KotOR - Retrospective Review @ RPGFan

HiddenX

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RPGFan looks back at Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic:

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

One of the best things about fan communities is an unwavering passion for their beloved properties, and few fandoms are more passionate than the Star Wars community. Whether you are talking about the original trilogy or the prequels, the extended universe or the new Disney continuity, you're always going to find fans who will defend their opinion with the intensity of a Jedi versus a Sith. Sometimes, this kind of passion can lead to poisonous situations, but can also be the catalyst for amazing pieces of art. This includes a video game labor of love which BioWare developed over a decade ago: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

Since its release, KotOR has gone down as one of the most influential and best-regarded games in history; a reputation it well deserves. It introduced revolutionary systems that we take for granted in RPGs today and is still the gold standard of how licensed properties should adapt their subject matter to the video game medium. Even 20 years later, passionate modding communities ensure that KotOR stands the test of time by introducing new quests, updated graphics, and other modern bells and whistles.

[...]

Score: 90/100
More information.
 
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I'm not sure if there's ever been a more overrated RPG among the popular titles. :)

Not that it's bad or anything. It's not, but it's nowhere near as good as the fans who gush over it like this would have you believe.
 
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After Neverwinter Nights disappointment, KOTOR was great improvement in my eyes. But I hated early 3D games very much. It killed visual appeal of video games for long time. At least for me. Same happened to adventures after FMV took over.
Anyway, back to KOTOR - it was Star Wars, that helped a lot I suppose:)

I wouldnt mind new Star Wars RPG these days, but it seems we are not getting any proper Star Wars single player game (let alone SP RPG), till EA is in charge. Pity.
 
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KoTOR 1 is in my view one of the best RPGs of all time, not over-rated at all. KoTOR 2 was somewhat good, and I replayed it again a year or two ago.
 
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I gave this one a shot many years back, but many years after it came out, mostly because of the amount of times people talked about it I guess. When it came out it wasn't on my radar at all as I only had a PC at that point and had relatively recently lost any desire to own a console or play console games.

As soon as I started playing, it played pretty much as I expected a console game to play, with a very close camera and most of the immediate gameplay involving me looking at my character's back as I ran around looking for anything to interact with.

And it's difficult to imagine the difficulty of the above when you are used to playing console games. With a standard long distance view of most PC party-based RPGs one would stand in the middle of the screen and move the curser about before moving any characters, however, in KOTOR's close perspective you can never see a whole area without moving both your character and your camera.

What would take a few seconds in a long-zoom game was now taking minutes, long minutes, to fully explore the same game area. Further to this, I had no idea what I was supposed to be looking out for when I did look around the room. Or anywhere for that matter.

Immediately leaving the starting room I was presented with a massive corridor of doors. Of course, if these were doors in a long-zoom game you could simply parse your mouse over each one to see which were interactable, and, in most cases, if a door was there it would be interactable. However, this game seemed to be demanding I actually go to every door and find out if it was a playable door, which, again, turned seconds into minutes. A lot of doors seemed to have very little use.

This was then further frustrated by the fact that the corridor was a completely circular corridor which took me right back to my original door. But had I circled the corridor in full or had I turned myself around and simply walked 'back' to my door. There were no easily identifiable landmarks to make the guess, the entire landscape was just a solid lump of grey and repeated assets. So round I went again.

Then I went round again and made sure I had exhausted all the available NPC dialogues. When I finally got out into the street, the street was full of NPCs, all walking back and forth. The street was just one long line of dull grey and repeated assets. I am still unsure even to this day how many times I went up and down that street nor whether I managed to cover every square meter nor talk to every NPC.

This grey street regularly had small roads going off it, most of which had nothing of great interest at the other end and usually just had the effect of turning me around a lot. Even to this day I have no idea if I managed to go down every side street.

Occasionally I found myself in a building with an interesting NPC and had some conversations that were, for the most part, technobabble, but I think I got the gist most of the time and it was a welcome relief from the grey assets.

Eventually I met some NPCs who took me somewhere new. Or did I find the bar before I met those NPCs? I can't remember. Oh well, I'll do the bar first. Basically lots of NPCs, surprisingly not much in the way of dialogues and some guy who wanted to play a gambling game.

Played the gambling game for a bit, found myself really underwhelmed & continued to try and look into every nook and cranny in the place. I think there were more fake doors and grey assets hidden behind general Star-Warsey bar type NPCs and sofas etc.

Again, it felt like I was doing stuff but not really doing stuff, on a gradually increasing scale of bewilderment. And no combat yet. Well, I guess there must have been some because I remember levelling a couple of times and putting points into Blaster (which I later found out on-line was a trap! <- said in your best Admiral Akhbar voice). But I honestly can't remember any combat up to this point.

The next stage of the game that I can remember involved going down a lift and then running through lots and lots of grey corridors that had no doors in them but were still repeated assets, and in these corridors there were enemies. Lots of them. And they were all defeated with the ease of a knife through melted butter.

Sure, I was only playing on Normal Difficulty, but up until that point in my gaming career Normal Difficulty didn't tend to mean easy mode verging on story mode. I was taken aback by this standard of encounter by quite a significant degree. Mostly, it helped magnify even more my sense of tedium.

Running through these corridors for a while, probably going back on myself a few times, but possibly not, as the corridors seemed easier to navigate with enemies in them constantly pulling you towards them, I became ever more bored. I had some companions by this point but for the life of me I can't remember a single detail about any of them nor how many of them there were.

At some point the grey corridors opened out into a lagre grey room and there was a Rancor Monster in there. And the next objective required us to get to the other side of the room. "At last!" I thought, an interesting fight!. Needless to say, the Rancor ate all my characters in a couple of seconds.

Well, this was a rather abrupt turnaround in difficulty I must say. I reloaded the fight a few times before guessing that, yanw, we were probably supposed to sneak past the stupid thing. I remember sneaking past it and… that's where my memory stops. I just couldn't be arsed anymore.

I'm guessing from the many threads I've read about it that the game 'gets good' when you leave the first planet. Which I'm guessing was probably not far off from where I was, but hindsight is a wonderful thing and its difficult for you to imagine the state of sheer tedium I was in by that point in the game.

I think I had been playing for about 10 hours by this point. But I'm guessing an experienced console player would probably have done all this in an hour and a half, instinctively knowing which doors to bother running up to to look at and which NPCs to bother running up to etc.

So ends my time with KOTOR a "9/10 game that represents a classic of the genre that contained many innovations". :D

Maybe everything wasn't grey, that was just how it reflected in my minds eye and cemented in my memory valve. Maybe I did have some enjoyment at some point, but none of that stayed concurrent for long enough to become a memory.

I do like Star Wars, I was a pretty big fan as a kid, but I really didn't get any sense of Star Wars in the time I played. I didn't really get a sense of anything. I mean, the game starts you on a massive downer in the first place by starting you in a dull grey room with a dull grey blaster for a weapon. And for me it seemed to just get duller from that point on.

So this isn't a review of the game. It's just my review of the start of the game. And if the game gets a lot better later, good on it, well done, I can respect that, but that start though… really, a game with a start that dull is a 9/10 all time classic? Wow, I guess the later chapters must knock it out the park.

(I have been told before that, yes, the start sucks by big fans of the game, so I feel ok and non-trollish to share my story here & hopefully provide some of you with the amusement of a less drooling and more detailed perspective about the game. I also feel this is something any new player should be aware of).
 
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All I'm going to say is, ME series was much better than KotOR ;)
 
Early BioWare games were much better then the recent mass-produced crap.:p

Baldur's Gate
Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn
Neverwinter Nights
KotOR
KotOR 2
Jade Empire
Mass Effect
Dragon Age: Origins

The rest of their games while good started declining as the years went by.:(

Mass Effect 2
Dragon Age II
Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO
Mass Effect 3
Dragon Age: Inquisition
Mass Effect: Andromeda
Anthem
 
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From my point of view it KotOR made a successful grand transition of isometric party based rpg into 3rd person perspective which they later perfected in Dragon Age: Origins. It also captured beautifully the Star Wars universe, you had your own ship and crew, you were able to travel to different planets which were distinct, had an array of interesting NPCs with plenty of choices and consequences.

Not a masterpiece but laid strong foundation for future 3rd person, party based rpgs.
 
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KotOR is masterpiece ;) One of the few games I've played several times.
KotOR II is a phenomenal game too.
 
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Early BioWare games were much better then the recent mass-produced crap.:p

Baldur's Gate
Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn
Neverwinter Nights
KotOR
KotOR 2
Jade Empire
Mass Effect
Dragon Age: Origins

The rest of their games while good started declining as the years went by.:(

Mass Effect 2
Dragon Age II
Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO
Mass Effect 3
Dragon Age: Inquisition
Mass Effect: Andromeda
Anthem

Last few games ( anything post ME2) were downhill for BW, but DAO/ME1&2 were at least on par, or better with older. ( Andromeda is actually their best game since)
And I can't see how KOTOR had better storytelling: that opening sequence how your background is explained directly to you...compare it to how Mass Effect handles it.
KOTOR was Bioware turning point to ARPGs/cinematic narrative games while simplifying a lot of rpg elements.
Some consolization also probably played a part (they had financial issues, in that period)
 
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I'm not sure if there's ever been a more overrated RPG among the popular titles. :)

Not that it's bad or anything. It's not, but it's nowhere near as good as the fans who gush over it like this would have you believe.
Yes and no. No if you can remember how videogames looked and played back when it was released.
Some designs in it were atrocious junk. It had some silly racing in, optional sure, but still. Just an example.
But it didn't have a cliched for the xth time story. Kotor decided to risk with twists.
I dare to say that Kotor (and it's sequel) is #1 Star Wars game ever made regardless of genre. And regardless of it's outdated looks today. Then again you know that I don't care about combat and Kotor combat isn't exactly, um, challenging. :)

Would I slap 9/10 on it today, on PC? Absolutely not. On phones probably would. PC moved forward with graphics, sound, music and rich c&c.
An example of all these four things done so much better making them impossible to compare with Kotor is a part of DA3: Wicked Eyes and Wicked Hearts quest. A game that was sadly a letdown in some other fronts.
If that same DA3 isn't 9/10, and it isn't, Kotor can't be either. On PC. On Nintendo Gameboy it'd probably deserve 10/10.

Someone mentioned another Bioware game above that should be called never more overrated RPG in gaming history with it's fans gushing over it.
It's NWN.
 
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Someone mentioned another Bioware game above that should be called never more overrated RPG in gaming history with it's fans gushing over it.
It's NWN.

Eh? Most people ( I've heard) outright hate NWN, even biggest fans put toolset above the actual game.
It's pretty mediocre game, overall though.
 
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Eh? Most people ( I've heard) outright hate NWN, even biggest fans put toolset above the actual game.
It's pretty mediocre game, overall though.
Bingo Joxer hates both NWN games, but doesn't realize it's the toolset/mods.:love:
 
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Love this game, completed it several times, but never as the Dark side. Hmm may have to give it another run through...

Daniel.
 
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It was pretty great, but if this didn't take place in the SW universe i will admit its something that probably wouldn't have drawn me in. I found the characters really likeable, the combat was fun too.

The world itself is pretty lacking, not immensely perhaps but it was hard to not think of how they could have made it way better..

KOTOR2 was pretty much like FO: NV for me, it tries something unique and some of it is good, but it was also a more tedious game that didn't draw me in as much. Never finished it, finished KOTOR 1 twice.
 
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