An Adventure Game By Any Other Name...

After playing Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, my personal favorite game of 2003 (although I personally played it in 2004), I was hungry-- starving, in fact-- for more Star Wars action. I’d heard good things about Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic (KOTOR), so I picked it up. KOTOR is billed as a Star Wars role-playing game (RPG). I love Star Wars, I love RPGs, I had just had a great experience with Jedi Academy, and I had read several glowing reviews of KOTOR, so naturally I went into it with high expectations. I was horribly disappointed at first, because frankly, KOTOR is extremely weak as an RPG. I might even go so far as to say it’s terrible as an RPG. But once I stopped thinking of it as an RPG and started thinking of it as an adventure game with some RPG icing, I had a lot of fun. It is a fun adventure game that supplied a nice Star Wars fix until 2005... oops! Guess it’s time to go shopping!

The Backstory

KOTOR takes places 4,000 years before the Galactic Empire (and the events of the original Star Wars movie trilogy). A few years before KOTOR opens, the Republic fought a costly war against the nation of rapacious Mandalorian mercenaries. The Republic sought the support of the Jedi Order in fighting off the Mandalorians, but the Order refused, claiming it was not yet time for the Jedi to become involved. Revan and Malak, then members of the Order, defied the Jedi Council and led Republic forces against the Mandalorians. They were victorious, but the cost was high. Republic forces had been greatly weakened, and Revan and Malak took a portion of those forces and chased the fleeing Mandalorians deep into unknown space. They disappeared, and were not heard from again for two years...

...when they returned, greatly changed, now known as Dark Lord Revan and Darth Malak, servants of the Dark Side, and with a mysterious armada of unknown ships backing them. Without warning or provocation, they unleashed a devastating assault upon the Republic. Weakened by the Mandalorian War, the Republic reeled under the sudden onslaught and now verges on the brink of collapse. Although Revan was killed in a surprise attack, Malak quickly assumed control and continued the attack. The Jedi Order is scattered and vulnerable, as many Jedi fall in battle, and more turn to the Dark Side and swear allegiance to Malak and the Sith.

You play a seemingly ordinary soldier caught up in a desperate bid to defeat the Sith and save the Republic. An ordinary soldier who turns out to be not so ordinary after all, as you become involved in a desperate gambit by the Jedi Order to find and neutralize the mysterious source of Malak’s power.

Character Generation: A Big Dull Dud

As is common in newer role-playing games (RPGs) (and by newer I mean the last 10 years or so), you only the get the chance to create one character (the player character, or PC) instead of a whole party. I never liked this, because I always enjoyed spending hours assembling the ideal adventuring party and experimenting with the range of races, classes and abilities. I think that’s half the fun of an RPG. Sigh... I guess I just have to accept the changing face of RPGs. The tradeoff is that there are non-player characters (NPCs) with detailed personalities and backgrounds who will join you during the game, and it can be fun to see them interact. Unlike some other RPGs such as Baldur’s Gate, you don’t pick and choose which NPCs to take with you-- the story line is designed such that they will all wind up on your ship, and you can pick any two to form a three-person “away team” (if you’ll forgive a Star Trek term) for a given mission. The available NPCs are a diverse bunch, including a Republic soldier, a few Jedi, a Twi’lek, a Wookiee, an evil Mandalorian mercenary, and some droids.

If you only get to create one character, you should at least have a lot of cool options for creating just the character you want, right? Wrong. Right off the bat, the character generation process misses the mark in a big way. Unlike most other RPGs, KOTOR gives you no race options-- you can only be human. Boo, hiss! In a universe as packed with cool non-human races as the Star Wars universe, the failure to include a variety of races with unique strengths and weaknesses is just criminal. I was also disappointed that you only get three class options-- Scoundrel, Scout, or Soldier. These can be considered analogs of the Thief, Ranger, or Fighter classes in a traditional sword-and-sorcery RPG. All of the mage, priest, and monk type classes you would usually see in a traditional RPG are absent, because the Star Wars analog of all of those classes is the Jedi. However, there is no Jedi class option during the character creation process, either. For a game in which being a Jedi and using the Force plays a central role, the lack of Jedi class options was rather shocking, but it turns out you must learn to be a Jedi through the course of the game.

Surprisingly, options for customizing your character’s image are virtually nil. The appearance issues are more important than you might think, because the adventure-game-style interface means you spend the whole game watching a 3-D model of your character run around and fight. The only good thing I can say about the character models, aside from 3-D generation, is that they’re impressively diverse, including quite a few phenotypes that on Earth would be recognized as African, Asian, and possibly Middle Eastern.

Once you have chosen your character’s gender, class and portrait, you then generate your character’s standard vital statistics of Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. You are assigned a starting level for each attribute, and given a pool of points which you can use to tailor your character. While the pool system allows you to fine-tune your character at will, I miss the old-fashioned system in which you simply rolled the dice and hoped for the best. With the random generation system, you had a small chance of rolling a truly phenomenal superhero with monster stats in nearly every category, and that’s not possible with the pool system.

Your character’s abilities are based on a system of Skills (non-combat abilities) and Feats (combat abilities). You develop your character by adding points to your selected Skills and Feats, and adding new Skills and Feats to your repertoire, as you progress through the game. Fortunately, there is no training or seeking out of masters to improve your skills in KOTOR. That’s one RPG tradition I can do without. You simply add points to your selected abilities each time you level up and you’re done.

Of course, if character generation isn’t your bag, then none of KOTOR’s shortcomings in this area will bother you. In fact, if you really don’t want to bother with it, you can simply have the computer generate a quick character for you, and you can allow all of your party members to level up automatically. Considering how weak KOTOR is in terms of being a true RPG, this might actually be the best way to play it.

Identity Crisis: Is it a Weak RPG or a Weak Adventure Game?

The reason I say KOTOR is a weak RPG at best, and maybe an awful RPG, is that you have next no freedom to truly develop your character as you see fit, which is the core of a good RPG. I already mentioned that you don’t get to choose a race, which is unprecedented for an RPG, and the limited class options seem to make very little difference to your character. At any rate, no matter what class you originally chose, you WILL become a Jedi... the only choice you get to make is whether you will be a Jedi Guardian, Consular, or Sentinel, which affects whether you focus more on lightsaber combat or developing your other Force powers. It’s a quite minor choice. Finally, your identity is set in stone before the game even begins. I don’t want to reveal too much about that for fear of spoiling the story, but suffice it to say the name you choose in the beginning turns out not to be your character’s real name. You’re playing a role, all right, but that’s never been my understanding of what a role-playing game is all about. In a real role-playing game, you determine your role yourself as you play. Here, the only real choice you can make is the standard choice between good and evil, and it’s even more scripted than in most RPGs. Everything else has already been written.

During gameplay, KOTOR actually feels much more like an adventure game a la Tomb Raider, Thief, or Jedi Academy than an RPG, thanks to the fly-behind camera adventure game-style interface, the detailed 3-D graphics, and the moderately intense but sporadic combat. It’s so much like an adventure game that occasionally the lack of adventure game features felt like a flaw. For example, at one point I encountered a knee-high ledge with some scenery beyond it. In any of those games, the ledge would have been no problem-- you simply jump or climb over it and explore the area beyond-- but in an RPG, negotiating terrain obstacles generally isn’t part of the game strategy, so you just have to accept that it’s the edge of the playable area. Unfortunately, many of the levels in KOTOR fall afoul of the adventure game principle of, “If you can see it, chances are you can explore it,” in exactly this way. Older, more traditional RPGs didn’t have access to the kind of advanced graphics used in KOTOR, so this kind of frustration was never a problem-- you simply walked until you ran into a wall of mountains, an ocean, or an impenetrable thicket, and you could go no farther.

Gameplay: Fun Adventuring and Action With A Few Flaws

If you can forgive LucasArts for the giant disappointments that crop up in the first five minutes of the game (it can be hard, it took me nearly six months before I was willing to give it another chance) and the fundamentally poor RPG character of the game, there is plenty of fun to be had.

The game is played with one hand on the mouse and the other mostly on the WASD keys. The biggest problem with the controls is that you control the direction your party is facing with EITHER the mouse pointer OR the A-D keys. They operate simultaneously, which means that if the mouse pointer wanders too near the edge of the screen while you’re pressing the A key, you’ll suddenly find yourself spinning in a circle. Aside from that problem the controls are quite simple, and if you can left-click, you’ve pretty much got it covered.

True to the RPG form, gameplay in KOTOR involves a lot of exploring, talking to people, collecting money and loot, buying and selling equipment, solving the occasional puzzle, and most importantly, acquiring and completing quests, some of which relate directly to advancing the story line, and some of which are side quests.

Combat with both melee and ranged weapons figures heavily through most of the game, and there are a variety of weapons and armor to be had, as well as enemies to fight. The combat system is a combination real-time/turn-based system which is thought to combine the best of both worlds in terms of blending turn-based control with exciting real-time action. When an enemy is sighted, the game automatically pauses, and you set up attacks for your characters, then un-pause and watch the fur fly. However, combat can be quite a tiresome juggling act. You have to constantly monitor each member of your team to make sure their action queue is full of useful actions. If you spend too much time controlling one character, the others will run through the actions you initially queued up for them and will revert to their basic script actions, which tend to be much less effective than the specialized attacks they have in their repertoires.

You’ll run into some fairly intelligent enemy AI, and particularly troublesome are the enemy grenadiers, who stand back and bombard you with devastating grenades while the front line fighters block the way, forcing you to plow through them before you can knock out the grenadiers. Enemies are also pretty good at spreading out and attacking from all sides, which can be a bit hard to handle. Your own party's AI isn't nearly as advanced, and although you can choose a script called Grenadier for one or more of your own characters, I found it's not very useful, because you can't stop all your characters from engaging the enemy, so invariably, your grenadier winds up blowing up your other characters.

From the beginning of the game, your actions will determine whether your orientation is Light or Dark. (I personally dislike using light and dark imagery to stand for good and evil-- I believe darkness and everything associated with it has been unfairly maligned for the last 4,000 years or so. I prefer to simply call them the Good and Evil sides of the Force.) If you choose to threaten and intimidate to accomplish your goals, and you slaughter innocent bystanders at the slightest provocation (or no provocation at all), you can rest assured your character portrait will turn red and your orientation meter will drop lower and lower. But avoiding the evil side isn’t as easy as it might seem. Often, the easiest path to getting what you want will likely lead toward the evil side, and sticking to the good will require that you spend more money, run inane errands for people in order to convince them to help you, and other such annoying things. Of course, some players choose to play the evil side, and it has certain advantages as well as disadvantages. Once you become a Jedi, you will have the opportunity to select the Force powers you want when you level up. You can select good or evil powers at will, but powers from the opposing side will cost you more in Force points to use. The evil side has most of the awesome combat powers, while the good side has more protective powers. There are also universal powers, used with equal ease by all. There are also certain high-level items of equipment available only to one side or the other, and a quest here and there that is only available to one side or the other.

KOTOR’s story unfolds on several different planets, including the planet-wide city of Taris, Tattooine, Kashyyk (the forested Wookiee homeworld), Dantooine, the ocean world of Manaan, and the volcanic planet Korriban. During the game, you acquire your very own spaceship, and you can use your ship to travel to any planet in any order you like. Each planet contains a variety of unique environments, enemies, and side quests, as well as a quest related to the main storyline. In this respect, gameplay is not particularly linear, in that you can visit any planet whenever you like and start any quest you have acquired whenever you’re ready. You may be able to visit certain planets more than once, although some are a one-shot deal.

Graphics, Sound, Performance

KOTOR was released in 2003, and while its graphics aren’t world-class compared to the best shooter games of 2004, like FarCry, Doom III, and Half-Life 2, they’re still good by today’s standards, and they’re certainly the best I’ve seen in an RPG-- not a genre known for cutting edge graphics. 3-D rendering is used throughout, which by itself is unusual enough for an RPG, and it’s a pretty good engine. Of the RPGs I’ve played, only Neverwinter Nights (incidentally, made by the same developer, Bioware) comes close to the graphics performance of KOTOR. The scenery for large outdoor areas is beautifully drawn, and there is none of that fogging out often seen in older 3-D games-- the scenery actually disappears into the distance.

I’m pleased enough to see an RPG using 3-D graphics at all that I’m not inclined to be too picky, but I did notice that there’s not a lot of variety in the NPC models. Throughout the game, the people you talk to on every planet you visit, while they’re fairly well done, look pretty much the same.

Throughout the game, you’ll hear music directly from the Star Wars score as well as original music based rather closely on the score, and a variety of voice-acted cut scenes. All conversations with NPCs are voice-acted as well, with quite good voice work (and that’s a lot of voice-acting). I was not as impressed with the sound effects as I was in Jedi Academy (I’m harder to impress these days), but they were not noticeably bad, and the Star-Wars-y feel is maintained.

Recommended system specs are 1.6 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM, and ATI Radeon 9200 or better OR NVidia GeForce 4 Ti or better video card. I run a 2.8 GHz processor, 256 MB RAM, and a GeForce 3 Ti200 on Windows XP, so I am below recommended specs, although I meet minimum specs, and my performance was fine. I had a very few minor slowdowns at a few outdoor points that only lasted a few seconds, and I had some crashing problems where Windows complained about virtual memory being low. I also found that KOTOR is very picky about running with other applications open in the background and it tends to crash if you try to run anything else along with it. Within the game, bugs were quite rare, with the major one being sticking on corners and protrusions. In this respect, it appears to be much better off than the XBox version, in which complaints about bugs were rampant.

What’s Cool

During many missions, you can leave the mission area to make a resupply run if you need to. You can also instantly change out members of your away team, and you can instantly travel back to your ship. Whether this works or not is based on common sense-- for example, if you’ve taken a submersible down to the ocean floor, you would expect these features to be disabled.

There is no weight or item limit on your inventory. You can easily carry a dozen sets of armor and 20 or 30 different pieces of heavy artillery, as well as a space suit, a deep sea diving suit, and the kitchen sink, with no problem. Ain’t technology great? The only problem is that your inventory gets so large it becomes a pain to find what you're looking for. You can sort your inventory by categories such as New Items, Equippable Items, Quest Items, etc, but I found them to be not that helpful.

There is no eating, resting, fatigue, or night/day cycles. This means you never have to carry food, worry about finding a safe place to rest when night falls, or pay for lodging. There are also no lengthy periods of traveling. Some purist players might take issue with these sorts of changes, because they lessen the “realism” of the game, but I think it’s all good. This is supposed to be fun! Why not take the tedium out of it? It’s not exactly realistic to begin with.

Once you become a Jedi, you can choose to use a single lightsaber, a pair of lightsabers, or a double-bladed lightstaff, provided you can take one off a fallen enemy. You can upgrade your lightsaber at your workbench, using a variety of crystals which will affect the blade color and properties. You can also upgrade a variety of other melee weapons, ranged weapons, and armor.

One of the more interesting types of equipment are cybernetic implants that can improve various stats and abilities.

The game includes a host of authentic locations and species, complete with their original languages from the Star Wars films, including Wookiee growls and howls, the deep rumbling language of the Hutts, the guttural grunting roars of the Sand People, Twi’lek, and a number of other lesser known species, all portrayed in loving detail.

What’s Lame

Each character in your away team has a 3-D model which moves independently, with the view centered on the active character, and the others following close behind. This is cool from a graphics point of view, but logistically it mostly means you’re tripping over your companions every time you turn around. Compounding that is the fact that it’s really easy to get stuck on corners and stray protrusions-- including your companions. When turning around to leave a room, the sticking on companions problem is so bad I’ve often had to switch characters just to get out. (Maybe I should have learned to use the Back key more often.)

There is no way to quickly switch between ranged and melee weapons in combat-- your only option is to pause, go to the equip screen, and manually shuffle your weapons for each character. I'm quite surprised Bioware didn't include item quickslots like they did in Neverwinter Nights, which got around this exact problem.

There is no way to set custom combat scripts for your characters to allow them to automatically make use of their most effective attacks and Force powers-- you must manually queue up a series of actions. While you’re busy fiddling with one character, the other characters have completed their queues and reverted to basic attacks, which aren’t nearly as effective. Although there are three basic scripts-- Default Attack, Grenadier, and Jedi Support-- they aren’t nearly detailed enough, and you really should be able to customize a detailed and specific script for each character.

Scoundrels aren’t really that similar to traditional RPG thieves or rogues. Although their primary stat is Dexterity, and their trademark skill is Stealth, you must have a piece of equipment called a Stealth Field Generator to actually be stealthy, and there aren’t that many occasions when stealth is called for anyway. There’s also no actual thievery or picking of pockets in the game, and although picking locks can be an issue, anyone can develop that skill, and a Jedi can cut through virtually any lock with a lightsaber anyway. All this leaves a Scoundrel little more than a weak fighter who relies on Dexterity instead of Strength to survive. That's too bad, because Scoundrel/Thief/Rogue is normally one of my favorite classes.

The Bottom Line

If you’re expecting a classic RPG with a Star Wars motif, prepare to be disappointed. I was. You’ll be much happier if you think of this as a Star Wars adventure game with a bit of an RPG flair and a few limitations. It has pretty good graphics, pretty good sound, a fun Star Wars feel, and some neat characters. Its main drawback on a minute-by-minute basis is that handling multiple party members in combat is a real drag. Although I think it basically blows from an RPG purist's point of view, I still give it four stars because at the end of the day, it's fun, regardless of what you call it.