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Tuesday, 15 July 2014

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (PC) - Part 2

Click to jump back to part one.

The game's given me a lightsaber! Though my character still can't use it; Jedis only.

I'm in a Sith base trying to get the codes to let us bypass the bloakage, and man Bastila is just slicing through these chrome Stormtrooper wannabes like they were nothing. Plus she can even deflect their own blaster bolts back at them, as is tradition for a Jedi. The only reason she's taken so much damage is because I accidentally walked over a poison gas mine to get here.

When they bring out the combat droids it's even more hilarious, as she instantly electrocutes them with lightning and shuts them down cold for a few seconds. Sure it costs Force power to use her powers, but that (slowly) recharges over time. She even has a healing power so I don't have to use up medpacs so much. I don't remember Yoda ever casting 'cure' on anyone in the prequel trilogy, but then I don't remember R2D2 flying around with jets in the original films either, so who knows what other Force magic that muppet had stashed in his spell book.

Bastila may be able to zap a robot or two with her Jedi powers, but my character has the hacking skills to break into the security system and blow power couplings! There's a room full of enemies that won't be bothering us in the future, plus we even get the XP for it. It's always nice to have options in an RPG. The only downside is that it costs some of my limited stash of computer spikes to do it, which I could've used for something else along the road.

Oh crap, this droid's got a force shield on it so Bastila can't use her lightning on it. I'd deactivate the shield using a security terminal, but I used up my all computer spikes already!

Uh, new plan! We run away and buy more spikes.


BUT THEN...


Okay Bastila this isn't funny any more. Come back out from behind the desk so we can go back to raiding this Sith base and acquire the codes we need to escape Taris and get past the blockade.

This is ridiculous, I've bought the computer spikes I need but now I can't use them because my Jedi refuses to jump over a waist-high shop counter! I can't just go off without her as "You must gather your party before venturing forth." I've no idea how she even got in there, it's blocked off on all sides!

It's times like this that I wish I'd saved the game properly more often instead of relying on quick saves. So much progress lost over something so stupid.


EVENTUALLY.


Oh now they're back to ripping off the movies again. Empire Strikes Back this time I believe.

You might be wondering why this guy has tattoos and a metal plate where his jaw should be, and the answer is that he's a Dark Lord of the Sith, and therefore his design has to be inspired by Darth Vader and Darth Maul as much as possible.

That reminds me, the game was released between Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith in case you were wondering, but is set way earlier. About 4000 years earlier in fact, as it's kind of a sequel to a comic book called Tales of the Jedi (which confusingly included an unrelated story called Knights of the Old Republic in 1994). Funny, I'd have put the game 40 years earlier than the films looking at the technology and fashions.

Oh no he's taken the admiral's jaw as well!

Look at those poor folks in the background on the right, trying to look busy despite their chairs being placed too far from the consoles for them to reach the buttons. It's not easy being a Sith.


GETTING HOLD OF A STARSHIP.


Darth Malak's arrival on the scene means that we really should be getting off this planet before he starts tearing it apart to find us, so I'm going to skip showing screenshots of the next few places and jump right to the part where I find the Ebon Hawk sitting in a hangar with the keys in the ignition.

You know, as obvious Millennium Falcon wannabes go, this doesn't look so bad at all. It has a distinctive design of its own, while still firmly belonging to the Star Wars universe. Plus it's twice as big on the inside as it is on the outside, so it firmly belongs to the BioWare universe as well.

Gratuitous spaceship shot.

I would've shown a screenshot of the ship escaping the hangar the building explodes around it, but it took a few tries to get screenshots from the cutscenes, and the game wouldn't let me replay that particular video from the menu screen.

Oh typical, I can't even leave a planet without Sith fighters coming to pester me. Uh, they're a little hard to see, but there's one just under the crosshairs. I would've put him directly in the crosshairs, but I'm trying to lead the target here, and that's a bit difficult when I can barely see the target. Also the mouse control started acting up as well so I had to start using the keys instead.

Anyway, this RPG has a turret sequence! They seem to get everywhere these days. Fortunately it's far more bearable than the one in... the new Star Trek game for instance, and is over with quickly enough. Then we hit the hyperdrive and left the Taris system far behind us. It's over. It's over.


MUCH LATER.


Anyway, stuff happened and I finally get to use a lightsaber now! The trouble with that though is, now that I have a team of Jedis what's the point of all those other characters I've been collecting? I tried to give guns a fair shot but unfortunately chance wasn't on their side.

Now the game is starting to feel a lot more like Final Fantasy XII, giving me the illusion of being in a wide open countryside, when I'm actually confined in small areas that join up at certain points.

This grassy planet dragged on for a little while itself, but now that I've earned my own the lightsaber and my Jedi crew I'm finally allowed to...

Knights of the Old Republic star map
... access the galaxy map! Here I can select to visit the quest hubs on the water planet, the desert planet, the evil desert planet, and the forest planet. The game is still going to play out much the same way as it did on Taris, but this small amount of freedom makes all the difference. Whenever I get sick of a place I can presumably just jump into my spaceship and go visit somewhere else. Plus it helps that Taris is permanently off my map now.

Speaking of leaving the world, I think this the perfect place to turn the game off.


CONCLUSION
I didn't really enjoy Knights of the Old Republic quite as much as I expected it to, though it really isn't a bad game either. I think my familiarity with the game probably has something to blame for that, as I know the answers to all the big secrets, which disarms all the plot twists and drains all the mystery out of it.

The writing isn't actually the game's strong point though in my opinion, as it's not blessed with the wit or interesting characters found in later BioWare games (yes even Dragon Age 2. ESPECIALLY Dragon Age 2). It's a bit of a shame really, as there's a lot of dialogue here, and you can find yourself talking for quite a while about the mythology they've created for these worlds. There's plenty of subquests to find and plenty of things to get involved with or ignore as you wish. The game encourages exploration of the environment and the characters though by not really letting you grind for XP. If you want those extra levels, you gotta go talk to everyone and figure out what you can do for them.

Musically it's perfect, as Elder Scrolls composer Jeremy Soule manages to capture the style of the Star Wars soundtrack without just repeating the movie melodies for the millionth time (and thank fuck for that). Visually though it hasn't aged all that well, with flat graphics and awkward animations, but it still has that Star Wars charm to it.

I'd definitely want to play it some more, some day, but I think I'd have to give myself a while to recover from Taris first. So it easily gets a shiny golden star, but no prize.

If you want to share your opinions on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Star Wars games in general, my writing, my humble website, or anything else half-way related, then you go down to that message box and you type those opinions into it!

Without your insightful feedback I'm left adrift like a YT-1300 Corellian freighter without a hyperspace beacon, or whatever it is they use in Star Wars. I forget.
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10 comments:

  1. thekelvingreen15 July 2014 at 20:51

    The writing isn't actually the game's strong point though in my opinion, as it's not blessed with the wit or interesting characters found in later BioWare games

    Or the earlier ones! I am beginning to think that they peaked with Baldur's Gate II, although that's not a peak to sniff at, to bludgeon a couple of metaphors.

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    1. Ray Hardgrit15 July 2014 at 22:38

      There are definitely worse games to peak with. Some people would put that as the peak for the entire RPG genre in general. Well, that or Planescape Torment I guess.

      Personally though I prefer the dialogue in their later games where you're able to see and hear your own character take part in the conversations. I gotta pick Garrus over Minsc every time, Morrigan over Jaheira, Varric over... whoever was in Neverwinter Nights. I admit it's been a while since I've played the games though so my memory is fuzzy; they're getting overdue for a replay perhaps.

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  2. Kizor16 July 2014 at 16:22

    Would morality meters be better if there was a cost to being good? The player would have to spend resources or even sometimes give up power, just because it'd be the right thing to do to a bunch of imaginary people.

    Bioshock went some way towards that (MURDER CHILREN FOR POWER Y/N?) but then it gave comparable rewards for N.
    Some of the Quest for Glories let the player do things like tell a disarmed enemy to pick up his sword, but even this gives you a better action scene and lets you see more of the game.

    Good luck with Long Live the Queen. It's a bit like clearing a minefield with a box of princesses.

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    1. Ray Hardgrit16 July 2014 at 18:20

      There's already a cost to being good in a lot of these games, and that's that you can't risk being bad occasionally without losing reputation points or paragon points or light side points etc. If these meters were just there to display how other people see your group then that's one thing, but BioWare games tend to tie it to the game mechanics, affecting your combat abilities and dialogue options. If I remember right, the player has to max out their Paragon or Renegade bars in the Mass Effect games by consistently picking either the blue or red dialogue lines every time or else characters are likely going to die.

      I not sure consistently punishing the player for being a decent person would help much, unless the game's got a grimdark world and is trying to push that as a theme, as players are still being dragged one way or the other instead of being encouraged to judge each situation individually. The trouble with BioShock's system wasn't that it gave rewards for being good, it's that it was the same damn choice every single time! If you answer Y to 'murder children for power?' twice, then you're not likely to change your mind when it comes up a third time.

      The way I'd do it, if I was running a AAA RPG development team (they'd be called Hardsoft), is make sure that there's never a optimal way to roleplay, that the 'right' dialogue option is left up to the player to decide, and that even being inconsistent comes with its own rewards. Plus if they put the effort in to steal something and manage to get away with it, then good on them, they're not going be stuck with a -10 karma penalty for a crime that no one else knows they did. Hey, maybe the owner even deserved it! Not that a crime wave won't have other consequences...

      Basically I'm more of an Obsidian fan than a BioWare fan when it comes to morality and choice in RPGs. Magical Princess Simulators on the other hand... they can have all the wrong choices they want. (I'm not sure how you got the right game from just a tiny cartoon ghost, but that was a damn fine analogy.)

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  3. Anonymous18 July 2014 at 11:34

    The stupidest thing with the light/dark system is that you have to be an idiot and behave like an obviously evil bastard if you are 'dark'. That doesn't even make any sense considering the plot.

    It would make much more sense to pretend to be good until to get people to help you, and then betray them when it is advantageous to you. THAT is evil, not randomly stealing lollipops from kids.

    The stupidest thing is that the game lets you do precisely that, but you won't get the full dark side bonuses if you do that, because you weren't "evil enough" even though you betrayed everyone...

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    1. Ray Hardgrit19 July 2014 at 12:23

      Well stealing lollipops is pretty evil too...

      Yeah, the system can't judge intent, it doesn't ask you if you're lying, and it doesn't take into account the bigger picture. I suppose a light/dark system could work better if it held off evaluating your actions until the end of each chapter of the story, to give your schemes time to play out. Plus get rid of the scale and make it a binary 'light or dark' result, determined by your actions in the last chapter alone, so there's no way to get Force power bonuses for being more good or extra evil. Though this idea kind of relies on the game having chapters, and that's not really KotOR's style.

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  4. DDay18 July 2014 at 22:40

    Nothing!

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  5. Narushima8 November 2014 at 15:59

    Hanger ≠ Hangar.

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    1. Ray Hardgrit8 November 2014 at 17:04

      Fixed, both times. Thanks for that.

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    2. Ray Hardgrit8 November 2014 at 18:12

      I also went through the site and fixed it on ZOE: Fist of Mars, Quake 4, E.Y.E., Silent Debuggers, Hostile Waters, F.E.A.R., Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, Medal of Honor 2010 and James Bond: the Duel as well, so hopefully the difference between the two has been burned into my mind now.

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