Finished KOTOR (SPOILERS!)

Games
1

(SPOILER WARNING!!)

So I finished KOTOR tonight, with 45 hours played, and a pure light-side ending. Overall this was the best video/computer/what-have-you RPG I’ve ever played. Yes. Not “one of”. Not “in the league with Planescape/FallOut/etc”. KOTOR was the best. I’m not one given to hyperbole or easy praise but KOTOR was just an outstandingly excellent gaming experience from beginning to end, succeeding on all levels, with some minor hindrances that I was easily able to overlook.

Sure it had some problems with inventory management, and the party level up system was a bit odd, but those things were IMO mere distractions, not serious problems. I was lucky enough not to experience any bugs, slow framerates, or the weird invisible-NPC-thing.

What I got instead was a great Star Wars experience, a much better Star Wars product than the last 2 movies, and also a great open ended RPG, AND a great power-curve game. I’m not much of a Star Wars fan but this game succeeded in taking me back to being 10 years old and awed at my first viewing of Star Wars. It had a classic plot based on potential cliches that nonetheless worked well in the setting. The music and voice acting were outstanding throughout. The visuals, although somewhat low res, featured truly great animations and had a good visual aesthetic. Also, I liked how each cool type of scene from the original series (ie, escape from the big ship, “I’m here to rescue you!”, destruction of a planet and so forth) were incorporated seamlessly into the game.

The RPG aspects of the game showed the lessons learned in the prior Bioware efforts. I liked the NPC system, and the flexibility to use many different characters while each had their own plotlines. This game had all the good features of prior Bioware games (NPC-based subquests, interparty dialogues, romance sub-quests, etc) but had less of that annoying “oh hey you put 10 hours into pumping me up but now I’m leaving the party, good luck!”. There is only episode of an NPC bailing and it is in context. Also, the quest system that from prior Bioware/Interplay games works quite well here. The dialogue choice system worked particularly well, as it allowed for Dark/Light choices.

So it was a good quest based RPG AND a good Star Wars game. On top of that, I really found the power curve and combat aspects of the game to be excellent. I got my entire party to level 20 by the end of the game, and we were BAD ASS :). That final “storm the command deck” battle against the troopers, dark Jedi, and Droids was awesome. What was particularly cool about the power curve was that since you could choose to individually customize each NPC as they levelled, you got to see 10 different takes on the character development system. This allowed me to experiment and plumb the depths of the D20 system. Also, this version of D20 felt better balanced than the AD&D rules (the D&D rules may be a bit hindered b/c they have to conform to 30 years of class/race/old-character expectations).

The combat was very turned based under the hood, with a consistent one-action-per-six-second-round system, but felt very fluid in practice, largely aided by the excellent animations and fairly smooth movement. (However, there were a few tights spots in pathfinding.) The battles were actually not twitchy-fast and the action queue worked well, but the battles still FELT fast and action packed, and the numerous special abilities worked in well.

The difficulty curve of challenges was nicely matched to my party’s growing awesomeness - there were only a couple of points where I felt overpowered (most of Korriban and parts of the unknown world). There were some points that were quite challenging (early on, also near the end with the final battles) but nothing that was painfully hard.

Bottom line: good story, good quests, good power curve, good combat, good party-fu, overall a great Star Wars experience and the best computer/video RPG I’ve ever played.

Favorite Character: HK-47. How can you not love him, with his cheerily homicidal attitude and bad ass combat skill. I played as a Scout/Sentinel and had enough repair to max out HK-47 and he was truly a bad man at the end.

Most used party - Me, Mission and Carth. Used a lot early and midgame, this was a good balanced party for exploring most of the worlds. I only stopped using Mission as much once I got HK-47 and then got to Kashykk for some of the heavier fighting.

Second-most-used party - Me, HK and Canderous, in the midgame, we shot up a lot of stuff on Tatooine and Kashykk - I didnt really understand how to use the Jedi and force powers until I got to Korriban.

Most powerful party: Me as a Jedi Sentinel, with Jolee and Juhani for an all Jedi party. I maxed out potent double bladed lightsabers for Juhani and I, and had Jolee pump up his dueling skill. With Jolee maxxed out on Force powers and using the Support AI script and Juhani and I going combat crazy, we kicked all kinds of ass. Once I did this, Korriban was kind of a cake walk, and we didn’t have any trouble with the unknown world.

Most memorable scene: the revelation of my identity - sure I shoulda scene it coming but I didn’t and it both surprised me and yet fit the plot perfectly.

Most un-expected setting: the underwater base. Here I am in a Star Wars game, and we have a sequence from The Abyss. But it worked :).

Coolest enemy (generic) - the Rancors on the unknown planet - big, tough, mean as hell, and sooooo ugly.

Coolest enemy (specific) - Calo Nord. Sure Darth Malak, Darth Bandon, The Rancor, and the Krayt Dragon all deserve honorable mentions, but Calo Nord’s appearances were some of my favorite bits.

Weirdest sub-quest: The Trial on Manaan - not only was the quest weird but I ended up with a strange ending - I had enough info to get him off, but then I got the videotape proving he did it - since I was light side I ended up having to force my own client to be found guilty and get executed. Very strange. Went against my nature :0.

OK doke, now I’m gonna start over. I feel the power of the Dark Side…

Dan

2

Excellent review and you echo most of my thoughts about the game.

In fact, KOTOR was so good. I immediately started another game after I completed it 2 nights ago to test out the Dark Side path.

I completed as a Light Jedi and from what I have seen you will be getting a very different play experience as a Dark Jedi so I immediately went back in again to try it out. No game to date even the major heavy hitter RPGs like Torment, BG2, Ultima7 have made me want to immediately play again. KOTOR is worth playing twice so here I go again down the dark path…

3

Fantastic game with an excellent story. The revelation about your identity is masterfully done. It could have felt cheap, like you could have never seen it coming. Instead it worked more like the end of the Sixth Sense, where you felt like you totally should have figured it out, but didn’t. There’s a great moment of clarity when they do that flashback sequence during your encounter with Malak, and about two seconds before he said it out loud, it hit me. I nearly dropped my controller in shock. Really well done.

In addition to all the stuff said above, I’d like to add that the combat animations add an awful lot to the game. While the melee combat is functionally similar to Neverwinter Nights, it’s a hell of a lot more fun to watch. Instead of generic “I swing at you, now you swing at me” animations, you get complex lightsaber duels with parries, blocks, kicks, and all sorts of tricks. And if you want to sample badass-ness, you are welcome to take on my dual-purple-lightsaber wielding Jedi Guardian. By the end of the game, I was wading through enemies like Luke in the Tatooine battle in RotJ.

Excellent game. Quite possibly Bioware’s best to date.

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Sssshhhh… Bloodknight might hear you… and thanks for the kudos.

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To add to the praise, Jeremy Soule’s music was excellent. The “hero music” played over the character creation screen and at a few other points of the game is awesome among others. The only misteps in the music were Manaan and the Ancient Temple. Manaan had a new-age sort of music that almost lulled me to sleep and the score to the Temple had a Thomas-Newman vibe that didn’t seem to fit with a temple corrupted by the dark side. I hope the PC gets a collector’s edition with a separate score cd.

I thought the various sidequests were Bioware’s best to date. I particularly enjoyed the various investigations. They seamlessly fit the jedi’s role in keeping the peace. There were some excellent ethical dilemmas too. The Manaan murder case for example: I had the proof that he was guilty yet that was balanced against concern that a guilty verdict could lead to the Republic being ejected for Manaan. There were several times in the game where the light path wasn’t clearcut, which is a good thing.

All in all its up there with Ultima 7 and BG2 among my favorite RPGs of all time. I know that Bioware has a couple of titles based on their own IP in development but here’s hoping we see them produce a KOTOR sequel.

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I thought the music was the weakest part of the game. None of it was memorable, and more often than not I felt that it would fit better in Baldur’s Gate than in Star Wars. Jeremy Soule has no originality, all of his music sounds exactly the same. With the exception of the few John Williams bits he stole for the game, it was pretty lackluster IMO.

7

Disagree on the music–I thought it was quite good.

Yeah, the side-quests (and particularly the trial on Manaan) were excellent.

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favorite character interraction so far:

mission asks bastila if she ever uses the force to get back at people that annoy her. bastila replies that she would never do such a thing. mission calls her a prissy, stuck up b… bastila trips her.

…

where do you find that videotape, sharpe?

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The video is in the Republic embassy computer archives. You can get access to the computer by offering to try to break the code on the Sith passcards, but you’ll have to slice the system to get into the archives. If you confront Sunry about the recording, he’ll confess to the murder (to you, at least–I couldn’t convince him to make a confession in court).

The Mission/Bastila thing was funny. I also like some of the evil dialog choices. One particularly tempting one comes when you save one of the Sith students in the hermit’s tomb. The student says “I can’t believe you saved me!” and one your possible responses is “I saved you… for last!”

Heh.

10

Oh man oh man oh man I can’t wait for the PC version !

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Something that bothered me. WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO MALAK’S JAW? It seems like a huge thing that would be explained somewhere in the game. He clearly was whole at one point, but now has a disfiguring injury. Did Revan maim him? Awfully puzzling.

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When you embrace the Dark Side, bits just tend to fall off, I guess. Didn’t think it needed explaining, especially once you consider KotOR is basically a retelling of Star Wars IV-VI in a different setting. Malak = Vader, sort of (although to really make the connection, you’d have to redeem him as he died - my Light Side guy tried and failed) and Vader wasn’t in terribly good shape either. I guess being downgraded from James Earl Jones to Hayden Christenson will do that to you.

I REALLY enjoyed picking up on the nods to the movies. “Alderaan. They’re on Alderaan.”

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Living on the Dark Side not only rots your soul, but your body, too. That’s what happened to Malek, Vader and the Emperor. Notice that all of them are pale and had beady or bloodshot eyes? Well, there you go.

My favorite character interaction was returning to the droid shop with HK-47 and talking to the owner. Trying (and failing) to repair HK-47 elicts some very amusing responses. The voice actor really nailed his lines there.

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Vader didn’t get feeble and fucked up simply from following the Dark Side. He fell into a pool of some kind of freezing cold liquid, possibly carbonite mist, I can’t remember, and sucking that into his lungs ruined them. That’s why he had a machine to breathe for him.

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Well yes, but Palpatine is pretty fucked up too (although that could just be advanced age, pretty sure His Imperious Majesty has a dental plan though)

Plus, my suspicion always has been that the first Star Wars was a one-off story and the rest of the movies were tacked on later, despite Lucas’s insistence that the entire trilogy or tetraology or lobotomy or whatever it is was written from the start as a complete epic. Among other things, that implies that Lucas WANTED to have Luke’s sister be his love interest in the first movie. So he could have written in the first script “Vader fell in a volcano and thus why he was decrepit and cyborged” and only later figured out that the dark side of the force is actually leprosy.

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Shocking! I never would have guessed!!!

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Finished, finally.

Great game. I don’t think quite on the same level as Torment, however. The evil path is a bit patchy at times (so much counter-productive, senseless violence), and to be honest I had a lot of difficulty forcing myself to finish evil.

I’m really looking forward to trying out the light path.

Question: How did anybody ever beat Malak with the Jedi Consular? That’s seriously an ass-whooping waiting to happen.

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Actually, I found it much easier to beat him with my light-side Consular than with my light-side sentinel. There are big problems if you’re seriously dependant upon force powers, however. Malak is virtually immune to them. There’s no point in trying to use stasis or force wave or any other debilitating light-side power on him. It will never work. He’s got an inbuilt resistance of something like 35. I ended up buffing myself repeatedly, using hyper-adrenal strength, a verpine shield (which, amusingly, doesn’t actually block any of the fucking force lightning damage, even though it claims to protect against electricity), force immunity, master valor, and master speed.

Something that really pisses me off in the fight with Malak, though - he uses lightning constantly, and whenever he hits you with lightning, it cancels your actions for that round of combat. And in examining the combat numbers, every time he hit me with lightning, the list was spammed with a bunch of “BadStrRef” errors.

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Ugh yeah, there’s no denying this is a buggy game. It’s not even as good as Blizzard games on PC, never mind the typical console title. I had at least 3 crashes to contend with, and two situations in which I needed to retry scenarios because the scripting got stuck (in the first Malak battle, he wouldn’t run away after the initial fight), and some other spot on Taris.

This really is the buggiest premier console game I’ve ever played or heard of. The crashes and show-stoppers are killer.

20

Yep. Every single time I play the game, I run into another bug. It’s one of the best RPG’s I’ve ever played, but the QC is appalingly bad. I’m sorry, Dave, Charles, I’m not out to insult either one of you. I’m sure Bioware has a great QC department, but somehow, this game got out in a terrible state. If it were patchable, it would be forgivable, but it’s not. How the hell did this happen?