T w e n t y S i d e d

I don’t know what it is about this game that lets it get away with so much. The combat is wonky, the game balance is way off, the moral choices are both idiotic and frequently negated, the dungeons are long and repetitive, the first planet drags on forever, you’re not allowed be be a Jedi until you’re forced to be one, a couple of the characters are pointless, and the hats are humiliating. But I still love it.

I think it comes down to the same reason I love Mass Effect 1: They nail the tone I’m looking for, and a couple of the characters are outstanding. If you get those right, you can apparently fumble nearly everything else.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

We have a wookie with a life-debt. We have giant slug creature that’s named “Something the Hutt” who runs some sort of shady enterprise. Later we have a Jedi council led by a little Yoda guy. We have a doomsday space station, Jedi in brown robes, a spaceship named in the form of “Adjective Bird”Yes, ‘Millennium’ is clearly being used as an adjective in the case of Han Solo’s ship, even though the word is normally a noun. This is not a nit worth picking., a sidekick astromech droid that speaks in beeps, and yet another trip to Tatooine.

They call this the “Expanded Universe” but in a lot of ways it’s more like the “Expended Universe”. All the ideas are worn out and used up. They take something done in the movies and simply repeat it. Why invent new planets when we can keep going back to Tatooine? Why invent new crime bosses or new designs for Hutts when we can just make a never-ending series of Jabba knock-offs? Why create a new alien sidekick when we can repeat the “Wookie with a life-debt” gag?

Having said that, I admit it’s a difficult problem to solve and I think KOTOR actually does fairly well. Yes, they lean on some really iconic, trope-y ideas, but they also invent new stuff. Manaan, Selkath, Juhani, and HK47, are new. The Malak / Revan dynamic is nothing like Vader / Palpatine. Canderous feels Star-Wars-ish and he’s not just a lame copy of Han Solo. The Ebon Hawk looks and feels just right without being a lazy copy of the famous Corellian freighter. Calo Nord looks a bit doofy, but he feels like he belongs in this universe and he’s not a stupid Boba Fett knockoff.

Writing Star Wars is hard. You need to come up with something new and different, but it also needs to nail that particular tone and style of Classic Star Wars. That’s not easy. Partly it’s hard because actually expanding on the work of other writers while maintaining a consistent feel is challenging workIt’s probably more difficult than simply writing something original. Not only do you have all the normal obligations of pacing, plotting, and characterization, but you need to be able to understand and mimic the sensibilities of another author.. The other reason it’s hard is because nobody really agrees on what ingredients give Star Wars its identity. Which explains why so many authors copy the obvious superficial elements of the universe and then totally whiff on the tone.

You could make the case that KOTOR is both more original and yet more true to the original trilogy than the prequel movies are. I realize that sounds sort of heretical to claim that KOTOR is somehow “more Star Wars-y” than real, official, actual Star Wars, but that really is how it feels to me.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

What is the deal with BioWare and making stat-boosting items in the form of ludicrously ugly and ridiculous headware? Dragon Age had a bunch of floppy jester hats that looked like they were stolen from a sad clown, and this game has random household appliances you can strap to your face, “improving” your vision by poking you in the eye for hours on end.

“On one hand, I really want all these stat bonuses because the half the game is discovering and maximizing your combat advantages. On the other hand, it completely ruins the look of my character and makes every dialog into a farce, thus harming the roleplaying stuff that makes up the other half of the game.”

They toned it down quite a bit in Mass Effect. The headware is less comical, and the bonuses are so slight it makes most gear decisions a question of cosmetics.

But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a hat in a BioWare game that looked awesome or cool. They’re always somewhere between “tolerable” and “hobo doing Geordi La Forge cosplay using things they pulled out of the dumpster behind Best Buy.”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.