The recent Star Wars movies left me kinda “meh” on Star Wars as a setting, but Knights of the Old Republic has been doing a good job of re-interesting me in the universe and lore. KotOR is the best-written piece of Star Wars media I’ve ever consumed. The RPG format goes such a long way towards making the experience so much more than a series of cool set-pieces for action scenes to happen in. The game took me a bit to get into because I was so nonplussed by the setting initially - I really don’t like the pristine and like, high-tech, angular parts of the Star Wars aesthetic. It got way more interesting in proportion to how grimy it was. Reaching the Undercity is about where my opinion started to flip. The idea that this city is so vertically massive but also so old that establishing a penal colony in its foundations was a viable idea was a cool exploration of the implications of an ecumenopolis. I’ve never thought the whole world-city concept was that interesting, but Taris changed my mind. I really enjoyed the transition of going from the upper city, which is this squeaky-clean, incredibly artificial place, to the true surface of the planet that has real dirt and plants but a post-apocalyptic, sunless landscape. And the idea of the “promised land”, that the planet’s inhabitants have just fully forgotten about fully-livable places that they’ve built over top of, really gave a wild sense of the whole universe’s timescale. I’ve only just left Taris and the internet has said that it’s the worst part of the game, so I’m excited to see what sorts of places the game takes me to from here.
Gameplay-wise: it’s D&D. It’s just D&D. I’ve seen people complain about the combat and I don’t disagree. It’s not that I don’t “get” it, I just find it kind of slow and uninteresting. It’s kind of hard to tell visually how effective your decisions are. But it is fun to just sort of program your squad and watch them kick butt.
One last thing, I like that the game world is a lot less open-world than more modern RPGs, it makes it a lot less overwhelming to explore for the first time. I’m assuming the the 2003 tech limitations forced the developers to go deep instead of wide with the content, but I want more games to do this on purpose. It makes me wonder how actually mad people would be if more games constrained players to where all the content was, instead of filling open worlds with empty space.
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