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Knights of the Old Republic and something to look forward to

After nearly four months, spent playing on two different platforms, I finished Knights of the Old Republic.

This game reminded me why I stopped playing most RPGs. As a general rule, RPG stories are all the same, the characters are nothing but stereotypes, and there really isn’t any feeling of adventure or surprise.

KOTOR has both adventure and surprises galore. As my character progressed from a typical Republic grunt to a full-fledged Jedi with the Force at his command, I was amazed at the excellent writing, the believable voice acting, and the constant flow of the plot. While many of the individual missions were of the “Go to this place and get something, then bring it back” variety, the designers at Bioware disguised them well enough that I didn’t even notice.

Where several KOTOR characters fall into one of the three Tolkien-esque stereotypical categories-lovable rogue, brooding ranger, or haughty wizard-KOTOR adds several deeper characters. It showed in my selection of different characters for each mission. The lovable rogue was rarely a part of my party, but the conflicted Jedi and the homocidal assassain droid made frequent appearances. Your frequent interactions with the different characters shape the direction of the several quests in the game, including the main one.

The other major innovation in KOTOR is the combat system. Never has a turn-based combat system felt so dynamic and fun to me. I definitely don’t have a thing for turn-based combat, but the way KOTOR lets you manage fights is rad. Basically, you queue up a set of commands, whether they’re buffs, Force powers, melee attacks, or range attacks. Every six seconds each character in your party gets to make one move, and each enemy character gets to make one turn. What’s impressive is that the outcome of your turns is acted out using some amazing animations. Lightsaber combat is truly something to behold.

KOTOR is based on the d20 RPG system, just like Neverwinter Nights and other Bioware RPGs. However, unlike other Bioware RPGs, you don’t need to know a single thing about d20 to succeed. If you want to powergame, it helps to know that the 25% stun chance that Critical Strike imparts to every successful crit is more effective than the extra swing that Flurry gives you. Serious RPG nuts can see the outcome of every single roll of the die, from persuade checks to melee attacks, but you can go through the entire game without ever knowing that a virtual die is rolled.

Perhaps the most telling is that I can safely say I would have played KOTOR all the way through if it hadn’t been set in the Star Wars universe. The combat system and the overall quality of the writing is such that once I started, I wouldn’t have been able to put it down. Like Deus Ex: Invisible War, KOTOR is one of the three best games I’ve played this year.

Since it’s the end of the year, I’m going to pull together a list of my favorite and least favorite games of 2003 sometime before Christmas. Even without Half-Life 2 and Doom3, this has been a banner year for PC games.

We’ve seen large leaps in role-playing gameplay with Deus Ex and KOTOR. Rise of Nations added another level of strategy to real-time strategy games with its Risk-like Conquer the World mode. Planetside gave us the first real massively multiplayer, persistant world war sim. Sure Sony billed it as a shooter, but it has armored cavalry, infantry, air cavalry, artillery, and loads of support vehicles, fighting in massive 300+ person battles. That makes it a war sim in our book.

We’ve also seen a rift growing between ‘big budget spectacular’ type games and thought provoking games that require actual skill to complete. It will be very interesting to see what direction the industry moves in the next year or two. Anyway, that’s all. It’s way past my bedtime.