Richard Hobbes
11-26-2003, 10:49 AM
Everyone,
(Note: these comments contain spoilers throughout so read no further if you have not finished the game. I originally posted this in Mackster's post "Knights of the Old Republic out tomorrow", but it seemed better suited in its own thread so I've moved it here.)
This is an updated version of a post I made on the System Wars forum several months back. I was commenting on the Xbox version of KOTOR so these comments must be taken in their proper context. From what I've read, the PC version of KOTOR is very similar to the Xbox version (bugs and all) and thus these comments should still be very applicable. Please keep in mind that this post has the flavor of a rant because I was somewhat tired of all the glowing reviews of KOTOR. In my opinion, KOTOR is a rather average RPG that contains an unacceptable number of software defects (bugs). As such, I was letting off a little bit of steam after trudging through a few bugs in KOTOR that I found surprising.
The post begins here:
Just to set the stage here... I am an Xbox owner who also owns a PS2, PC, and GameCube. I've just finished playing KOTOR (on Normal difficulty) to completion for three of its endings (two republic win endings and one Sith win ending).
Here are my final thoughts on KOTOR.
KOTOR is one of the most over hyped and underdeveloped games that I've ever played. Other than fabulous voice acting, every other aspect of the game is underdeveloped and/or unfinished. The biggest disappointments in the game are bugs, poor story development, heinous graphics, bland level design, and a poor battle system. I'll extrapolate on these below.
I've covered the bugs before (in an earlier post), but to recap... some of the bugs render the game incapable of being finished. Some bugs are just plain annoying. Most importantly, one particular bug completely ruins the ending of the story. Imagine my horror when, after killing Bastilla and taking down Darth Malak, several minutes later Bastilla appears in the closing ceremony to accept the Republic's words of gratitude! It's obvious here that BioWare forgot (or didn't have time) to create both "Bastilla lives" and "Bastilla dies" endings. While I'm a software engineer and understand tight development schedules, I don't think I can forgive this. I mean, come on. I kill Bastilla in cold blood yet there she is (reborn) several minutes later with no explanation.
During two of my games I encountered bugs where I was locked into areas and not allowed to exit. The first time this happend I spent several hours debugging before I was able to resume my game by flushing the Xbox cache, loading a save file, deleting all existing save files, and saving the current game to a new save file. Needless to say it was not fun finding this "solution".
For all of KOTOR's copious amounts of dialog, the story is really a very simple good guy versus bad guy affair. I suppose you could say this about many stories, however, KOTOR pretends to be much more and then refuses to deliver. While there is lot's of Jedi/Force diatribe and doctrine, the light side versus dark side mechanics have no effect on the game or on the outcome of the story. You can be as nasty as you like and still get the "good" ending of the game if you do the right things in the final chapter. The characters certainly have lot's to say, but there are not many interactions that connect emotionally. Likewise, many conversations follow the same "you ask this, I say that, you ask again, I say let's get on with the mission" script.
My biggest disappointment with the story is that there was an incredible opportunity for a deep, moving love story (between the hero and Bastilla) but for some reason BioWare decided not to develop this. Just why BioWare decided to pull Bastilla out of the game for a good part of the story is beyond me. Bastilla was (probably) the most interesting character in the game. She was certainly the most critical character in developing the story between herself, the hero, and the republic. Even at the end, when you finally rescue Bastilla (if you succeed in convincing her to come back to the light side of the Force), BioWare pulls Bastilla out of the story again during the final battle. Just as George Lucas hinted at a great love story (in the last Star Wars) and failed to deliver, BioWare does the same in KOTOR.
Another character that had potential for great plot development was Canderous, but once again BioWare takes the bland road. Canderous (a Mandalorean, mercenary warrior) has killed many Jedi in the past and is now leaning well towards the dark side of the Force. So why didn't BioWare do something with this in the story? I was expecting Canderous to turn on me at some point or to align himself with the republic. Instead he does neither. Canderous is a killing machine at the beginning of the story and he is still a killing machine at the end. (Albeit, he has more respect for the hero by the end of the story, but really, like many of the other characters, Canderous does not grow throughout the story - he talks a lot and fills in much back story, but character growth is decidedly absent.
Graphically KOTOR is a mess. I kept trying to be less critical in this area, but KOTOR never ceased to offend. Blocky character models - check. Low resolution textures - check. Seams everywhere! (Yes... actual seams! Check.) The inability to move the camera more than two inches above or below the line of sight - check. A frame rate of no more than twenty frames per second (at best) - check. Visible pixels when viewing objects up close - check. Very visible LOD (level of detail) being drawn in as you move about - check. Clipping problems - check. Absolutely horrendous aliasing and texture warping problems - check. Fog - check. If you can name a graphical problem, KOTOR probably has it. Also annoying is the fact that BioWare obviously figured out how to create a couple of Xbox graphic effects and then decided to use these everywhere. Thus, whether appropriate or not, every object has the one "reflective sheen" effect applied to it. Ditto for the "florescent glow" effect.
Bugs in the gameplay also extend to the graphics. Animation freezes are common. CG film sections stutter and have noticeable compression defects. During the last two chapters of the game, white and purple blotches appeared at the top of the screen every time I changed areas. Characters stand in thin air and move through solid objects. Of all the Xbox games I own, KOTOR is by far the least graphically impressive. As I said before, there is a good case to be made that KOTOR is one of the worst looking Xbox games.
Now we come to level and quest design. This is the aspect of KOTOR that has to be the blandest part of the game. The level design can be summed up as follows: Go to new world. Complete a bunch of quests in dungeons that all look the same until someone gives you what you need to find the Star Map on that world. Find Star Map. Go to next world. I was expecting much more from KOTOR's levels than map-driven, dungeon crawls through endless corridors. If the battle system were more engaging, perhaps I would have enjoyed this part of the game, but as it is, I just felt as though every dungeon was a hindrance to moving the story ahead. A few of the quests presented interesting moral decisions, but this was the exception rather than the norm. The majority of the tasks consisted of banal "go get this item and bring it back to me" item fetching. One final comment on KOTOR's level design: many of the levels feature doors that don't open. These doors don't look like other non-opening doors in the game (in fact, they look like doors that can be opened). What seems to have happened is that content was meant to go in these places, but the developers ran out of time. This (along with the many bugs left in the game) really gives KOTOR a feeling of being unfinished.
Arguably, most RPGs live and die by the story they have to tell and by the quality of their battle systems. KOTOR relies less on its battle system than many RPGs, however, you'll still fight a lot of battles in the game. The key problem with KOTOR's battle system is that it tries to pull together aspects of real-time systems (from PCs) and turn-based systems (from consoles). In the end, KOTOR gets neither system right and what we are left with is an annoying hodge podge that just isn't fun. Real time battle systems are all about involvement, excitement, and action. In KOTOR, you don't make the battle moves (the game does for you) so the key element of the real-time experience is missing. Turn based battle systems are all about understanding your opponent and devising careful strategies to win. In turn based systems there are usually strong elemental and deity alignments. Thus, characters worshiping one particular god may be strong or weak against others. Likewise, characters of specific elemental alignments (water, fire, ice, earth, etc.) will have various strengths and weaknesses. KOTOR completely misses the boat in this regard. There is the odd place where resistance to electric forces comes into play, but for the most part there are no perceptible alignments. Because battles play out in real time with all characters making their moves simultaneously, the strategic, chess-like quality of good turn based systems is absent. I won every battle in the game with the following strategy: queue up starting commands for each character at the beginning of battle. Watch battle play out while feeding health potions at critical intervals. In short, I found KOTOR's battle system very unrewarding and just like the level design, a hindrance to moving the story forward.
Although I didn't mention this at the start of my comments, I'd be remiss if I didn't at least touch on KOTOR's mini-games. There are three (shooting, swoop bike racing, and a card game called Pazak). At about the quarter-way mark in the game you can race swoop bikes or play Pazak any time you like. The shooting levels are fixed at specific points in the game.
I'll get the shooting out of the way first. Basically, the shooting levels amount to not much more than "shoot all enemies on the screen to progress". These sections are short, light-hearted fun, but they feel like they are thrown in just to add variety to the game. Almost no time was spent to make the shooting sections deep and exciting, or to tie them in with the rest of the game. I guess what I'm really saying here is that the few brief shooting encounters could have easily been left out and KOTOR would not have suffere. The shooting sections don't really add or take much away from the game.
Swoop bike racing seriously got on my nerves - so much so that I just stopped playing the races entirely. Like the shooting, swoop racing is very simple. However, in the swoop tracks you must finish within a specified time limit. The first time limit set on each track is fairly easy to beat (you can usually beat it within a few tries). All the other times on the tracks are insanely difficult and insanely un-fun.
At each racing venue, you always race on the same track. Each time you beat a race, the next race you have to beat is the same track with a lower time limit. The problem with this is that the second and third times are designed so that you must do everything perfectly to win. Miss the starting gun by a fraction of a second? You've lost the race even before you've started. Miss one single accelerator pad? You've lost the race. Shift at the wrong time? You've lost the race. Worst of all, there is no way to cancel a race once it has started and the races have horrible load times both before and after the race. To race one 20 second round you must endure 60 seconds of pre and post race loading and cut-scenes. Ugh!
At one track I tried over 500 times to beat the final (3rd) challenge time. I'd get within 2 tenths of a second of getting the required time, but I could not get the required time. Perhaps I was tired I thought. So I tried again the next day. After 200 more tries, I gave up again. Finally, after letting the tracks sit for a few days, I tried again. This time I was smarter. After a few races I gave up and said "to heck with this... why punish myself by playing a poorly designed mini-game". That was the best decision I made because it allowed me to continue on with the rest of the game. I've got no problem when a game ramps up the difficulty, but when the difficulty goes from doable to impossible inside of twenty seconds, I just don't want to play anymore.
One final word of frustration about the swoop racing. All throughout the races different riders would say "you need to upgrade your bike, go to so-and-so store". I'd go to "so-and-so store", but not a single swoop bike part was to be found. In fact, I played through the entire game twice (and a third time from middle to end) and never found a single swoop bike upgrade part. I must conclude that this is another part of KOTOR that was left "unfinished".
The last mini game is the card game Pazak. Pazak is a blackjack-like game played with a hand of four cards. You can draw a card from the deck (which you can't see before hand) or you can draw a known card from your own hand. The idea is to get the closest score to twenty without going over. Pazak is actually quite enjoyable once you get a deck with enough "flip" cards. Flip cards are cards whose sign can be changed from positive to negative. This is the key to winning at Pazak. With flip cards the size of your hand effectively doubles from four to eight so you have a lot more cards to tilt the odds in your favor. While Pazak is a simple card game, I actually had quite a bit of fun with it.
So... in the end, what do I think of KOTOR? Well... it seems like a very unfinished game with lot's of bugs and poor graphics. I certainly liked the well-voiced dialog, but I'd have liked the game a whole lot better if the dialog actually told a deeper, more emotionally involving story. BioWare wanted KOTOR to be the Xbox's Final Fantasy. Unfortunately, I'd say KOTOR has a long way to go before it approaches the level of quality found in Squaresoft's premier RPG series.
The last two Star Wars films (Episode 1 and Episode 2) were dismal failures. Featuring scripts that could have better been written by a class of ten year olds and atrociously painful acting, George Lucas didn't seem to realize that all the special effects in the world can't save a poor story. One of the reasons I think KOTOR is getting such glowing reviews is that it tells a better story (with better acting) than George Lucas could produce. I agree that KOTOR tells a better story than Episode 1 and Episode 2, but I think KOTOR has to be judged on its own merits. Just because the films were awful does not immediately raise the game (which seems merely good) to a level of greatness.
Okay folks. That's my rant for the day. I know there are those whom will strongly disagree with me and that's okay. If you are loving every minute of KOTOR, don't let my taste for the game dissuade you. KOTOR is unquestionably a game with huge scope made by a developer that was trying to make a great game - not just an average game, but a great game. In this case (and not for lack of effort on BioWare's part), I don't happen to think greatness was achieved. Even with all the best of intents, not all projects turn out as well as their creators envisioned them.
RH.
(Note: these comments contain spoilers throughout so read no further if you have not finished the game. I originally posted this in Mackster's post "Knights of the Old Republic out tomorrow", but it seemed better suited in its own thread so I've moved it here.)
This is an updated version of a post I made on the System Wars forum several months back. I was commenting on the Xbox version of KOTOR so these comments must be taken in their proper context. From what I've read, the PC version of KOTOR is very similar to the Xbox version (bugs and all) and thus these comments should still be very applicable. Please keep in mind that this post has the flavor of a rant because I was somewhat tired of all the glowing reviews of KOTOR. In my opinion, KOTOR is a rather average RPG that contains an unacceptable number of software defects (bugs). As such, I was letting off a little bit of steam after trudging through a few bugs in KOTOR that I found surprising.
The post begins here:
Just to set the stage here... I am an Xbox owner who also owns a PS2, PC, and GameCube. I've just finished playing KOTOR (on Normal difficulty) to completion for three of its endings (two republic win endings and one Sith win ending).
Here are my final thoughts on KOTOR.
KOTOR is one of the most over hyped and underdeveloped games that I've ever played. Other than fabulous voice acting, every other aspect of the game is underdeveloped and/or unfinished. The biggest disappointments in the game are bugs, poor story development, heinous graphics, bland level design, and a poor battle system. I'll extrapolate on these below.
I've covered the bugs before (in an earlier post), but to recap... some of the bugs render the game incapable of being finished. Some bugs are just plain annoying. Most importantly, one particular bug completely ruins the ending of the story. Imagine my horror when, after killing Bastilla and taking down Darth Malak, several minutes later Bastilla appears in the closing ceremony to accept the Republic's words of gratitude! It's obvious here that BioWare forgot (or didn't have time) to create both "Bastilla lives" and "Bastilla dies" endings. While I'm a software engineer and understand tight development schedules, I don't think I can forgive this. I mean, come on. I kill Bastilla in cold blood yet there she is (reborn) several minutes later with no explanation.
During two of my games I encountered bugs where I was locked into areas and not allowed to exit. The first time this happend I spent several hours debugging before I was able to resume my game by flushing the Xbox cache, loading a save file, deleting all existing save files, and saving the current game to a new save file. Needless to say it was not fun finding this "solution".
For all of KOTOR's copious amounts of dialog, the story is really a very simple good guy versus bad guy affair. I suppose you could say this about many stories, however, KOTOR pretends to be much more and then refuses to deliver. While there is lot's of Jedi/Force diatribe and doctrine, the light side versus dark side mechanics have no effect on the game or on the outcome of the story. You can be as nasty as you like and still get the "good" ending of the game if you do the right things in the final chapter. The characters certainly have lot's to say, but there are not many interactions that connect emotionally. Likewise, many conversations follow the same "you ask this, I say that, you ask again, I say let's get on with the mission" script.
My biggest disappointment with the story is that there was an incredible opportunity for a deep, moving love story (between the hero and Bastilla) but for some reason BioWare decided not to develop this. Just why BioWare decided to pull Bastilla out of the game for a good part of the story is beyond me. Bastilla was (probably) the most interesting character in the game. She was certainly the most critical character in developing the story between herself, the hero, and the republic. Even at the end, when you finally rescue Bastilla (if you succeed in convincing her to come back to the light side of the Force), BioWare pulls Bastilla out of the story again during the final battle. Just as George Lucas hinted at a great love story (in the last Star Wars) and failed to deliver, BioWare does the same in KOTOR.
Another character that had potential for great plot development was Canderous, but once again BioWare takes the bland road. Canderous (a Mandalorean, mercenary warrior) has killed many Jedi in the past and is now leaning well towards the dark side of the Force. So why didn't BioWare do something with this in the story? I was expecting Canderous to turn on me at some point or to align himself with the republic. Instead he does neither. Canderous is a killing machine at the beginning of the story and he is still a killing machine at the end. (Albeit, he has more respect for the hero by the end of the story, but really, like many of the other characters, Canderous does not grow throughout the story - he talks a lot and fills in much back story, but character growth is decidedly absent.
Graphically KOTOR is a mess. I kept trying to be less critical in this area, but KOTOR never ceased to offend. Blocky character models - check. Low resolution textures - check. Seams everywhere! (Yes... actual seams! Check.) The inability to move the camera more than two inches above or below the line of sight - check. A frame rate of no more than twenty frames per second (at best) - check. Visible pixels when viewing objects up close - check. Very visible LOD (level of detail) being drawn in as you move about - check. Clipping problems - check. Absolutely horrendous aliasing and texture warping problems - check. Fog - check. If you can name a graphical problem, KOTOR probably has it. Also annoying is the fact that BioWare obviously figured out how to create a couple of Xbox graphic effects and then decided to use these everywhere. Thus, whether appropriate or not, every object has the one "reflective sheen" effect applied to it. Ditto for the "florescent glow" effect.
Bugs in the gameplay also extend to the graphics. Animation freezes are common. CG film sections stutter and have noticeable compression defects. During the last two chapters of the game, white and purple blotches appeared at the top of the screen every time I changed areas. Characters stand in thin air and move through solid objects. Of all the Xbox games I own, KOTOR is by far the least graphically impressive. As I said before, there is a good case to be made that KOTOR is one of the worst looking Xbox games.
Now we come to level and quest design. This is the aspect of KOTOR that has to be the blandest part of the game. The level design can be summed up as follows: Go to new world. Complete a bunch of quests in dungeons that all look the same until someone gives you what you need to find the Star Map on that world. Find Star Map. Go to next world. I was expecting much more from KOTOR's levels than map-driven, dungeon crawls through endless corridors. If the battle system were more engaging, perhaps I would have enjoyed this part of the game, but as it is, I just felt as though every dungeon was a hindrance to moving the story ahead. A few of the quests presented interesting moral decisions, but this was the exception rather than the norm. The majority of the tasks consisted of banal "go get this item and bring it back to me" item fetching. One final comment on KOTOR's level design: many of the levels feature doors that don't open. These doors don't look like other non-opening doors in the game (in fact, they look like doors that can be opened). What seems to have happened is that content was meant to go in these places, but the developers ran out of time. This (along with the many bugs left in the game) really gives KOTOR a feeling of being unfinished.
Arguably, most RPGs live and die by the story they have to tell and by the quality of their battle systems. KOTOR relies less on its battle system than many RPGs, however, you'll still fight a lot of battles in the game. The key problem with KOTOR's battle system is that it tries to pull together aspects of real-time systems (from PCs) and turn-based systems (from consoles). In the end, KOTOR gets neither system right and what we are left with is an annoying hodge podge that just isn't fun. Real time battle systems are all about involvement, excitement, and action. In KOTOR, you don't make the battle moves (the game does for you) so the key element of the real-time experience is missing. Turn based battle systems are all about understanding your opponent and devising careful strategies to win. In turn based systems there are usually strong elemental and deity alignments. Thus, characters worshiping one particular god may be strong or weak against others. Likewise, characters of specific elemental alignments (water, fire, ice, earth, etc.) will have various strengths and weaknesses. KOTOR completely misses the boat in this regard. There is the odd place where resistance to electric forces comes into play, but for the most part there are no perceptible alignments. Because battles play out in real time with all characters making their moves simultaneously, the strategic, chess-like quality of good turn based systems is absent. I won every battle in the game with the following strategy: queue up starting commands for each character at the beginning of battle. Watch battle play out while feeding health potions at critical intervals. In short, I found KOTOR's battle system very unrewarding and just like the level design, a hindrance to moving the story forward.
Although I didn't mention this at the start of my comments, I'd be remiss if I didn't at least touch on KOTOR's mini-games. There are three (shooting, swoop bike racing, and a card game called Pazak). At about the quarter-way mark in the game you can race swoop bikes or play Pazak any time you like. The shooting levels are fixed at specific points in the game.
I'll get the shooting out of the way first. Basically, the shooting levels amount to not much more than "shoot all enemies on the screen to progress". These sections are short, light-hearted fun, but they feel like they are thrown in just to add variety to the game. Almost no time was spent to make the shooting sections deep and exciting, or to tie them in with the rest of the game. I guess what I'm really saying here is that the few brief shooting encounters could have easily been left out and KOTOR would not have suffere. The shooting sections don't really add or take much away from the game.
Swoop bike racing seriously got on my nerves - so much so that I just stopped playing the races entirely. Like the shooting, swoop racing is very simple. However, in the swoop tracks you must finish within a specified time limit. The first time limit set on each track is fairly easy to beat (you can usually beat it within a few tries). All the other times on the tracks are insanely difficult and insanely un-fun.
At each racing venue, you always race on the same track. Each time you beat a race, the next race you have to beat is the same track with a lower time limit. The problem with this is that the second and third times are designed so that you must do everything perfectly to win. Miss the starting gun by a fraction of a second? You've lost the race even before you've started. Miss one single accelerator pad? You've lost the race. Shift at the wrong time? You've lost the race. Worst of all, there is no way to cancel a race once it has started and the races have horrible load times both before and after the race. To race one 20 second round you must endure 60 seconds of pre and post race loading and cut-scenes. Ugh!
At one track I tried over 500 times to beat the final (3rd) challenge time. I'd get within 2 tenths of a second of getting the required time, but I could not get the required time. Perhaps I was tired I thought. So I tried again the next day. After 200 more tries, I gave up again. Finally, after letting the tracks sit for a few days, I tried again. This time I was smarter. After a few races I gave up and said "to heck with this... why punish myself by playing a poorly designed mini-game". That was the best decision I made because it allowed me to continue on with the rest of the game. I've got no problem when a game ramps up the difficulty, but when the difficulty goes from doable to impossible inside of twenty seconds, I just don't want to play anymore.
One final word of frustration about the swoop racing. All throughout the races different riders would say "you need to upgrade your bike, go to so-and-so store". I'd go to "so-and-so store", but not a single swoop bike part was to be found. In fact, I played through the entire game twice (and a third time from middle to end) and never found a single swoop bike upgrade part. I must conclude that this is another part of KOTOR that was left "unfinished".
The last mini game is the card game Pazak. Pazak is a blackjack-like game played with a hand of four cards. You can draw a card from the deck (which you can't see before hand) or you can draw a known card from your own hand. The idea is to get the closest score to twenty without going over. Pazak is actually quite enjoyable once you get a deck with enough "flip" cards. Flip cards are cards whose sign can be changed from positive to negative. This is the key to winning at Pazak. With flip cards the size of your hand effectively doubles from four to eight so you have a lot more cards to tilt the odds in your favor. While Pazak is a simple card game, I actually had quite a bit of fun with it.
So... in the end, what do I think of KOTOR? Well... it seems like a very unfinished game with lot's of bugs and poor graphics. I certainly liked the well-voiced dialog, but I'd have liked the game a whole lot better if the dialog actually told a deeper, more emotionally involving story. BioWare wanted KOTOR to be the Xbox's Final Fantasy. Unfortunately, I'd say KOTOR has a long way to go before it approaches the level of quality found in Squaresoft's premier RPG series.
The last two Star Wars films (Episode 1 and Episode 2) were dismal failures. Featuring scripts that could have better been written by a class of ten year olds and atrociously painful acting, George Lucas didn't seem to realize that all the special effects in the world can't save a poor story. One of the reasons I think KOTOR is getting such glowing reviews is that it tells a better story (with better acting) than George Lucas could produce. I agree that KOTOR tells a better story than Episode 1 and Episode 2, but I think KOTOR has to be judged on its own merits. Just because the films were awful does not immediately raise the game (which seems merely good) to a level of greatness.
Okay folks. That's my rant for the day. I know there are those whom will strongly disagree with me and that's okay. If you are loving every minute of KOTOR, don't let my taste for the game dissuade you. KOTOR is unquestionably a game with huge scope made by a developer that was trying to make a great game - not just an average game, but a great game. In this case (and not for lack of effort on BioWare's part), I don't happen to think greatness was achieved. Even with all the best of intents, not all projects turn out as well as their creators envisioned them.
RH.