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".
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).