Codex Review Uberlong Knights of the Old Republic review

[Saint_Proverbius]

Tags: BioWare; Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

Our overly long review of Knights of the Old Republic, which I admit is a little long.. But I had a lot to cover, so take your ritalin before reading this. Here's a swath:

Most players of PC CRPGs are used to having fairly easy inventories to deal with. You open a panel, and you have your inventory displayed in a nice grid along side a paper doll of the character that you can drag and drop items to and from in a simple fashion. Well, not in this game. In fact, the main inventory screen and the equip item screen are two different screens. Just to equip a blaster, for example, you have to open up the equip item screen, select the part of the body, then scroll through a single column list of items pertaining to that part of the body. Then click on that item, and hit the "Okay" button. That may not sound like much, but it's far more annoying than simply dragging and dropping items like nearly all the modern CRPGs have had for the last five years. It effectively doubles the amount of interface use to do the same thing. You'll definitely notice the difference between this console style system and the more traditional system when you get a new follower later in the game and have to equip most every item on them.​

Yes, the inventory does suck, despite what other reviews and BioWare claim.

But, overall, I liked it.

 

[Elwro]

Hey, after all this proofreading, in the second line it should be "its" instead of "it's".

 

[EEVIAC]

Some quick questions Saint :

- Has your enjoyment in the game been influenced by the fact that its the first decent (or well) implemented Sci-Fi RPG?

- Is it good because its Star Wars? (I'm not a huge fan of SW but any form of sci-fi is welcome.)

- Are your opinions of the game coloured by the fact that you might well have had exceedingly low expectations which might have proved unfounded?

- Is the game good, purely by proxy in that there aren't aren't really any other scif-fi RPG options out there?

I think the last line constitutes the greatest copliment - "it's worth checking out even if you've hated everything done by BioWare so far." Regardless of the fact is Bioware (and Star Wars for the matter) the game still seems worthy. (I'm not basiing this on this partclar review, but with Forum posts as wellI.) think I'll look for the game when it come out.

I offer a tentative congratulation to Bioware now.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

Some quick questions Saint :

- Has your enjoyment in the game been influenced by the fact that its the first decent (or well) implemented Sci-Fi RPG?

Not really, because it plays more like a D&D lite game with Star Wars graphics than it does sci-fi.

- Is it good because its Star Wars? (I'm not a huge fan of SW but any form of sci-fi is welcome.)

I don't really care much for Star Wars. The first movie was good, and Empire Strikes Back was cool, but the rest were just silly.

- Are your opinions of the game coloured by the fact that you might well have had exceedingly low expectations which might have proved unfounded?

This is possible, but there are some really interesting things in the game, none-the-less. The combat sure as hell isn't one of them, though. The followers can be annoying as hell too. There's a lot of times I've thought, Why can't I do this here? Why can't I use Force Persuade on this?, but overall, it's decent.

It's definitely no where NEAR as good as the other reviews have made it out to be, though.

I offer a tentative congratulation to Bioware now.

I hope they improve on what makes KotOR good, and start removing things that aren't so good.

 

[EEVIAC]

Saint earns his name again - thankyou. :D

It's definitely no where NEAR as good as the other reviews have made it out to be, though.

That's one of the principles I've admired about Rx - the pursuit of an hoinest parity. I'm fully expecting a fun decent adventure, as opposed to the greatest game ever made. Imagine I'll have some fun.

hope they improve on what makes KotOR good, and start removing things that aren't so good.

Now that the rumour is that obsidian might be handling a sequel, how probable do you think that is?

 

[Azaka]

Thank you for providing the first honest review of this game! RPG Codex remains the best source for the truth. Great job!

 

[Montez]

Nice review Saint, thanks.

 

[Greenskin13]

hope they improve on what makes KotOR good, and start removing things that Now that the rumour is that obsidian might be handling a sequel, how probable do you think that is?

That's news to me. Where'd you hear this?

 

[kumquatq3]

I thought it was a pretty fair review, as well as a good one.

I laughed when I read the part about having a massive data pad pile up by the end of the game. Its so very true. You could get rid of some of them by sticking then in boxes on your ship, but not all of them would let you do that.

I really fail to see how this system is better and less tedious than a turn based system when you have to switch characters

If it is some shitty little battle, and you don't want to waste your time taking charge of the battle field, you can just tell your guy to attack someone once and they will all go in to auto mode in RT. It ends it all so much quicker. Same thing for mopping up battles. I can't tell you how many times, in things like FO, I'd meet 15 rats with my bozar and have to hunt them all down for 5 minutes. I prefer TB, but it ain't perfect.

O and its C-3PO not C3-PO (right? can I get conformation?)

 

[kumquatq3]

hope they improve on what makes KotOR good, and start removing things that Now that the rumour is that obsidian might be handling a sequel, how probable do you think that is?

That's news to me. Where'd you hear this?

http://pc.ign.com/articles/454/454330p1.html

 

[kumquatq3]

O and Saint, I don't think you mentioned the horrible endings in the review.

What did you think about those?

 

[HanoverF]

You didn't hit any bugs Saint? Between all the memory leaks, sound issue, graphic card incompatability, etc, I have to wonder what Bio was doing for the 4-5 months this was XBox exclusive, QA deffinetly wasn't on the agenda.

Turning off the sound stoped the slowdown, but more then doubles the amount of graphic glitches, and there are lots of times when I want to revisit a map, it crashes the game to the startup screen and locks up.

This thing is buggier then ToEE and it had a longer fine tuning period, well Bio could have used it for fine tuning instead of touting thier game like it was the second coming...

 

[Elwro]

I like such uberlong reviews. Keep this length in the future!

 

[Spazmo]

If it is some shitty little battle, and you don't want to waste your time taking charge of the battle field, you can just tell your guy to attack someone once and they will all go in to auto mode in RT. It ends it all so much quicker. Same thing for mopping up battles. I can't tell you how many times, in things like FO, I'd meet 15 rats with my bozar and have to hunt them all down for 5 minutes. I prefer TB, but it ain't perfect.

We've been over this endlessly--it's a design issue and has nothing to do with turn-based. There simply shouldn't be fifteen rats facing you in the late-game. If a fight isn't challenging and interesting, it shouldn't be there in the first place.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

You didn't hit any bugs Saint? Between all the memory leaks, sound issue, graphic card incompatability, etc, I have to wonder what Bio was doing for the 4-5 months this was XBox exclusive, QA deffinetly wasn't on the agenda.

I'm not a huge fan of bringing up bugs in a review simply because that gives the thing an expiration date. It's accuracy expires when a patch comes out that fixes the bugs you mention.

But yeah, I've noticed a bunch of bugs. My least favorite is when you're moving around with the mouse and something triggers dialogue. Then you can click on the responses with the left mouse button and nothing happens because the game thinks the right mouse button is down still. You have to slap the right mouse button again to get it working again.

Another interesting quirk is when something starts combat with you and something else starts some dialogue or a cutscene with you. Some things will get stuck in the cutscene/dialogue state while everything else is fighting.

We've been over this endlessly--it's a design issue and has nothing to do with turn-based. There simply shouldn't be fifteen rats facing you in the late-game. If a fight isn't challenging and interesting, it shouldn't be there in the first place.

Spazmo is correct. Putting ants in Broken Hills or Rats in the sewers of the necropolis wasn't good map design. Hell, it's bad design in real time as well. It's still going to take at least 6-12 seconds if that were done in Baldur's Gate and a full 30 seconds in KotOR because of the six second round thing.

• 15 Rats / 3 Characters * 6 second round = 30 seconds

So, I fail to see how this is just an issue with turn based.

 

[kumquatq3]

If it is some shitty little battle, and you don't want to waste your time taking charge of the battle field, you can just tell your guy to attack someone once and they will all go in to auto mode in RT. It ends it all so much quicker. Same thing for mopping up battles. I can't tell you how many times, in things like FO, I'd meet 15 rats with my bozar and have to hunt them all down for 5 minutes. I prefer TB, but it ain't perfect.

We've been over this endlessly--it's a design issue and has nothing to do with turn-based. There simply shouldn't be fifteen rats facing you in the late-game. If a fight isn't challenging and interesting, it shouldn't be there in the first place.

Ok, bad example.

I simple meant a large group of bad guys that you think you can take and you wish to "sim". You surely don't believe that just because the enemies come in quantity instead of quality that it is bad game design.

I'm not sure I like the idea of every single battle being life and death. That would be "tedious".

 

[Azael]

A good review, probably the best I've read on the game since it addresses more of the problems than any other I've seen.

I completely agree about the lightsabers, they weren't special enough and I hated the Force enhanced crystals. It was also quite lame that every single melee weapon in the game was enhanced with cortosis ore. This is an actual exisiting thing in the Star Wars universe (well, it's in one of the novels at least), but it's also supposedly very rare and also quite useless, at least for making weapons. Having lightsabers as they're "supposed" to be would be a bit problematic though, but I guess you could have it with the opponents dodging instead of blocking your moves.

 

[Dhruin]

Well, now I know I can pick the game up and get a fair adventure game. Review scores of 97% are just too ridiculous to take seriously.

 

[kumquatq3]

Well, now I know I can pick the game up and get a fair adventure game. Review scores of 97% are just too ridiculous to take seriously.

After seeing soooo many scores like that I would hope that you wouldn't think that it wasn't a massively repeated fluke. :wink:

 

[kumquatq3]

BTW, what is considered the "benchmark" RPG(s) in here? The game that other games are judged by. You can compare parts of various games (IE combat, interface, etc.) that were extremely well done to a new game, but its not really a fair way to judge a game as a whole. As it could fall short of many of those marks, yet still be a great game as a whole.

So what do people see as the bench mark RPG in here? Not that one that handled combat really well, but had next to nothing in dialogue trees. Overall I mean.

get me?

 

[DrattedTin]

Fallout seems to be the local benchmark.

Not that I agree.

 

[kumquatq3]

Fallout seems to be the local benchmark.

I assumed so. Just making sure.

 

[Dhruin]

Well, now I know I can pick the game up and get a fair adventure game. Review scores of 97% are just too ridiculous to take seriously.

After seeing soooo many scores like that I would hope that you wouldn't think that it wasn't a massively repeated fluke. :wink:

Sorry, I got confused by the double-negatives. Are you I should accept it's a realistic score after seeing so many that high?

I ignore any score that high. If a reviewer scores 97 (think I remember a 98 and there were plenty of 5/5 and even 10/10 on those useless low scales), what do you do when a clearly superior game comes along? There's always room for improvement in any game. What's worse is when a reviewer actually describes a number of faults with a game and then gives a score of 98.

I assume a lot of these KotOR scores are really based on the reviewer being impressed by the production gloss (and Bioware is good at appealing to the masses) rather than the underlying game.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

I ignore any score that high. If a reviewer scores 97 (think I remember a 98 and there were plenty of 5/5 and even 10/10 on those useless low scales), what do you do when a clearly superior game comes along? There's always room for improvement in any game. What's worse is when a reviewer actually describes a number of faults with a game and then gives a score of 98.

I assume a lot of these KotOR scores are really based on the reviewer being impressed by the production gloss (and Bioware is good at appealing to the masses) rather than the underlying game.

This is one reason why we don't do scores here. Let's face it, most of those numbers are based on how much the reviewer liked the game, rather than any actual system. It's foolish to put a quantitative value on a qualitative measure, really. But, people seem to like numbers on reviews, so you end up with Diablo 2 getting a 95% in graphics when it came out. Nevermind that the game was 256 color and 640x480 resolution, it was a good game - high marks in graphics!

Fallout seems to be the local benchmark.

Fallout is a really good benchmark in a lot of ways. It had a great custom character system, a really nice combat system, tracked good/evil pretty well, unique and homogenous setting, and so on.

But that's not to say it's the only benchmark. After all, there are newer games which might do something better than Fallout, like ToEE's combat system or Gothic's environment interaction or Arcanum's reaction system(though, flawed).

 

[kumquatq3]

I ignore any score that high. If a reviewer scores 97 (think I remember a 98 and there were plenty of 5/5 and even 10/10 on those useless low scales), what do you do when a clearly superior game comes along? There's always room for improvement in any game. What's worse is when a reviewer actually describes a number of faults with a game and then gives a score of 98.

I look at game scores like I look at Car and Motorcycle reviews. Example: The Toyota Camry has won many many awards, and has got a whole lot of praise through out the years. Still, it could do alot of things better. It could be cheaper, yet use better parts. It could have a bigger engine, yet be more fuel efficent. It could have a bigger interior, yet look sportier. Yet, critics still praise it.

But when grades are given to these cars, its not based on how close to perfect they are, but on how well they compare to their competition and the "benchmark" of the class.

Thats how I think a good video game review should be like. You can make a HUGE list of what even the best games (or cars) could do better, but you can't fault a game for something that hasn't been accomplished yet (ie perfection). You can only fault it on what other games have been better. If the game you are reviewing surpases those other games, then you give it praise and hand it rewards. If it falls behind on to many of those peaks and copies others directly, then you can fault it for being "just another game", but not nessasarily bad.

That all being said, you can't fault a game because 50 different games each did something individually better than the game in question. Just because (hypothetical examples) KOTOR had the best NPCs ever, FO had the best combat, and Gothic had the best interface doesn't mean that a RPG that is released that doesn't beat all those is a failure. Hell, the Camry prolly lags behind on alot of things when compared via the top individual aspects of otehr cars in its class (it in fact does), but you have to compare the 2 things head to head. As totals. Otherwise its not really fair. Thats why having a benchmark or two for a total/complete RPG is important. Sure, its nice to compare singular aspects of RPGs to other RPGs that are considered to have "the 3e$t" of that category (combat, interface, etc) ,but that won't really tell you the worth of the RPGs you have in front of you.

So really, a good car is like a good game. It either is all around solid (or better) or it has something sooo special about it that makes it worth playing, even tho its not nessarily the best in its class. So a 97% doesn't mean that its just a hair off perfect, or that it has nothing wrong with it besides they spelled Tatoonine wrong once in the game. It just means that overall, its flaws don't hurt it too badly, and its a great RPG in their (and my) opinion. The game is just a joy to play. Thats all 97% means to me.