well (very cool!).

KOTOR was best, because in the Star Wars tradition good was clearly good while evil was clearly evil. The second game screwed that up in an attempt to add more depth, and that was a shame.

KOTOR wasn't perfect. There was an overdependence on dialogue, and there was sole emphasis on things good and evil. It was right to keep those distinct, but bad to depend on them exclusively for flavor. More than anything else, KOTOR proved how good vs. evil works as a theme but also needs something more.

What KOTOR needed was for the player to have more opportunities to indicate personality and style, two things the game otherwise exuded, especially via NPC banter. It did it via the dialogue screen, and that was satisfying but not enough. And it needed other ways of expressing those concepts beyond comparisons of good and evil.

Imagine Romeo and Juliet unable to express their feelings for one another until they opened their mouths. Then they gushed, talking only about their pure love. KOTOR 2 tried to solve that by requiring them to make and argue cases for their love. Unless you're some kind of real geek, that just made it worse.

KOTOR encouraged the player but also frustrated him by offering him what he wanted but not nearly enough.

This is the best thread i think i've ever read on the internet.

I've often tried to figure out why I much preferred KOTOR to KOTOR2 and this thread has provided plenty of things to consider (and I don't just mean how it seemed unfinished).
An excellent examination of what people really enjoy (or really would enjoy) in games, after you manage to look beyond graphics, plot, and the layout of in game menus etc imo, ....thanks RPGWatch!

Squeek said:

Imagine Romeo and Juliet unable to express their feelings for one another until they opened their mouths. Then they gushed, talking only about their pure love. KOTOR 2 tried to solve that by requiring them to make and argue cases for their love. Unless you're some kind of real geek, that just made it worse.

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Given that Romeo and Juliet are hormone-ridden teenagers with not a single brain cell to go between the pair of them, I can't imagine coming up with a worse example.

Given that they're imaginary characters, your point isn't very clever.

On Nietzche - You know, there's a big difference between someone pointing to Darwin and invoking Godwin's Law which would be dubious, and someone citing Nietzche for being a supremacist. I'm by no means any kind of a scholar on the man, but what Ive read of ol Friedrich, it's quite clear what his viewpoint was. While at times inspiring and thought provoking, he was very much a hardass sonofabitch w/ no mercy for the weak, the faithful, women, or anyone for that matter that wasnt on the straight and narrow to becoming the Overman, Superman, Big Daddy, etx. There's a lot of people inbetween Hefty(x3) and Wimpy(x3) that get philisophically steamrolled there. He was German, and starry-eyed nazis in the grip of their fervor to ascend to the highest pinnacle of mankind saw him as a national hero. You can see where that's leading...

So it's not so hard to see someone make the leap to nazi-demon-anti-semite connection.

That said, I'm inspired to go grab my copy of Will to Power and dive into it again, because he is a fascinating and thought provoking writer, but I'm not going to deny that he's definitely sending warm fuzzies in the direction of those w/ supremacist leanings in the end, ie Uncle Adolf (ww2 nazi end boss).

Kotor surprised me w/ how much fun it was for a console game, in fact it was the reason that I bought an XBOX, and it certainly paid off. Still need to try out part two, it should be 9.99 by now...

Side fact on Nietzche - he suffered from crippling migraines that he took all manner of intoxicants to deal with, so often veered between crippling, bitter, pain induced despair & drug induced euphoria. Does explain some of the shifts in tone in his writings.

On the nazi link, I think that it's generally quite unfair to him. For me, his writings were about dominance over oneself through strength of mind, rather than the dominance over others it's often used to justify by the fascists.

I wouldn't blame Nietzsche if there were nazis who misunderstood his philosophy considering their level intellectual level in general. Also one must understand what Nietzsche considered weak, else one will go to the wrong conclusions.

Yes, he had no mercy for the faithful, but that's the point. He didn't like people who stayed faithful to someone elses ideas while abandoning their own thoughts, reason, critical judgement and responsibility. That includes nationalism, communism, nazism and most obvious christianity. He wasn't against good people or the physically weak, he was against those who submit (like women submitting to their husbounds). He was against those who claimed that they are good without good reason, or one who want to establish something as good (like a "moral institution") when it isn't good at all. In his critizism against christianity he meant that you are not a good person simply because you call yourself christian, sing psalms and give up sex. You are not good because you have "faith". Neither psalms, worship, abstinence nor faith have anything to do with being good, compasisonate behavior, helping the less fortunate etc. Subscribing or pledging your allegiance to an institution that established themselves as "the good" and "the moral" is a will to power, a source of status and social recognition rather than a will to do good.

He meant that you should question everything, you should question what you think is true, what others tell you to think is true, what people are taking for granted, because if you do not you become a mindless tool rather than a human being and that's when you are weak.

That has to be the best two-paragraph summary of Nietzche I've ever read. Kudos, JemyM.