KOTOR Revisited

I took a break from CoH until they got the update in (which they did last week, though I haven’t done much in there since but noodle around), and reinstalled Knights of the Old Republic. I’d previously had a couple of characters I had gotten fairly far into the game, but lost them to a HD failure. After that, I hadn’t reinstalled.

This game is sucking me in all over again. Knowing what was coming most of the time, the battles haven’t been terribly tough. The exception being those Sand People Holy/Elite Warrior ambushes, especially when one spawned close enough to a Wraid group to draw them in. In comparison, the massive fight at the Sand People zone entry went smoothly, and Calo & Co. went down fairly easily as well.

What I’m digging is the personality this game has. It’s loaded with style, and the voice acting is excellent with few exceptions. I’ve been playing around with characters I hadn’t used much previously (particularly Canderous), and getting some fun dialogue I hadn’t heard before. There’s one conversation where he tells Bastilia that if all of the Jedi under Revan had been as incompetent as she, they would have won the war…

This game delivers for me nearly exactly what I want in a computer game. While I like playing some games as a quick diversion, KOTOR, through its quality, just demands to be played.

This is exactly the sort of post that makes me think I’m crazy. I sunk 3 or 4 hours (of game time, far more actual time) into KOTOR, and just lost interest. Why ?

  1. Combat doesn’t seem to involve any skill, the guy with the higher hit points usually wins. There doesn’t seem to be any advantage to positioning your characters, selecting the “skills” like rapid fire, or even weapon selection (at least in the first 3 or 4 hours).

  2. There’s no way to know what’s important or not. My character ran around in his underwear the first hour because I didn’t know I had to dress him. Heck, he was dressed in the character creation screen. Then, I spent at least an hour running around that damn city talking to everyone and couldn’t figure out what to do next. ( I needed to put on some sith armor I’d found in a trunk). I wasted at least 3 hours trying to win at Pazzak until I realized that I was at a completely unfair disadvantage due to the minus cards the other guy had that I didn’t. Do I need to beat this guy to move the story along ? Can I skip Pazzak entirely ? Can I come back later when I have some minus cards ? Damn if I know.

  3. KOTOR does a terrible job of answering the question: “What the hell do I do now ?” Am I supposed to duel ? Well, only the first two guys, then the rest are unbeatable at your current level. Am I supposed to buy armor and weapons ? Aint tellin. Am I supposed to keep talking to that Sith chick in the bar who keeps threatening to arrest me ? Dunno. Hell, in freaking Paper Mario I could literally buy a clue, why am I made to feel like I’m at a disadvantage because I’ve never played Baldurs Gate or other PC D&D games? I’m not an RPG newbie, but I am a Bioware RPG newbie, so why is Bioware making this harder than it is ?

  4. It’s too hard to figure out why you lost a fight. Once I put the sith armor on, I immediately got my ass kicked by the undergrounders. Why am I being thrown unbeatable foes this damn early in the game ? How do I build up my character so that he doesn’t get his ass handed to him ? Not even gamefaqs can tell me.

It must just be you. Not only was I a newbie to Bioware RPGs, I was a newbie to all RPGs when I played KOTOR, and I didn’t really have any trouble. If anything, I found the game to be too easy.

I’m no experty at this, but I did experience the same thing you did when I played the first time. I came back 8 months later and I LOVE it, so it might be a “mood” thing. Anyway, here is what I have to say about your questions:

  1. Yeah, it seems that way early on, but later you will see definate effects from your choices. There are many things you can do including changing weapons, selecting your opponent, using force powers (Force Whirlwind is my favorite).

2./3.It’s tough at the beginning. There are a ton of side-quests on Taris. Pazaak is fun, but I don’t recall it being necessary to complete any quests. Ditto with the “Duel”, but as you level-up they get easier. Most of those things are there for you to get XP.

  1. This site is great http://www.gamebanshee.com/starwarskotor/locations/introduction.php

Pazaak is completely optional. Of course, if you’re a patient powergamer (contradiction in terms?) you can play through the Yavin station Pazaak sequence, which is probably the only one worth the trouble as it nets you 750 credits per win plus a hefty shopping discount later.

The open-endedness of the game is perhaps one of the downsides. The areas are thankfully small enough that you can traverse them quickly, but the activity density is still a little low compared to, say, BG2. As a result, the plot wanders a bit until you get to the main storyline, which starts right after you finish your Jedi training (about 8 hours into the game). My only major beef with KotOR was that the in-engine cutscenes were unskippable.

  • Alan

Honestly you do sound a bit like an RPG newbie. Sidequests, difficult battles that you may not be completely ready for when you first gain access to an area, properly equipping your character, etc are all pretty common staples of RPGs. I can’t say that I was ever at a loss of what I had to do to move the main plot along in KOTOR.

In all fairness to RickH, I found the first five or so hours of KOTOR to be pretty awful. I stopped playing and restarted several times over a period of months before I managed to power through the beginning just so I could see if the rest of the game was any better. And it is. Once you get your force powers, the game get’s a lot more compelling and rewarding.

But man it’s really tough to get excited about the quests on that first planet. I think part of the reason is that you’re immediately hit with a bunch of side quests (or at least quests that don’t appear relevent) and the story is urging you to spend your time finding Bastilla and getting off the damn planet ASAP. That coupled with party members who want to stop and chat every every five minutes just grinds the momentum to a halt.

Once you get off the planet and gain some power, things pick up. In the end I enjoyed the game, but honestly don’t think it was GOTY material.

Ummm… no ? GF gave me more than I wanted to read, but (as always) I read it anyways. All the answers to the all the questions posted above are in the various FAQs.

Only problem with GF is reading just enough to help you on your way without giving away too much of the story :/.

I got KOTOR late and made it to…the 3rd planet (name escapes me ATM) and then I got Thief 3 and stopped playing. I’m almost done with T3 but I don’t feel compelled to go back to KOTOR. Ever.

  1. Combat does take some skill, or at least some planning. Using the correct combination of buffs/force powers and NPCs can make a huge difference, such as using Bastilla’s droid disruption ability when fighting droids, for example.

  2. I thought it was pretty clear that armor, wrist shields, headgear etc. were important? Reading the descriptions and observing their effect on my characters certainly made it apparent. Pazaak becomes extremely easy once you build a deck with 2 each of +1/-1, +2/-2, +3/-3, +4/-4 and +5/-5 cards. The first guy is beatable with some trial and error, and throughout the game you can gamble for and win these.

  3. I thought that, quest-wise, KOTOR was easier than most other Bioware games. I never had a problem figuring out what to do next. The hardest time I had was in deciding which solution path I wanted to take, since many quests have multiple solutions.

In all fairness to RickH, I found the first five or so hours of KOTOR to be pretty awful.

Interesting. That was my reaction to most of the end game.

I’m two rooms away from beatng the big bad foozle and…Hey, Luke look twenty bucks!

Yeah I liked the first planet better than the last area too.

All in all though, I loved this game. It was my second favorite Bioware RPG behind BG2 and right up there with my favorite RPGs of all time. The NPCs had great personality and I had strong feelings for or against almost all of them.

The combat is not great compared to TToEE but it was the best combat in a Bioware RPG thus far. Pushover battles were easily won without the need to babysit your characters and the per-character action queue allowed for some kind of tactics and forethought in the tougher battles.

About the only negative for me, that I can recall, were the minigames sucked. Swoop racing was ok but there was not enough tracks and no real reason to play once you had beaten each circuit. And the load times for it on the Xbox were horrid. You had to endure 1 min of conversation skipping and loadtime to get 20secs of racing.

olaf

The light-side NPC’s were horrible.

A bunch of whiny, do-good, sniveling punks, most of them with the emotional depth of a rain puddle.

The interesting NPC’s were all dark side, and even then only because being evil is fun.

Jolee get’s some bonus points, but the rest were pretty meh.

If Bioware had writers able to make me care a bit more about the NPC’s maybe I’d have felt guilty when going bad and tormenting them for 20 hours straight without any of them having the guts to do something other than whine about it. But I didn’t. They were all mostly pawns, which I cared for just a smidgeon more than I do about pigeons.

I shared a lot of the experiences already expressed here…

I am definitely not an RPG newbie, so I was perfectly comfortable with the open-ended nature of the game. As mentioned earlier, the beginning was pretty slow, and I felt totally divorced from the combat for the first few hours of play. It’s true, though – once you get to the Jedi academy and start the main quest, everything picks up a lot.

The unskippable cutscenes weren’t a problem for me most of the time, but after every Swoop race, there is a 15 second load time, then a 10 second cutscene. I almost killed myself trying to get through those fucking Swoop races… (unfortunately, I felt compelled to complete everything that I ran across)

I would also agree that some of the fights in the last area get a little annoying. Not a big problem for me, but I noticed.

As a whole, I enjoyed the game a lot, but it was a lot shallower than I had thought it would be, based on the reviews I had read. The stakes in the game are huge (and I was impressed with the extent to which they allowed for my evilness to shape the endgame), but it still felt like the whole game was on a small scale. The small areas and the fact that there were only a few discreet planets – no exploring, etc – made the game seem a lot more contrived and artificially limited than I would have liked.

As embarassing as it is to admit, I haven’t played either of the Baldur’s Gates, but if you compare KOTOR to Fallout, for example, I felt like the scope of Fallout’s story was greater than KOTOR’s even though the stakes are much lower. I have wondered why that is, but I think it’s that Fallout is open-ended in a Morrowind sort of way, and KOTOR’s individual areas are on rails. Granted, the rails branch a time or two, but they are a lot more obvious than in RPGs that I have liked better.

Hm. Longer post than I intended.

All in all though, I loved this game. It was my second favorite Bioware RPG behind BG2 and right up there with my favorite RPGs of all time.

Agree. I’d put KOTOR up there with BG2, Avernum 2, Gothic 2, Ultima V, Magic Candle, and a few others on my short list of best CRPGs ever.

After winning KOTOR the first time (as light side), I immediately started to replay it the next day, as dark side. I’ve never done that with a CRPG before.

Hmmm, seems I need to try again when I am in the right frame of mind and willing to gut out some blah material until I can use the force.

Oh, and I read a great deal of the stuff on GameFaqs, but most of it was just lists of stats and comparisons of character classes. Made the game seem about as fun as a spreadsheet.

If Bioware had writers able to make me care a bit more about the NPC’s maybe I’d have felt guilty when going bad and tormenting them for 20 hours straight without any of them having the guts to do something other than whine about it. But I didn’t. They were all mostly pawns, which I cared for just a smidgeon more than I do about pigeons.

Wow, maybe I need to go dark side…

Combat does take some skill, or at least some planning.

I can understand planning your weapons/buffs loadout before a fight, but how influential is actual positioning in a KOTOR fight ? Does it really matter where your characters stand outside of the obvious weapon ranges ?

Range/position is almost completely irrelevant. The tricky part with combat is using the right combination of special moves/items and making sure characters are doing coordinated things. Early on when special moves/items are scarce that’s not so big a deal, but it gets to be a little ways into the game when special feats and grenades start becoming a factor. Once force powers come into play, picking the right powers in the right order makes a world of difference.

Mr. Jones, you’re right. What a nice walkthrough, makes me want to start over again and get it right this time.

If you can get over that one dialogue choice decides the fate of the universe without any of your previous acts being taken into account for it, sure.

If you can get over that one dialogue choice decides the fate of the universe without any of your previous acts being taken into account for it, sure.

Yeah, there’s that, I guess. :) I was playing consistently as evil as possible through the entire game, so I guess it didn’t occur to me that you would even have those options available if you were light-side through the whole game. Hmph. I guess I thought the outcome of my choice was cool enough that I didn’t even think about the mechanics of the game.

I guess that Jedi are supposed to always be in danger of falling to the dark side, but it’s kind of silly to allow a light side Jedi on the order of Bastila to make some of the evil choices you get toward the end of the game.

Unless I’m mistaken (which I very well might be), Fallout would limit your strategic dialogue choices based on your reputation… Probably I’m wrong, but I’d prefer to think that I’m right.