Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic Review

Developer	BioWare
Publisher	LucasArts
Genre	Role-Playing

The Star Wars licence has always offered a deep well of history and storyline for those companies blessed with the ability to create a game based on the George Lucas creation, but it’s a well that’s rarely been drawn from with any success. In fact, for years the only really worthwhile Star Wars games available were the classic X-Wing series and Dark Forces, while stinker after stinker clouded up the shelves of retailers. Does Force Commander ring any bells?

Fortunately, while new updates to the movie franchise have had some problems capturing the hearts and souls of movie audiences, Star Wars video games have undergone a revival of sorts. Led by games like Jedi Knight II and the Rogue Squadron series, the interactive world of Star Wars has never been stronger on the side of Light. The Dark Side is strong though, and pressure to turn out a top-notch product has been mounting on Edmonton-based BioWare. Can they manage to put together a classic Star Wars RPG without falling prey to pitfalls of the Dark Side like using tired clichés? Hop in the speeder and let’s take a spin around the game.

A word of warning, I’ll try to stay on the path and well away from any major spoilers, but there may be things here that you don’t want to read. Just skip ahead to the scores if you’re worried – they won’t spoil anything.

Gameplay - The first thing done in any RPG is creating a character, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (shortened hereafter to KotoR) is no different. There’s a bit of disappointment from the start, as gamers can only choose to play as a human – no Darth Maul impersonators welcome here. Offsetting that is the fact gamers can choose to play as either a male or a female, and there are three classes to choose from: scoundrel, scout, and soldier.

The class chosen has an impact on abilities, so choose wisely. The scoundrel is small and quick, with a penchant for stealth. The soldier is set at the opposite end of the skill range, favouring loud explosions and ‘in your face’ action. Scouts fall somewhere in the middle, sort of the Han Solo-type character from back in the day when he shot first, and are still tough enough to duke it out, but also gain enough skill points per level to allow them to pursue more of the non-combat skills. This ‘three class’ system also applies when gamers become a Jedi: one class is lightsaber-centric, one emphasizes using The Force, the third employs a mixture of the two.

The game uses the d20 set of rules, and that enters play for the first time during character creation. Gamers can choose to opt out of the creation process and play a ready-made character. This is handy for those who are unfamiliar with the rules, those that just don’t care about creating a custom character, and perhaps those who just harbour an irrational fear of random numbers. Those with a thirst for customization can set up the five essential elements to their character: attributes, feats, portrait, skills, and, of course, their name.

The attribute system centers around divvying up the initial pool of 30 points into six stats familiar to all D&D players: charisma, constitution, dexterity, intelligence, strength, and wisdom. As attributes provide bonuses (or penalties, if the stat is lacking) to every skill a character uses, it’s keenly important for people to choose a distribution to fit individual play styles. Soldier-types intent on sticking in the thick of combat should beef up their constitution and strength, so they can both dish out and endure more damage than normal. Those wanting to stay out of the limelight, preferring to sneak in the back door, might want to pour more points into dexterity.

Next, players choose the skills they will start with, then the feats they start with. Skills are base abilities like stealth or the ability to hack into computers. As in Neverwinter Nights characters can train cross-class skills, a soldier training stealth for example, but it costs double skill points. Feats are special abilities that provide your character with even more customization – the ability to multi-wield weapons, improvements to skills, or powerful new attacks. It’s all a matter of balancing and tuning the character, and the game does a great job of explaining the process every step of the way, which makes it tough to totally gimp a character.

Once the character is completely set up, the game finally gets underway with the traditional crawling text, explaining the situation. KotoR is set approximately 4,000 years prior to the events of Episode I, in a galaxy beset by – everyone guessed it – people strong in the Dark Side of the Force. The game opens with an attack on an enormous starship, the Endar Spire, by Sith fighters, who it’s fairly safe to refer to as “the bad guys”. Unfortunately for players, they start the game as a soldier who happens to be on the Endar Spire as it’s boarded by those attacking Sith, which kicks the game into high gear even during the initial training levels. As gamers navigate their way through the ship to find another crewmember, the game delivers continual instruction on the basic mechanics of how the game plays: equipping items, arranging party members, and opening doors – things like that. The instruction is a welcome addition, as the gameplay is substantially different from the standard turn-based RPG that’s been the norm for consoles.

Combat in KotoR is one of the most jarring differences from the normal console RPG, as it features a sort of quasi real-time system. There are turns, but they fly by quickly and the game doesn’t pause at the end of each one for players to set up commands for individual characters, the action just keeps going. Fortunately attack commands, like throwing grenades, using Force powers, and healing, can be stored up in real-time for each character, up to four commands each, though this makes the initial combat sequences a dizzying array of ‘what do I do now’ button pressing mayhem. Relax, young Padawan, you can – should you need to – pause the game at any point during combat to queue up more commands, and you can use an auto-pause feature so it halts at the end of every round of combat. Thankfully the learning curve for combat strategy input is fairly short, and chaining together attack orders quickly becomes a fluid part of gameplay.

It’s often said that the Devil is in the details, but this game proves that to be completely untrue. The Devil isn’t in the details – he’s in the dialogue, approximately 14,000 lines of recorded dialogue as a matter of fact. In a format that gamers familiar with another BioWare RPG, Neverwinter Nights, will recognize, several responses that vary from polite (Light) to downright rude (Dark) can be chosen during each conversation. Each response chosen affects a hidden meter that, when full, gives the gamer a point to either the Light or Dark Side, and gamers can monitor their current standing on the character screen. There are also neutral options for those that wish to play a Swiss Jedi, but developers have warned that, at some point in the game, players must decide to support the Light or the Dark. The decisions they make will also affect the storyline that gamers will play through, though I won’t give specifics in order to keep from spoiling things. Suffice it to say that one could easily play through the game with a Dark or Light character multiple times without playing the exact same storyline, just by varying some of the conversation selections and the methods used to complete quests.

Ah yes, quests – where would RPG’s be without them? It’s difficult to define exactly what KotoR truly is – a linear or open-ended RPG. The initial story is fairly linear, but it quickly opens up into a selection of choices on what to do next. Don’t mistake me, this isn’t the huge and confusing sort of ‘open-ended’ that Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind was, gamers will always have a clear idea of what they should be doing next and where they need to go to. Quests and subquests can, however, be done out of order, and gamers can skip around to different planets on the Ebon Hawk, a precursor to the Millenium Falcon that acts as sort of a mobile command headquarters, to run through quests on another of the planets if they get stuck on one. These quests vary from the standard Fed-Ex package deliveries all the way to multiple objective missions. There are multiple ways to complete the larger quests, which adds a great deal of replay value, doubly so since the experience reward is tied to the manner in which the quest is completed. Skirting the issue of revealing too much, I’ll just say that doing a quest the Light way tends to earn more experience for completing the quest itself. Doing it in a Dark manner earns substantially less for completing the quest – but makes up for that thanks to all the experience received for ‘expediting’ anyone in the way. It’s all about balance here in the world of the Jedi. There are also a staggering number of subquests to complete, many of which are triggered through talking to your companions and help flesh out their storylines.

Those companions are an important part of the experience, and in more ways than just opening subquests and taking damage during combat. The humans, aliens, and droids that you gather as companions all have unique personalities – several of which clash with one another. Unlike companions from most other RPG’s, where they all too frequently follow along merely to carry loot and do damage, the motley assortment of characters in KotoR all believably exist as beings with their own needs and goals. One truly standout character is HK-47, the assassin droid who acts as a decidedly psychopathic C-3PO. The dialogue with HK-47 is, on occasion, laugh out loud funny, and it’s almost disappointing when there isn’t room for the sharp-tongued droid in the three person adventuring parties.

If the questing and adventuring gets a bit dull, there are also several minigames to keep gamers occupied. One, a card game called Pazzak, is a poker-style card game with a collectible twist. As gamers progress through the game, they can find new cards to make their decks stronger. There’s also a turret sequence that frequently pops up when traveling between planets on the Ebon Hawk, and swoop bike racing rounds out the trio of minigames. The swoop bike racing, somewhat like pod racing in Episode I, uses accelerator pads to continually speed up the vehicle as it races. While races are short, they tend to be fairly intense and act as a satisfactory diversion from the regular game.

One downside to the gameplay are the loading times during transition from area to area, or from outdoor locales into the interiors of some of the larger buildings. These load times are usually around 35 seconds, but don’t really seem to impact the game as heavily as one might anticipate since the areas are, on the whole, fairly large and therefore don’t require frequent loading.

Graphics - KotoR covers a breathtaking range of the Star Wars universe, and displays it all with style. The game is a step above the vast majority of other RPG’s, and more closely resembles the action from Jedi Knight II than it does Final Fantasy XI. Dust blows through the towns on Tatooine, even being kicked up into small whirlwinds of sand by the footsteps of characters walking through the dunes, and the grass on Dantooine sways in the wind as flocks of birds wheel overhead. The game marks the first visit to Kashyyk, the home planet of the Wookie race, and BioWare’s graphic designers, in conjunction with the art direction of LucasArts, created a world that fits right into the pre-existing universe.

A considerable amount of art resources are devoted to the creatures, with both bump and environment mapping are used to good effect, leaving their skin or hide appearing shiny with…well, whatever aliens sweat I suppose. That effort was also given to the controllable characters, including the ability to recognize what equipment each person has on them just by their appearance. Characters also lip-synch, those of them that have lips anyway, along with the dialogue being spoken, and while a few don’t match up properly, the majority are very well done.

So far as major graphics problems go, the game escapes relatively scot-free. It suffers from the occasional framerate dip, though it never drops as low as in, for example, Pirates of the Caribbean. The camera is another slight snafu, since it occasionally ends up sitting at an awkward angle during some cutscenes, though it operates perfectly fine while in normal gameplay. The game could have also have used a few more faces for NPC’s, as they tend to start repeating.

Sound - The voice acting in KotoR is the real standout, as every single one of the approximately 14,000 lines of dialogue delivered by an NPC is spoken. The vocal work, aside from being delivered in quantity, is also quality, with alien races speaking the languages heard in the movies (their dialogue displays simultaneously in text form), and the actors filling human roles doing a believable job of conveying emotions. By having voice actors not simply “phoning it in”, BioWare’s efforts to involve the gamer in the world they’ve created are much, much more compelling. Thanks to the resources available from LucasArts, BioWare has also nailed the weapon effects to perfection. The hum of a lightsaber, the whine of blaster fire, the roaring of ship engines – it’s all perfectly reproduced.

The soundtrack is the only real diversion from the classic feel of the movies. While various themes by John Williams are present within sections of the game, they never really blast to the forefront. Instead, the bulk of the music, handled by continual contributor to BioWare games, Jeremy Soule, is more subdued and remains in the background except for special occasions.

Overall Value - KotoR is one of the standout games for the Xbox, a deep and compellingly written RPG set in a world with undeniable appeal. BioWare set out to create their own vision of this much-loved universe, and managed it with a flair that will draw gamers back for multiple plays. It is, thanks to the incredible job on the vocal work and the environments, easily the most involving RPG I’ve ever played on a console or PC, and speaks volumes about the talented and passionate people making games at BioWare. While not without a few minor faults, the game is head and shoulders above the competition and offers, to anyone who enjoys a well-crafted game, an experience like no other.

Review by Rod Oracheski