What's with KOTOR and all the love for it?

[Edward_R_Murrow]

I just don't understand it at all. Storytime!

I was going through Limbo (aka Bioware forums) for some reason, most likely mental impairment of some sort, and I came upon a couple of threads about people's favorite Bioware games and favorite RPGs. I went and read them, hoping to get a decent laugh. There were tons of people with "jRPGs" in their lists, Oblivion, Diablo, and all that nonsense.

But what actually interested me were the KOTOR fans. I expected a ton of people who had never touched a CRPG in their life to love these games. Heck, I bet if most of us had never been exposed to PC role-playing games we might find KOTOR the messiah of role-playing. What I found was a little more mystifying, a ton of people also had Shadows of Amn in their lists....below KOTOR. Even more mysterious were the people with games like Fallout, Planescape, and Arcanum in their lists.....also below KOTOR.

This made me wonder what the hell was going on here. Maybe it's because I really like complex answers or have a far too open mind sometimes, but I wanted to know if there was really something I missed about KOTOR.

Ok...so one of the first things I heard about KOTOR that was supposedly great were the characters. Alright. Let's look at this for a second.

-First character I met was Lieutenant Expendable who died in the first five minutes of the game. How Gorion of him.

-Next I meet this Carth fellow. First thing I think of when I see him is that he looks a hell of a lot like Anomen. After talking to him for a while and finding he is a whiney S-O-B, I'm thinking he is quite similar to Anomen. Moving on.

-Next I meet this blue chick with a big, hairy Chewbacca clone following her. This blue chick is apparently pretty young and speaks a lot like it. I got a serious Imoen impression off of her, except without the sort-of twisted jokes etc.

-Next I meet some Jedi chick who is ultra-pretentious, super-stuck-up, and an overall pain in the ass to deal with sending me off on stupid journeys. She's apparently of noble blood and she really gives me a Jaheira vibe....

-Then I meet a droid. He doesn't talk a lot. Real deep.

-Then I meet a big dude who likes to fight stuff and kill people. How unique.

-Next I meet a furry. I try to show mercy by not killing it, in the hopes she leaves me alone instead of haunting me, but to no avail, I'm stuck with it. The furry is angry and tormented, probably because she's a furry and apparently a lesbian. Wonderful.

-Next I meet a droid who likes to kill stuff and call people meatbags. Awesome. The two "evil" characters are just so deep and involving.

-Next I meet a senile, old man with crazy Jedi powers who sounds a lot like Sarevok....wonder why? He's actually pretty unique and kind of funny.

So out of 10 characters, 1 of them is actually decent while the rest are clones of Baldur's Gate people. Not getting it yet.

Next people say the dialogue and role-playing options are so deep. Not getting this one either.

-Basically everything in this game is Neo-Bioware morality at full scale. Your choices are be a saint, be a saint and give people money afterwards, or do the exact same thing the saintly person would do.....but ask for money......how evil.

-You can't even initiate fights. Past Bioware games let me go on a murderous rampage if I wanted to. Heck, even Oblivion does this. But not KOTOR.

-Korriban was quite possibly the dumbest place in the universe. If you really are a Sith Lord, wouldn't you just go whack the people in charge and seize control? Does it make sense for Mr. Evil Lord of Darkness to do a bunch of trivial tasks when he could easily just mop the floor with everyone?

Combat was praised as well for some strange reason.

-I loved the blaster fighting at first....then some guy with a sword started dominating me. A freaking sword. So somehow a beam of superheated plasma or whatnot is inferior in killing ability to a sharp piece of metal. Yep, perfect sense.

-People don't die in your group.....ever. I guess because there's no ressurrection spells, but still....maybe they could have....nanites or something. It was damn near impossible to actually lose.

-Speaking of difficulty....where is it again? After you Jedi-up everything dies like that. Sixteen Dark Jedi Masters? No problem! I can understand keeping the main fights easy enough for the general public that lacks patience, but at least throw in some good optional fights a la Kangaxx, the dragons, and Demogorgon. Blew this one big time with the Krayt Dragon.

-The big fight with Malak was exactly like the one with Aec'Letec in Baldur's Gate....except not a challenge.

Story as well was praised. I guess that makes Baldur's Gate a masterpiece by their standards.

-I'm the Dark Lord Revan? NO WAI! I totally wasn't expecting that I was secretly someone special....not in a Bioware game.

-Go get these four MacGuffins so we can find the foozle factory and shut it down ASAP. Obviously something like pulling the location out of Revan's mind with the same force magic that wiped the memories would make too much sense and somehow inexplicably fail.

-My love interest has been turned against me? Like turned into a vampire? Or baptized by an unholy lizard cult? Wow...so original!

-If you feel like seeing the good/evil ending but are going the wrong way, no need to worry! Just say something to Malak and you are now a full-fledged Sith/Jedi.

I just don't get it. What was so great about KOTOR? It did nothing better than Shadows of Amn, had a heck of a lot less role-playing in it, and less general content. Was it just the "3d graphix" and the "immurshun"?

 

[made]

Bioware sucks at creating unique, interesting characters. Each seems to represent a single cliche/archetype - that's why they often seem like rehashed characters from old games, easy to identify with for the target audience, I suppose.

That said, I found Kotor far less horrible than Oblivion, for example. Its main appeal was the setting, I guess.

 

[Jasede]

I really have no idea.

I am one of the few on the Codex who actually likes (some) Bioware games; for example, I can't deny I loved Baldur's Gate's open, vast areas, the expansion's lovely dungeon crawl, BG 2 in general or the combat challenges of ToB. Why Kotor got good reviews, however, can only leave me mystified. Next to NWN [without addons] it was, to me, certainly the most trite and poor game Bioware ever made; the whole game is a forgettable experience. If someone can tell me what makes Kotor good, supposedly, I'd feel very much enlightened.

 

[Edward_R_Murrow]

I really have no idea.

I am one of the few on the Codex who actually likes (some) Bioware games; for example, I can't deny I loved Baldur's Gate's open, vast areas, the expansion's lovely dungeon crawl, BG 2 in general or the combat challenges of ToB. Why Kotor got good reviews, however, can only leave me mystified. Next to NWN [without addons] it was, to me, certainly the most trite and poor game Bioware ever made; the whole game is a forgettable experience. If someone can tell me what makes Kotor good, supposedly, I'd feel very much enlightened.

I'm in the same boat with you. I don't see what it did well. It sort of reminds me of Arcanum, minus the awesome role-playing, unique setting, nifty music, and choices and consequences galore. It's like all the bad, but none of the good. Yet it got stellar reviews.

 

[Zomg]

I thought the stuff with HK-47 and the sand men was quite good, and the trial on the water planet (the one where you defend the guy) was a great role playing set piece. The combat was meringue rather than the groin-mutilating shit pathing and shit AD&D of the IE games. I'd rather the kids pick KotOR than a JRPG.

The characterizations are just Bioware, meaning broad and sunny, but there would even be room for that in RPGs if the genre were robust instead of crippled.

 

[Red Russian]

For me it was the Star Wars setting that I never had the intention to play in, until my bro brought the game from the university. From there, I enjoyed it quite alot and even played it a second time, but that was only 'cause I was bored.

 

[Texas Red]

I enjoyed quite a bit playing KotOR. The most memorabe experience was going to Dantooine to the Jedi Academy. That was rather nice character development.

I also liked that there was something constantly happening. Even though the dialogs were black-and-white, there *were* a lot of them and they were interesting enough. Thats more than you can ask in this day.

What I disliked where the mandatory dungeon crawls of Bioware. Especially on the very first planet where you were forced to fight off hords of generic enemies.

The characters were decent. They may seem to be cliche but this is, in my opinion, only because they werent over the top. They were believebale and real. I actually pretty much like them. Except Malak who was a pretty generic evil guy.

The story was poor. Before playing I was constantly told that it would blow me away but it was predictable and the main turning point happened in the middle, without anything unexpected going on in the end.

Overall it was a good game. It wasnt as overrated as NWN or Oblivion. Of all of these overhyped shit it deserved its scores the most. It can be even rather hardcore when you compare it to ME with its retarded dialogs where you play a predetermined role and cant even tell what the hell youre going to say.

KotOR 2, on the other hand, is greatly superior. But it got lower scores, for some reason. Probably because it wasnt so immature and wasnt developed by the Holy Bioware. It was more complicated and dark, and thats what I liked about it. The story, despite being "unfinished", is better than that of the 1st game.

 

[Volourn]

"Each seems to represent a single cliche/archetype"

Oh, please. There's not a character in any kind of story that doesn't fit into some broad archetype.


"It was more complicated and dark"

No, it wasn't. Story was rather simple. "Force is evil, and m,ust be destroyed! HAHAHA!" *yawn*


"sunny"

Huh? They were anything but 'sunny'.

 

[Diogo Ribeiro]

I just don't get it. What was so great about KOTOR? It did nothing better than Shadows of Amn, had a heck of a lot less role-playing in it, and less general content.

I'm not sure I agree. KotOR was undoubtedly crippled by a story that absolutely required party members to be alive at all times and the party members' constant attention whoring was pretty annoying as well. Combat was also a low point, moving away from Baldur's Gate 2's plethora of possibilities. However when it comes to allowing characters to use different skills to solve situations by various means it goes beyond what Baldur's Gate offered: straight up combat, stealth, computer splicing, Force powers, droid repairing, lock picking, charismatic options done right (read: actually include them) and so on were a definite plus. It also opted for a more diverse quest structure, mostly abandoning BGs' binary way of quest solutions.

Better than Fallout or Arcanum? Not a chance, though.

 

[Dark Helmet]

It's a pretty good Fisher Price "My first real CRPG", and it's in a pretty familiar setting. Plus, you don't actually need to know anything about games to play; even a konsole kiddy can finish the game by auto-leveling up and just clicking the Flurry button repeatedly.

The animations are okay too; I guess that's why the D20 system was bearable to action gamers.

It's kind of like movies; the first supah-cool PG13 action movie is going to seem pretty cool, and then you either move on to the good stuff, or keep watching them. Okay, bad analogy. But the characters are still probably memorable if it's your first BioWare game; just like the quests. You'd probably think the whole court case scenario was pretty cool, if it hadn't already been done as recently as Neverwinter Nights.

In comparison to JRPG's, and Oblivious, the dialogue is actually pretty decent. Most games these days don't have much in the way of choices, so even BioWare's Good, Neutral, EXTREME options seem cool.

And the whole "omg plot twist" is, again, probably pretty cool the first time around. I dislike it as a plot device because it makes all your choices up to that point irrelevant (fixed in the second game), and it also weakens the character you've defined thus far.

I think it's a fairly over-rated game; I really liked the second game, though (Awareness and Wisdom played larger roles in dialogue). It's a shame they never really finished it.

Oh, and I agree with you about the old guy (Joley?). He was probably the most interesting character in the game; there's a few times where he has some interesting interaction with the other characters. And he's got some funny lines.

I'll also admit I liked HK-47, so maybe I'm not hard-core enough for the codex.

 

[Relayer71]

The answer is so obvious: those that even dare to list KOTOR above some of the classics are die-hard Star Wars fans.

RPGing (even lite-RPGing) in the Star Wars universe was every SW fan's ultimate wet dream. I'm a Star Wars fan myself and almost creamed my pants when I heard about Bioware making KOTOR. Just the fact that there'd BE a SW RPG was enough to give me a stiffy.

I actually found the game entertaining. Being one those rare (are we rare?) gamers who enjoys both PC RPGs and console RPGs (KOTOR feels like a cross between the 2) I thought the game was fine, nothing groundbreaking but decent.

I thought the characters were passable, dialogue was great, some of the quests were interesting, the combat system itself was fine and the story was very good.

What bugged me was: ridiculously easy combat, linear and repetetive gameplay, and searching through all those fucking containers!!

Halfway through the game what really kept me playing was the story and the Jedi combat. As mind numbingly easy as it was, there's just something fun about playing a badass Jedi throwing your lightsaber around, Force Choking enemies and then flinging them across the room. It was just refreshing and different from your average fireball casting and sword bashing.

Still, the game comes nowhere close to the real greats of RPGing. It's just entertaining enough for one playthrough.

More importantly, the story, voice acting and plot were just SOOOOOOOOOO much better than those of the 2 prequel movies (notably, Episodes I & II. The 1st didn't just suck, it VACUUMED. The 2nd just sucked but had a couple of cool things, not enough to redeem it though. The 3rd was actually decent). This is probably the real draw for the more fanatical SW fans.

And KOTOR2 was actually the better game if not for the lack of polish and sense of deja vous (same dull, spartan graphics for indoor settings and such). Dialogue was deeper, there were more choices, the NPCs were better, crafting was better implemented. Still, the difficulty was just as lame and it followed the same "visit several planets" format of the 1st which got even more annoying. You visit 1 planet and only get to see the equivalent of a "town". Better to have made it take place in 1 planet and have one HUGE area encompassing several cities.

Had these games been open ended like Fallout? Wow...the possiblities. Still, had the games been a lot more challenging and just a little less "claustraphobic" feeling they'd be higher on my list.

But if ever a KOTOR 3 gets made, you can bet I'm skipping it. Maybe if Bethesda creates the graphics engine, and Troika designs the core game/story and Sirtech designs the combat system...

 

[Volourn]

"The answer is so fucking obvious: those that even dare to list KOTOR above some of the classics are die-hard Star Wars fans."

Your so called 'obvious;' answer is so obviously fuckin' wrong.



"And KOTOR2 was actually the better game if not for the bugs and non-finished bits."

Bullshit.


"Dialogue was deeper,"

Wrong.

" there were more choices,"

True for the most part.

" the NPCs were better,"

Absolutely not.

" crafting was better implemented."

Nah. It was the same just more.


" Still, the difficulty was just as lame"

In fact, it was even lamer as it made KOTOR's easy combat look hard in comparison.


R00fles!

 

[Relayer71]

Your so called 'obvious;' answer is so obviously fuckin' wrong.

Well thank you very much for giving me your insightful counterpoint. I wouldn't have been convinced by anyone who just flat out called me wrong, obviously.

Bullshit.
Wrong.
Absolutely not.

Who can argue with that?

 

[Callaxes]

You're asking this in the rong forum Eddy, we're just as disgusted about KotOR has you are and the answeurs we have to this dilema are just guesses/speculations. There alot of people I know from other forums that put Dungeon Siege or Oblivion next to Torment or X-COM. What gives? The world is fucking diverse. In. Every. Little. Aspect. That's what gives!

If you realy want to know the answeur, try posting this in their forums (a veteran gamer liek yourself isn't afraid of a little fanboy flaming are you?)

 

[Dark Helmet]

You're wrong, Volly. The crafting was a lot better (unfortunately it also made shops and money pretty pointless), and the combat required a little more involvement.

In the first game you could just Flurry your way through the game on any difficulty, but I found the second game "boss" type fights often required using the shields and stims and all that stuff. I found the party members' unique abilities (Kreia gives bonus XP, for example) made assembling a team a little more interesting than "ok, whare r my jedi lightsabre guyz?".

Dialogue and characters were most certainly somewhat deeper; just look at the cast of villains. 1 gets some moron who's evil just for the sake of evil ("Destroy the entire planet! See how unecessary entire is in this context? Muahaha"), but 2's got Sion, who I thought was kind of cool, and admittedly the bland retard with a helmet, but he's not important.

Dialogue had some better options; Force Persuade wasn't always useful, so the basic Persuade was more useful. Awareness and Wisdom were better implemented too.

 

[hicksman]

Agreed with the OP, all you needed were two jedi and you could get through this game with your eyes closed.

unfortunately, the final battle pissed me off and tarnished my impression of the whole game. The dude fuckin cheated. I'm used to BG where everyone follows the same rules, so to see the guy disengage from combat and run away and be invulnerable while doing it was so stupid.

 

[Edward_R_Murrow]

However when it comes to allowing characters to use different skills to solve situations by various means it goes beyond what Baldur's Gate offered:

I'll give it that, but it didn't do that much better.

computer splicing,

I don't know why I hated this so much, maybe the fact that computer-use skill meant nothing because enough spike things (which weren't hard to come by) could get anybody through anything. That and even if you gassed that room full of Sith....there were three more rooms right behind them. Wonderful.

Force powers,

You mean force persuade right? Because I sure couldn't use the telekinesis I had to cross that lava pit or my force push to rip open doors. I liked the force persuade, but it pretty much rendered the generic persuade skill absolutely useless.

droid repairing

It was nifty, but it never really seemed to help a lot.

charismatic options done right (read: actually include them)

You mean being able to forcefully persuade people through looping dialogues? I admit there were some decent uses of persuasion...but they were few and far between.

It also opted for a more diverse quest structure, mostly abandoning BGs' binary way of quest solutions.

I'm not sure of your experience with either games, but I never really noticed this in KOTOR. Pretty much every Bioware cliche was running wild in this game, and the good/evil solutions were pretty much it in a lot of cases.

Let's look at a good sample quest or two from each game.

Shadows of Amn

Telepathic Fish in a Jar: A fish in a jar is threatening to expose you in the drow city. You can...
-Go whack the person it wants you to a give the fish the brain.
-Get a fake brain from the person and give it to the fish instead.
-Refuse and get exposed, then kill everybody.
-Get hostile with the fish and threaten to expose it, thus stopping it.

Get Some Sculptor to Work for A Church: As the name says. You can....
-Go on an epic fetch quest to get the ore the guy wants.
-Give him some fake ore and hope things work out.
-Buy some of the ore at a ridiculously high price.
-Tell the guy to screw off and see if you can spin it in some way to the church.

KOTOR

Jedi Revan, Attorney at Law: Defend some Republic dude in a murder trial. You can....
-Be a terrible lawyer and get him killed.
-Be a "good" lawyer and save him by not presenting evidence that would cement his guilt.
-Be an altruistic type of guy and present all the evidence, and get your client convicted.
-Get thrown out of court.

Jedi Revan, Robot Repairman: Help, or don't help, some more fool out in the desert with his reprogrammed robot problem. You can....
-Solve robotic riddles to help the poor sod out, then ask for cash.
-Solve riddles, but don't ask for cash, because you are awesome like that.
-Get him blown up.

I wouldn't say KOTOR really improved on BG's quests and such....but hey, that's just me.

 

[Section8]

It's pretty simple really. KOTOR, like Oblivion is inoffensive and bland across the board. It doesn't unduly frustrate the player by challenging them, and reads like supermarket pullp fiction. It's popular for the same reason television is -- people have no taste.

 

[Texas Red]

You dont really notice the different approuches in combat because it is ridiculously easy.

KotOR could have been a really great tactical RPG. But of course as with everything the retarded consoles ruined it with their shitty interface and ease of use for the ADD kiddies.

 

[Squeek]

They never bothered to fix the PC game, so LucasArts doesn't deserve any accolades for KOTOR in my book. And even if it did, I'd rank it below BG2 for a bunch of reasons.

Both games obviously put a lot of effort into character development. I remember laughing out loud at Jolie Bindo in KOTOR and the dark hairy little gnome guy with the Swedish name in BG2.

The KOTORs were fun if you could get over the stuff you didn't like about them. I know I'll be replaying KOTOR2 after Team Gizka finishes its Restoration Project at http://www.team-gizka.org/

 

[mlc82]

I enjoyed it because I liked the original 3 SW movies, and KOTOR's storyline, like it or not, was above and beyond the pure crap release as SW Episodes 1-3. I wouldn't call it a favorite game but I enjoyed it.

 

[Diogo Ribeiro]

skills

That would be the roadblock, ie., plenty of skills but not always useful. It is true that several areas presented a secondary method of passing through them but were somewhat ineffective since there were additional enemies nearby. However, they certainly helped tip the odds in your favor and being able to do things like disrupting shields, gassing rooms full of hostiles or opening security doors were useful. Droid reparing pretty much gave an edge in certain situations for characters who were not very good at combat.

Though, there was also a problem in that party members, aside Persuade since that was limited to the main character only, always focused on something useful. You didn't really had to take Repair or Computers since other characters - like Mission Vao and the droids - eventually excelled at that. Although it was still useful depending on your play styles and who you took along for the ride.

Force powers,

Yes, the inability to cross over obstacles for someone who could jump around or float by using the Force was pretty bad. Saint pretty much ripped on Bioware because of that in his review. Also, Vanilla Persuade and Force Persuade seemed to be weird in terms of class focus. My Soldier for instance, didn't seem to have Persuade as a Class skill so it took him double the points to increase it. But when he took the Jedi Guardian class he got the standard Persuade as a Class skill - despite the fact that Force Persuade was now available to him!

Though, Force Persuade and that Jedi Mind Trick were useful for diplomatic or stealthy approaches, respectively.

quest structure

Most of the time in Baldur's Gate quests were terribly one-sided in that there was only one possible way of solving them and in the few ocasions where one could play both sides it was also pretty limited. The examples you gave stood out as something done right, though. But certain exceptions aside - like the Racer gangs at the beginning, where racing wasn't realy necessary and was only there to showcase the minigame - I got the feeling it had been considerably improved in KotOR.

 

[aries202]

As I understand, when you develop for a licensed IP, the IP owner aka Lucasarts(tm) must approve of all things you're doing. Just so that you don't accidentally screw something up that supposed to be 'canon' in the star wars universe. Or perhaps more so that you, (aka bioware) suddenly don't get the idea that you should be able to kill children in the game or have too much nudity and profanity in it. And bioware have to comply with this. And I think that that's one of the reaons they are developing their own games in their own setting now.

As for the cliché in games, well, star wars is based on clichés, called Archetypes, from the HERO, to the WISE old man, to the TRICKSTER, and many more of the Jungian archetypes. All these can be found in any & all cultures throughout the world, though in different shapes & forms. It really is the artistic presentation & the artistic efforts being used to make these archetypes (or clichés) that is interesting.

As I understand the main character of Planescape: Torment must sacrifice himself in order to redeem himself and the bad guy in Icewind Dale has the name as a priest (as one of the character's in one of Moliere's plays) who hides under his religius faith to commit all sort of autrocities in its name.

Doesn't this sound a bit cliché and archetypal to you ?? It doesn't so to me, because the artisitic effects and the presentation of the two stories were so impeccably well-done.

And most of the crpgs stories are simply: A great evil - - threathens this land - you're our only hope - go save the land - save land finish. big party. And most of the time you are called to action because 'it has been written'. ....

At least bioware games tries to put a nice twist around this, and they may not allways succed. The plot-twists in the bioware games are beginning to become to obvious though...

 

[Imbecile]

It probably says something (fairly uncomplimentary) about me, that I skimread most of the thread, but the quote below really made me chortle for some reason.

Doesn't this sound a bit cliché and archetypal to you ?? It doesn't so to me,..

It could be a faulty sense of humour. I found HK-47 pretty amusing myself.

 

[Edward_R_Murrow]

As I understand, when you develop for a licensed IP, the IP owner aka Lucasarts(tm) must approve of all things you're doing. Just so that you don't accidentally screw something up that supposed to be 'canon' in the star wars universe. Or perhaps more so that you, (aka bioware) suddenly don't get the idea that you should be able to kill children in the game or have too much nudity and profanity in it.

They broke most of this right open with Baldur's Gate. You could kill Drizzt, then him and all his friends and a bunch of other stuff.