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

[Veracity]

Do quite a few people still give anything using the Star Wars setting a bit more stupidity leeway or initial goodwill just because, you know, yay lightsabers and stuff? That might account for some of KOTOR's ability to bypass some people's critical faculties when they'd be less forgiving of Tolkien knock-off #3,148.

I don't think attempting one-to-one BG/KOTOR series mappings is meaningful. Bioware characters in 'not embellishing much on well-worn archetypes' shocker? Yeah. Jolee was good fun, but he's easily dismissed as your basic comical crazy old guy whose rambling conceals great wisdom, if you're feeling churlish.

I won't hear Haer'Dalis hate! I wish he had been romancable.

Goodness, yes. Bestest Bioware character ever: entropy-fixated deathwish, shallow as all hell, and meant to be.

 

[Edward_R_Murrow]

One thing I completely disagree with is the similarities between Imoen and Mission. They are both young girls and sound the same. That's it. Mission Vao is not your sister, she's not some kind of demigod, she's just a normal twi'lek teenager. So shut up.

Imoen was a teenager, who was very cheerful and child-like, was a theify person, and was playing the "slightly annoying little sister" role. Same thing was Mission. Of course if you never played the first Baldur's Gate it might be a little hard to see this.

I don't think attempting one-to-one BG/KOTOR series mappings is meaningful. Bioware characters in 'not embellishing much on well-worn archetypes' shocker?

It's just that they seem to constantly reuse their old archetypes, plot points, and just about everything else ad nauseum. Some of their ealier takes on archetypes were not too bad, it's just lately they seem to have lost any creativity. Soon enough Bioware games will be as predictable and formulaic as an episode of The Incredible Hulk, or The A-Team.

Goodness, yes. Bestest Bioware character ever: entropy-fixated deathwish, shallow as all hell, and meant to be.

I liked the originality in him....I just hated how I got the biggest loser out of the multitude of people in Sigil. I guess everyone can't be Dak'kon, Vhailor, Ignus, or The Nameless One....but still.....

 

[sportforredneck]

Soon enough Bioware games will be as predictable and formulaic as an episode of The Incredible Hulk, or The A-Team.

Three's Company. Every episode is exactly the same.

 

[cutterjohn]

I have to agree with the because it's teh Star Warz aspect, as I have long since lost what little interest I ever had in Star Warz, and admittedly haven't gotten very far in KotOR but have found it to be incredibly boring. Likely it's because the dialog and cutscenes so far hadn't been very good (got about halfway through that 1st city area), and the combat is just plain silly. So adding in my indifference to Star Warz, personally, I tend to dump it slightly below NWN1 & 2 OCs in terms of interest, and haven;t bothered to try KotOR2 because of my current impression of KotOR and having not finished it yet.

 

[Texas Red]

I have to agree with the because it's teh Star Warz aspect, as I have long since lost what little interest I ever had in Star Warz, and admittedly haven't gotten very far in KotOR but have found it to be incredibly boring. Likely it's because the dialog and cutscenes so far hadn't been very good (got about halfway through that 1st city area), the dialog hasn't been very good, and the combat is just plain silly. So adding in my indifference to Star Warz, personally, I tend to dump it slightly below NWN1 & 2 OCs in terms of interest, and haven;t bothered to try KotOR2 because of my current impression of KotOR and having not finished it yet.

The starting area of KotOR 1 is the worst part of both of the games. After you finally leave the game picks tremendously up. You should continue with it.

And also launch up KotOR 2 because its tons better than the first one.

 

[AlanC9]

Imoen was a teenager, who was very cheerful and child-like, was a theify person, and was playing the "slightly annoying little sister" role. Same thing was Mission. Of course if you never played the first Baldur's Gate it might be a little hard to see this.

I think someone from Bio (I'm betting Gaider - he's forthcoming about stuff like this) said that Mission was rewritten very late in development. The original plan was for a male character, and I think one who was a little more of a street punk. For some reason this character "didn't work," and was rewritten into Mission.

As for the rest of your parallels, I don't see them. They're broad enough that you could pull off this trick with any party-based RPG.

 

[Edward_R_Murrow]

The starting area of KotOR 1 is the worst part of both of the games. After you finally leave the game picks tremendously up. You should continue with it.

Huh....that's interesting...I thought it was one of the better areas. Dantooine, Tatooine, and Korriban all sucked more than a Vietnamese prostitute, with emphasis on Korriban. Of course that was because it took me awhile to learn that swords were the dominant weapon in the universe still.

And also launch up KotOR 2 because its tons better than the first one.

Totally agreed. Sure, the combat got even easier as time went on, but at least you felt pretty damn powerful and had a hell of a lot of fun zapping people while running around like the Flash. And the writing was good, especially seeing as it was butchered by LucasArts.

As for the rest of your parallels, I don't see them. They're broad enough that you could pull off this trick with any party-based RPG.

It's really not a trick. And I really don't think I'm making broad, sweepng parallels in the least.

Let's look at Korgan/Canderous huh?

Both are "evil". Both are warriors. Both really like to fight and kill stuff. Both really love to talk about stuff they've killed and stroke their ego. Both really hate when you do nice things for some reason. Both seem to really hate women for some reason. Both hate people who don't like to kick ass and take names. Both really absolutely loathe women who don't like to kill. Both love characters who like to kill stuff and have some seriousy chemistry going on. Both just love a bloodthirsty player character. Both despite being hardcore evil fans, will begrudgingly stay with the player character if he's a good guy just because the player character is invariably a supreme badass. Basically they're both the perfect right-hand man for Commander Shepard.

A little more than a set of broad parallels, eh? Slap a set of dwarven paint on Canderous and you got Korgan. Paint Korgan with Star Wars, and you've got Canderous. See my point, at least slightly?

 

[Diogo Ribeiro]

Jolee the token black guy---Uhhhhh.....nobody

He's kind of a tamer version of Minsc and Jan Jansen, probably more of the latter. Huge rants, with the random bit of wisdom inside all the drivel.

 

[yipsl]

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.

Was it just the "3d graphix" and the "immurshun"?

I'm a hard core CRPG fan who played Ultima III and IV on the C64, alongside of the early Gold Box games. I love the old Might and Magics and the pre-Oblivion Elder Scrolls (Oblivion makes Morrowind look better as time goes by). I do like KOTOR and KOTOR 2 as well.

Note that I said like, not love. I also like Oblivion. Back when the field of CRPGs was filled with a bevy of beautifully designed titles, it was easy to ignore the less complex mainstreamed wannabees and focus on the great ones. Nowadays, there just aren't that many genuine CRPGs, and even Fry's puts Dark Messiah of Half Life Too with the RPGs. So, we have to accept that the mainstreamed action titles are all we're going to get from the big studios, so we mostly buy them at bargain bin prices (like I'll do later with Dark Messiah).

I do admit, though. that I'd divorce my pocketbook from any Zenimax game (I blame the lawyers behind the company, not the Bethsoft devs), but I still have the hots for anything remotely related to Daggerfall, even if it's the prettified but not all that satifying Oblivion. I've heard they've done better with Shivering Isle (except for ruining the Daedra Seducers), but it's so buggy I haven't gotten either it or Knights of the Nine yet.

I liked KOTOR because it was at least an attempt at a Star Wars RPG. Eventually, they might get it right by the time of KOTOR III. Some of us don't play dogfighters and didn't want Tie Fighter. Others didn't want a turn based strategy and didn't get the ones based on Star Wars. Even among serious CRPG fans, many don't want to give MMO's a try and what we are left with, when we love the Star Wars movies and CRPGs is KOTOR.

I suspect that KOTOR is listed higher than Arcanum, Daggerfall, Might and Magic VII or Betrayal at Krondor by some fans is that they are CRPG fans, but they are Star Wars cultists who really believe there's a Jedi religion and who are just overwhelmed by the fact that there is a playable and enjoyable Star Wars RPG series that is not an MMO.

So, I'll take KOTOR and like what I get. I just won't rank it as the best CRPG I've played or the best incarnation of the Star Wars universe I've seen. I did find the plot interesting and will give future titles in the series a try.

TIE Fighter is the finest non-RPG I have ever played. A brilliant game. It's a real shame it doesn't work on modern systems (the TIE95 version is a rape of the original game). TIECD was the definitive version, it included all expansions and boosted resolution. I still have it on my shelf, and I gaze at it longingly, wishing I could play it once more.

Keep a slightly older PC around or do a dual boot. I just bought a used E-Machines Celeron 2.7 with a Radeon 9200 PCI card and 512 megs of RAM. I plan on installing Windows ME so I'll have native support for Daggerfall. I rue the day I gave up a dual boot on my main PC. When I play Daggerfall under Dosbox, it works, but it crashes when I try to buy the recall spell in any Mage Guild. So, I have to play without one of the more useful spells under Dosbox.

I found my old Dos 6.0 diskettes and am seriously considering seeing if I can't have the largest partition that old OS will give me, and dual booting with ME. I'd install 98, but I can't find my 95 CD and they're all upgrades, not OEM. I still have a box of shovelware AD&D games that I keep displayed in my living room that are just pining away for DOS.

If I did try a DOS install, drivers would be the only issue. Most of the old DOS games I have will install under ME and run under the command prompt, but getting them to install and run under DOSbox is a nuisance.