Knights of the Old Republic
You're reading Mikko Saari's blog Life and opinions. This entry was written 01/30/2004, at 15:33.
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I've been playing lots of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic recently. It's a great game, even though I'm not a huge fan of the movies (I like the original three, especially the first one, but the new movies left me totally cold).
The world is attractive, though, and the game has strong feel of the movies. It's set 4000 years before the events of the movies, so you're not going to see familiar faces, but I've already met Hutts, Jawas, Wookies, Jedis and whatnot. The script and dialogue is good, as is music. The game looks pretty good, too.
Even though it suffers from a world full of annoying absurdities (as most computer roleplaying games do - they simply fail to present a believable world), the plot has me hooked. I'm very curious. I also like the way the game lets you take different approaches to the problems you face. Of course, there's a strong good or evil -thing going on. Your actions count and your balance between the Light and the Dark side of the Force depend on how you solve the problems.
There's always the way of taking what you can and then there's the way of doing what's right. It isn't always easy to choose. And that's what makes the game so neat. I'm very curious to find out what's going to happen next and how can I react. That's pretty addictive stuff, you know...
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Comments
Many games do offer the choice in various situations to perform as a good/bad character, but there's plenty of examples in games such as these where the reward for playing as a good character are many times better than if you'd choose a bad approach. This is why KOTOR is a good example of how games such as these should be approached. Fallout-series was also excellent and the storylike approach in Fallout was strenghtened by showing how your actions changed the game world when you finish it.
I can't remember another game such as KOTOR where you truly felt like you had a tangible choice. In KOTOR, I agonized forever when these obvious decisions came up and even though I completed it with a totally twisted and evil character, many of the settings within the game are so gut wrenching that sometimes it was hard for me to go through the evil route. But I still did.
Still, if I have anything bad to say about KOTOR is that the worlds within are sometimes ridicilously small. The starting planet was ok and at least had the illusion of being somewhat big in terms of places to go, but afterwards the game felt really crowded and too guided.
Posted by: Reko at January 30, 2004 5:08 PM