Yora plays Knights of the Old Republic (This time for real!)

[Yora]

Knights of the Old Republic is a great game and widely considered to be the best Star Wars game ever made. I played through it once when it came out 14 years ago and made another attempt 7 years or so ago, but only made it about halfway through from what I remember. I recently got the game again for XBox and had already completed Taris and was about to wrap up Dantooine after 15 hours of play when my old console finally gave up. I now got a replacement but recovering the saves from a different model seemed like too much trouble, so I simply started a new game.

I started this thread last week but it immediately turned into an unrelated discussion about the problems of KotOR 2 before I even got to make a second post, a game I never played and really don't care about. So I am making a new one, picking up where I last left off.

New Game: The Endar Spire

As I usually tend to do with such games, I started it the same way as all the other times I did before. Female Scout. But I think this is the first time that I actually went through the full character creation process and didn't just go with the presets. It's very obvious on first glance that this game runs on the Star Wars d20 system from WotC that is a pretty straight up conversion of Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition. Looking back now, that is a really odd and not well fitting choice for doing a Star Wars game, but back then it probably seemed like a genius idea. Also, the developers had just made Neverwinter Nights and had an existing relationship with WotC so using a currently in production pen and paper game that the developers already new well was probably quite convenient.

After having made some poor choices in my last run, I went with 14 STR, 14 DEX, 14 CON, 12 INT, 14 WIS, 10 CHA. Persuasion comes up only very rarely in this game, is usually not very important, and any skill ranks you put into it will vastly outrank any +1 bonus you get from putting extra points into Charisma. And I am the kind of player who always takes any Force Persuasion feats the first time they become available and then the Persuasion skill becomes pretty much useless. As a Jedi I will need Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution so I put them all at 14 to get the maximum return from my ability points. (For 15 or higher you have to pay extra during character creation.) Having had more skill points than I could use in my last game I simply set Intelligence at 12 and put everything else in Wisdom, which I believe helps with Force powers and energy.
The feats I picked so far are Empathy (+1 Awareness, Persuasion, Treat Injury, all skills I use a lot), Duelling (+1 to attack and AC with pistols and single swords), and Conditioning (+1 to all saves because there's nothing better available right now.) As a scout I also get Rapid Shot and Flurry for free, but both seem like bad ideas unless you upgrade them. Flurry I probably will later on.

As prolog tutorials go, the Endar Spire is pretty neat. The architecture of the corridors is a bit weird, but that's with any indoor architecture in any third person game ever. You just need all this huge space to see anything. What makes the design more interesting are the several windows which let you clearly see that the whole ship is spinning while falling towards the planet. One odditiy I noticed in previous playthroughs is that Taris is described as being a planet completely covered in a massive city, but any time the planet is actually shown this isn't the case. What you see is a planet that has one single massive city running in a narrow band that covers maybe a quarter of the circumference. Still massively big but not as ludicrously impossible as the whole planet being covered by a kilometer high city. Corruscant can get away with it for being the capital of the galaxy, but for a small backwater space port like Taris this depiction is much more believable.

I am playing the game on hard and I am simply unable to comprehend how I used to occasionally die in this section on previous playthroughs. There isn't really any kind of tactical variation you can do at this stage other than selecting a blaster pistol or a sword as your weapon, and I believe from the way the combat system works it's a purely cosmetic difference. This time I simply walked through it and used a medpack once. Maybe that was the amazing skill my previous experience provided me with.

Thrask was an okay prolog party member but he runs through a door to give you time to escape while he holds of a Sith with a light saber and the door closes and locks behind him. I hope this wasn't because I am a girl. That stuff wouldn't fly with modern Star Wars anymore. Instead I meet Carth Onasi in the next room and jump in the escape pod. With the cutscene that follows and the dialog after waking up on Taris, the playtime is already an impressive 40 minutes for such a short level.

Visually this game looks okay but from a technical standpoint is absolutely primitive. The amount of copy-past material is staggering. There is something like only 6 faces for minor NPCs and maybe twice that number for outfits. I assume this had to do with the technical limitations of the Xbox and that they had to get all the data on a single DVD.

[Yora]

Part 2: Taris
The first thing you get to know on Taris is Carth. Oh Carth... A proud member of the league of Blandy McBlandfaces like Anomen, Sky, Kaidan, and Anders. (At least Alistair was funny.) He's my second least favorite character in the game, but for the time you're stuck with him he's at least not actively annoying.

Getting out of the apartment building, I have to say that Taris looks amazing. Obviously it's all very low tech and basic, but I really like what they did visually with these technical limitations. This game came out shortly after Neverwinter Nights, which was terribly ugly even at its release, while in contrast KotOR still looks really pretty. I remember back when the game first came out how amazed I was seeing the transports land and take off at the Sith Military Base. Back in 2003, I found this mind blowing. Sith troopers, protocol droids, and astromech droids look very different than what is known from the rebellion era but they are still instantly recognizable as what they are. And it still all looks and feels like Stat Wars. That's really good visual design.

The apartments strongly remind of Cloud City and the street of the Lower City also looks very appropriate. I actually really like the look of the Undercity. It's technically really primitive again, but the choice of light and color makes it work for me. Can't really say the same thing for the other "indoor" environments, though. The gang bases, the cantinas, and the military base all looks pretty bland and the sewers suffer from too much monotony because of constantly copy-pasting the same very limited assets. Which as I mentioned, probably comes from the limited storage capacity of XBox DVDs and hard drives. (Did XBox even have a hard drive?)

In the Lower City you meet Mission and Zalbaar, which I think are okay as NPCs go. Nothing too memorable, but perfectly servicable. And while I am really not a fan of Calo Nord, I have to say the first time you see him ranks pretty high in my list of funniest videogame moments. There is also Canderous, whom I completely ignored the first time I played the game for being evil, but now I actually am much more interested in him and want to take him along more often. Now that I am playing an imported English version of the game I do feel kind of disappointed that they didn't get the voice of Ron Perlman to go with his face.

One thing I really only noticed on the fourth time playing through it is how strictly linear Taris is. You have to get a Sith uniform from the northern apartment building to get to the Lower City. In the Lower City you have to get the papers from the Hidden Beks to get to the Undercity. In the Undercity you have to take Mission with you to get through the sewers into the Vulkar base. And the layout is really one long corridor from the South Apartment complex to the Vulkar base and from there looping back to the Lower City. And then you have to do the swoop race to get Bastilla, into the Sith Base to get the codes, and to Davik's Estate to get the ship. All in exactly this order. There isn't much in the way of optional side quests either. There's the bounties, the Rakghoul serum, and the Promised Land journals.
Look back at it, the Promised Land quest is actually really terrible designed. All you actually do is loot all the coprses you find and then give three items you picked from random corpses to either one NPC or another NPC. The entire active parts of the quest is dialogs in which you don't really do anything other than listening to a long story. The whole quest is listening to long monologues about a subject that does not touch on any other parts of the game or the setting.
I think it's all not that bad the first time you play it, but it really, really hurts the replay value of the game, And it's long. Even though I just played this part of the game a week earlier, it still took me 8 hours of play time to leave Taris.Which I find amazing, given how seemingly little content there is and that I didn't spend a lot of time running between NPCs.

Hacking computers and droids is somewhat of a mixed back. With computers you can never really know in advance if it's worth to use up your spikes or if you will find a key card or something similar later on. And when you have to use 6 or 8 spikes, that's really a big difference. But at least you know what you're getting for it. Droids are much more problematic because you have no way what patrol route they will take when you turn them on. The droid in the sewers where Zalbaar is guarded by Gamoreans is a huge help in that fight, but there's no way to know that help would be handy before you already faught them and died once. Then in the Vulkar Base there's a droid you can activate and upgrade, but it will only walk a section of corridor where there are two super weak enemies. Which you might already have killed at this point. Repairing droids and sending them patrolling really only works after you already seen where they will go and what enemies there are and you returned to an older save.
It helps with a couple of tough fights, like the the Garage Head and the locked hangar in the Vulkar Base. But it's really only worth activating droids when you lost a fight and have to return to an old save, which is somewhat lacking as game design goes. And speaking of saves, the autosave function in this game is pretty much useless. It only saves during area transitions and even then not all the time. You can spend a considerable amount of time in one area and then you open a door and get surprised attacked by a really hard enemy you had no way to anticipate. With this game you really have to manually save every 10 minutes or so, at least when you're in a "dungeon".

While working my way through the arena to get to fight Bendak Starkiller, I had quite a hard time with Marl to the point where I was looking up advice and learned about grenade spam. Grenades totes OP. I remember the previous two times I played the game, fighting Calo Nord and Dravik for the Ebon Hawk was really hard. And I think back then I played only on normal and not on hard. So I was bracing myself for a really hard hour of trial and error and frustration. But no. Throwing six grenades at Calo was enough to get him to a hp value that triggers the cutscene, which automatically kills Dravik. It was over in seconds.
Overall, I have to say I am not a fan of the combat system. I can understand why it seemed reasonable 15 years ago to make RPGs digital versions of D&D, but in hindsight there are so many so much better ways to approach it. In theory you can make turn based combat very tactical, but here the options are just too limited. What it comes down to is selecting the enemy and then waiting until the random number generator does it's thing. The most important thing you do during a fight is activating medkits. And with the d20 system, random number generation becomes a huge factor in the outcome of a fight. You can have exactly the same fight two times and the results will be comopletely different because you got random numbers. If a fight is hard or easy is not a matter of skill but mostly a matter of luck.Or grenade spam.

This game is back from a time when morality in BioWare games was still really primitive and somwhat laughable. So far, from what I've seen, playing Dark Side simply means threatening everyone to give you more money and killing all your prisoners. With Jade Empire they had an interesting idea for replacing good and evil with diplomatic and forceful, but that game completely ignored the morality system it explained in the prolog ten minues later and it was only in Mass Effect that we actually go to see it in action. Playing Renegade Sheperd was fun, but I see little reason to play Dark Side in KotOR.
And speaking of which, so far Malak seems like a terrible villain. I know he's a Sith Lord and all characters in Star Wars need to be larger than life and somewhat over the top, but Malak comes across as a raging lunatic who seems to be attempting to make a speedrun at getting a 100% dark side score in his short conversations with Admiral Karath by ordering as many attrocities as quickly as possible. Vader was coldly menacing and in comparison even the Emperor comes across as reasonable and restrained. I'll be keeping an eye on this as the game progresses.

And as a side note, why are the Sith officer uniforms so terrible? The regular gray ones simply look poor, but Admiral Karath takes the cake. Why is he wearing a drab potato sack? Would it really have been so hard to give his character model even the most basic of collars? Compare that to the Republic officer uniforms who get so spot on occasion and they look great. The game can look so gorgeous, but Karath's uniform is the most ugly thing in it by a good margin.

Overall, my impressions of Taris are very mixed. In this part of the game they designers do a great job at capturing the style and atmosphere of Star Wars. But when you take away that layer and look only at the gameplay itself, it's really pretty weak. But I remember the rest of the game getting much better and I had much more fun on Dantooine on my previous run last week. Now it gets to the good part.

[rooster707]

Sorry again about derailing the last thread. I look forward to reading your thoughts on the rest of the game. Are you saving up levels for after you get your Jedi class? I don't think I've ever done it myself, but supposedly you end up more powerful that way, although it makes Taris a bit harder.

[Yora]

No, I don't bother with these things. I am now playing Scout/Sentinel, which I recently saw is considered the worst possible character, and I play the game on Hard. And it's still really easy.

I also remembered some more flaws with Taris and Malak that I forgot to put into my post:
The replay value of Taris is hurt even more by the fact that everyone on that planet supposedly dies the moment you leave it. Everything you did that wasn't directly helping you leave the planet was completely irrelevant in hindsight. It's not so bad the first time you play it, but on a second run you know that none of it will matter in any way. It also feels very cheap. A planet gets wiped out and everyone just shrugs and never mentions it again. It's not like Alderan was really any better in that regard, but here I really would have wanted a lot more. If you want to include a massive genocide in your story, that you should have the courage to deal with it. Just using it as a cheap effect is really lame.

I also noticed I have a problem with Malak as a villain while playing on Dantooine. Why exactly is Malak a threat? The game does a really bad job at explaining that. All we've seen and heard about him is that he has one ship that is big, but not unusually so. He's a guy with a ship who is also a Sith lord. Why is he any kind of problem in the bigger picture? How is he a threat to the Republic? Why are we in a hurry to stop him? And stopping him at what exactly?

[Caelestion]

Malak is the Lord of the Sith, with access to near-infinite numbers of ships and the (dubious) loyalty of an entire galactic-level army and navy, so his being a clear and present threat to anything in his way is fairly transparent.

My problem with him is that he's cartoonishly evil, even by the standards of the Old Sith. What sort of nutter wipes out an entire planet, simply to kill one person, when they're not even surprised when they run into them later on? Tarkin blows up Alderaan as a political point about the fear of force and whilst it's equally monstrous and unnecessary, there is at least a solid idea behind it. Malak's method is slow, cumbersome and easily thwarted, yet Malak doesn't even care about the strategy behind his heinous decisions.

[Yora]

Part 3: Dantooine

This is where the real game starts.

Again, it took me about 8 hours to finish Taris and get on my way to Dantooine. The planet itself took me 5 hours in total on my second run and now I am back at where I last was when my old console died.

But before you get to Dantooine there first is a small very lightweight mini-game in which you shot down sith fighters from the Ebon Hawk's gun turret. From a gameplay perspective this mini-game is really quite bad. It manages to be trivial while at the same time making it really hard to see anything. However, I still think it's a great addition to the game that greatly enhances it and I love that they put it in. It's just so really appropriate for a Star Wars game and does a great job at referencing the movies. Could have been better done, but I am glad they didn't cut it.

I am repeating myself, but once again Dantooine looks gorgeous. Even though from a technical perspective it's really simplistic. When you stand on a hill looking at the valley? coast? in the distance, the background texture is so blurry that you can't even tell if it's fields or the sea. But it all works still really well at creating atmosphere. I also like that the interior of the Jedi Enclave looks a lot like the Rebel Base on Yavin in the first movie. I already set foot on the next planet after completing this part and I really have to say that whoever was responsible for lighting the environments did a phenomenally fantastic job. The engine is old and simple, but the way the levels are lit is perhaps the best I've seen from any game of that decade. It looks so very much like the movies were lit, which makes up a very significant part of the unique Star Wars visual style. And this is my top contender for the reasons this game is widely considered the best Star Wars game ever. It captures the visual look and with that is more succesful than any other game at capturing the atmosphere.

The quests on Dantooine are pretty okay. There's bringing back Juhani to the Jedi (can you even kill her?), dealing with the grumpy old farmers, fighting a lot of Mandalorians, and the mandatory BioWare criminal case solving. I never like those but I guess this one is okay. Though I believe I only was able to successfull solve it because I remembered the answer from the last time I played the game. The quest with the missing droid is both interesting and weird. I don't know how much into the deeper details you can get, but I prefered not to dig any deeper. Still, I think it was somewhat gutsy to delve into this back in those days.

Then there is the Jedi training. I am not completely sure, but I believe they introduced a couple of problematic additions to the Jedi lore here. Splitting the Jedi class into Guardian, Sentinel, and Consular seems pretty reasonable for a class based rules system, and I assume they just took that from the d20 Star Wars game. But making the lightsaber colors official badges for different branches of the Jedi Order? That just seems wrong. At least they immediately give you the option to get differently colored crystal for your lighstaber on the very same planet.
And did they invent the Jedi Code? That thing went ahead to cause all kinds of problematic assumptions about the Jedi that have become pretty well established and accepted standards for the Expanded Universe.
I went with Sentinel and made my lightsaber blue, being now a Scout 8/Sentinel 3.

The ruined temple with the Star Forge map is somewhat mixed as a level, though I would say it's mostly bad. I like the visual style, but the layout is poor and the puzzles are a joke. And those damn guardian droids. Fortunately I remembered them being there and being really hard, so I made lots of saves. And just as I remembered, the first droid took forever to beat. I don't know if this thing has damage reduction or something like this, but the animations clearly showed plenty of hits while no damage was being done, and when damage was done it was often just 1 or 2 points. I hate that thing.
Oddly enough, the second droid in the other room was no problem at all. That thing went down within seconds. No clue why.
The droid being able to give you some critical information to make some sense of what you have to do next but not having been programmed with any data to tell you what the Star Forge actually is was a clever idea. The droid actually seems somewhat confused when you tell him to give you more detail, which I found a pretty funny way to dress up this inconsistency in a way that is at least somewhat plausible.

Looking through stores, I noticed that there are quite a lot of expensive armors to buy. And I have to ask: Why? The only characters in the party who are going to wear armor are Mission, Carth, and Canderous. And the armors you find on Taris are clearly much better than almost anything that is for sale on Taris and Dantooine. Why would you ever spend money on those?
The Cassus Fett armor on Dantooine looks quite neat as it is also upgradeable, but that thing is still way too expensive to contemplate.

All said, I like Dantooine.

Getting on the Ebon Hawk and looking at the available selection of planets, I immediately noticed that the positions don't have any relations to those on the now existing pretty complete map of the galaxy. Which I think didn't actually exist yet when this game was made as it has Manaan and Rakata Prime on it, so they are excused.

[Inarius]

I know it's a bit late to bring this up, but because of the weirdness with the system that was used for Kotor a score of 12 Int does pretty much nothing. Int doesn't actually give any extra skill points per level unless you have 14 or 18 int. Boosting charisma to 12 or pretty much making any other stat a 15 would've been a more useful option.

No, I don't bother with these things. I am now playing Scout/Sentinel, which I recently saw is considered the worst possible character, and I play the game on Hard. And it's still really easy.

Scout is probably the best starting class, the thing is Sentinel doesn't really get anything worthwhile for the trade offs it has vrs Guardian and Consular. Amusingly enough that's a different story in Kotor 2 where they gave Sentinels the same Attack Bonus as Guardians which basically makes Guardians the weakest option in Kotor 2. Of course its not like playing the weakest class will make the game a struggle really.

I also noticed I have a problem with Malak as a villain while playing on Dantooine. Why exactly is Malak a threat? The game does a really bad job at explaining that. All we've seen and heard about him is that he has one ship that is big, but not unusually so. He's a guy with a ship who is also a Sith lord. Why is he any kind of problem in the bigger picture? How is he a threat to the Republic? Why are we in a hurry to stop him? And stopping him at what exactly?

It's been awhile since I've played but I thought Malak was a threat because he and Revan essentially took command of the fleets, armies, and Jedi that conquered the Mandalorians and turned them on the Republic. So its not just a single ship but rather most of the veteran forces the Republic had are now under Malaks command.

Looking through stores, I noticed that there are quite a lot of expensive armors to buy. And I have to ask: Why? The only characters in the party who are going to wear armor are Mission, Carth, and Canderous. And the armors you find on Taris are clearly much better than almost anything that is for sale on Taris and Dantooine. Why would you ever spend money on those?
The Cassus Fett armor on Dantooine looks quite neat as it is also upgradeable, but that thing is still way too expensive to contemplate.

A heavy armor Soldier/Guardian darkside build that dumps dex and pumps up strength and con is actually pretty good. The biggest downside of it is it loses access to force speed which is tbh rather significant. It does let you play as a character who has brute force behind each swing, a slower speed and the ability to force choke at will. Basically its a Darth Vader type of build.

[Bobb]

Yes, you can kill Juhani.

No, Thrask's actions aren't affected by your gender.

[Kish]

All the classes have 1/1 BAB in KotOR 2. Consulars, Scoundrels, droids. If you think that makes Guardians weak (or not far stronger than both the other Jedi classes), well, that's a point of view.

I thought Yora was saying she finds it insufficiently spelled out why Malak's a threat when she's on Dantooine. By the end of the game, it's clear that the Star Forge is effectively giving him an unlimited number of ships and combat droids comparable to the best the Republic has to match them; unless it's taken away from him his conquest of the galaxy is a "when," not an "if."

[Yora]

You can piece together why the developers meant for him to be a major threat. But the game itself does a really poor job at communicating this. It's never explained what the current conflict is and what enemy the Republic is facing except for there being a Sith Lord. As if that automatically explains everything. (Though The Force Awakens does the same shoddy mistake.)

[rooster707]

Then there is the Jedi training. I am not completely sure, but I believe they introduced a couple of problematic additions to the Jedi lore here. Splitting the Jedi class into Guardian, Sentinel, and Consular seems pretty reasonable for a class based rules system, and I assume they just took that from the d20 Star Wars game. But making the lightsaber colors official badges for different branches of the Jedi Order? That just seems wrong. At least they immediately give you the option to get differently colored crystal for your lighstaber on the very same planet.
And did they invent the Jedi Code? That thing went ahead to cause all kinds of problematic assumptions about the Jedi that have become pretty well established and accepted standards for the Expanded Universe.
I went with Sentinel and made my lightsaber blue, being now a Scout 8/Sentinel 3.

There's a book called The Jedi Path that talks about a lot of this stuff. IIRC, the class colors are traditional, but not mandatory. (That book's worth checking out, though; there's some very cool stuff in there about lightsabers and Force powers and whatnot.)

Looking through stores, I noticed that there are quite a lot of expensive armors to buy. And I have to ask: Why? The only characters in the party who are going to wear armor are Mission, Carth, and Canderous. And the armors you find on Taris are clearly much better than almost anything that is for sale on Taris and Dantooine. Why would you ever spend money on those?
The Cassus Fett armor on Dantooine looks quite neat as it is also upgradeable, but that thing is still way too expensive to contemplate.

I actually wore heavy armor for most of my first playthrough. (Possibly just because the robes in this game look awful.) But yeah, all the ones you can buy are either worthless or waaaay too expensive.

[Yora]

Part 4A: Tatooine

I decided to go to Tatooine first, since it's my least favorite planet in Star Wars. It appears in pretty much every Star Wars game ever and aside from being Luke's homeworld and having Jabba's palace there really isn't anything interesting about it. It's original concept was to be bland and barren so Luke has all reason to want to leave. I don't like sand.

As a game level, I have to say this was really very poor. The spaceport isn't very interesting and while it has a Cantina and Hunter's hangout there's not really anything to do in them. They are just there. The streets don't offer any cool sights either. Outside the spaceport there is one main outdoor area where you get attacked by lots of sand people. Then there's the sand people "fortress" and the krayt lair and that is it. The quest to get the sand people to leave the space port alone is trivial. Fighting the krayt doesn't even happen as you just have to give an NPC some bantha feed, fight four sand people, and then you get a cutscene in which the krayt is killed by mines. What a disapointment. That part feels like they meant to have a fight with the krayt but couldn't make such a big enemy work so they just made it a cutscene and gave you another Calo Nord fight. No use for the blasters, but nice upgradable heavy armor for Canderous.

On Tatooine you can also buy HK-47 if you want to talk with the sandpeople instead of going full out assault. I did the whole sand people quest with him and I have to say I didn''t find him funny. Not annoyingly silly, but he did not entertain me. I see little reason for having him along.

And yeah, that's kind of all I have to say about Tatooine. There's barely anything there to talk about. Very bland planet and I think it took me just 3 hours or so in total. Adventures come and go, but sand remains.

[GloatingSwine]

No, I don't bother with these things. I am now playing Scout/Sentinel, which I recently saw is considered the worst possible character, and I play the game on Hard. And it's still really easy.

The problem really is the Sentinel class hat is "good saves", but you basically get good saves anyway as a Jedi. So it doesn't matter what you took to combo into Sentinel, it's giving you something you don't really need. It's not a weak class it's just giving you not particularly relevant bonuses.

(IIRC The Jedi Sentinel wasn't in base SWD20)

Scout is a good starter though, especially if you hold your non-jedi level at 5. Scout 5/Guardian gets more feats than Soldier/Guardian due to getting two levels of Implant free which you're always going to take anyway and only pays 2 BAB and 10HP to do it (and when you're getting up to like +30 to hit that's not a huge deal).

[kraftcheese]

I always liked playing a consular myself (mostly because I'd always be disappointed if I missed out on dialogue options with another class).

[rooster707]

I always liked playing a consular myself (mostly because I'd always be disappointed if I missed out on dialogue options with another class).

Wait, Consular gets special dialogue options?

[Inarius]

Part 4A: Tatooine

I decided to go to Tatooine first, since it's my least favorite planet in Star Wars. It appears in pretty much every Star Wars game ever and aside from being Luke's homeworld and having Jabba's palace there really isn't anything interesting about it. It's original concept was to be bland and barren so Luke has all reason to want to leave. I don't like sand.

I definitely agree with this, Tatooine as a whole is just blah. It doesn't help that it keeps coming back and seems to find its way into nearly everything set in Star Wars.

I also feel it kind of defeats the purpose of Kotors setting. The idea was to distance the setting as far from the movies as possible so they can do whatever they wanted without having to worry about stepping on canon. The whole planet sort of feels like its on shaky ground because they went and explained how the Jawas got their sandcrawlers, what the planet used to look like and hinted at the origins of the Sandpeople.

[kraftcheese]

Wait, Consular gets special dialogue options?

Maybe I'm remembering wrong but I thought Consular was the charisma-based one?

On the subject of Tatooine, I remember enjoying it.....WITH the caveat that the last time I played KOTOR up to Tatooine was around the time the game was released when I was in grade or middle school.

[GloatingSwine]

Maybe I'm remembering wrong but I thought Consular was the charisma-based one?

Sort of.

Consular is the caster focused Jedi, and Charisma increases the DC to resist force powers so Charisma is useful for being a Consular.

All Jedi have Persuade as a class skill though, so you don't need to be a Consular to get enough persuade to get all the persuade options and Sentinel has the most skill points, but persuade is wacky in KOTOR because the DC for doing it scales with character level, so a few points at the start will become useless if you don't keep investing every level.

If you want to be really persuasive it's the Scoundrel starting class you want, because they're the only non-Jedi that has it as a class skill. (Also Scoundrel/Guardian is hilarious ambush monster because you can use force leap onto unaware enemies and get your sneak attack bonus).

[Yora]

Maybe I'm remembering wrong but I thought Consular was the charisma-based one?

On the subject of Tatooine, I remember enjoying it.....WITH the caveat that the last time I played KOTOR up to Tatooine was around the time the game was released when I was in grade or middle school.

I also don't remember feeling that disappointed by it as I did now.

[kraftcheese]

I also don't remember feeling that disappointed by it as I did now.

I guess it's rose-coloured glasses, huh?

[Yora]

No, I never had any positive memories of that one.

Part 4B: Kashyyyk

This is a pretty solid and quite good planet. As always, it looks great. It looks very much like the image I got from the description in the Thrawn books. The shadowlands on the surface are decent, but the tree village is really quite pretty, though a bit sparse because of the game's limitations. The story here with Zalbaar's brother and father is servicable, but if you look at it objectively it's really pretty awful writing that is easily surpassed by a lot of fan fiction from 16 year olds. It's all so obvious and cut-out. Quests aren't great either. Again, it's really just walking down all the possible paths, picking up everything that is lying around, and giving quest items to NPCs on your way back.
Length seems okay. I think it took me about 4 hours in toital.

The atmosphere here is right, which really is the strong suit of the entire game. And I think by 2003 standards this was actually pretty high end quality as RPGs go. But this really shows how much games have come in the years since. By todays standards I would have to say that the gameplay and level design here is garbage. From what I remember, Jade Empire, which was BioWare's next game, didn't do much better but they made a huge leap forward with Mass Effect. Compared to ME2 and ME3, the first game was still pretty rough, but still miles ahead of KotOR and JE.

I've got Jolee to my party and he seems alright. He's not a fan of the Jedi though he obviously was trained as one and I think I'm going to take him along for a while to see more of his dialogs. I believe he's really the origin of the whole Gray Jedi concept that seems to have become quite popular in recent years. KotOR was released 13 months after Attack of the Clones and the Gray Jedi philosophy seems in many ways to be a response to much of the nonsense ideology spilled by the Jedi Council. The Gray Jedi way seems like an approach to make the Force more attractive and heroic to audiences without negating what the Jedi said in Episode 2 by making them seem misguided. And not only does it seem to work and make sense of Episode 2 and 3, it also appears to fit nicely with Episode 7 and the title "The Last Jedi". But more on that once I've gone through all of Jolee's dialogs and played through Korriban.

One thing that very much surprised me is that I got Dark Side points for telling the computer guarding the star map the answers it wants to hear to make me sound like a Sith Lord. Wasn't the whole point to fool it into thinking I am Revan? Then why do I get Dark Side points for lying to a computer? That seems stupid.

[The Glyphstone]

You still spoke lies. The Force is nothing if not mindlessly dogmatic to the principles of what is 'good' and 'evil', and I guess lying is Always Evil No Matter What.

[AvatarVecna]

You still spoke lies. The Force is nothing if not mindlessly dogmatic to the principles of what is 'good' and 'evil', and I guess lying is Always Evil No Matter What.

The game doesn't assume you're lying, it assumes you're answering the questions truthfully; if a dialogue option is intended to be a lie in-universe, it comes with a little [Lie] at the beginning of the dialogue option, the same way that some options will start with [Persuade] or [Force Persuade] or what have you. When you give the computer the answer of "I'd be an evil ******* who sacrifices a city of people for the tactical advantage" or "I'd sell out my buddy because trust is for suckers", you might be choosing the options you think the computer wants to hear, but you're also selecting the answers your character actually "believes" in.

Incidentally, if you're a goody-two-shoes who trusts Zaalbar and won't sacrifice the city, the computer sends robots to kill you for being an imposter, and once you kill the robots, the computer lets you in anyway, so lying to the computer about how Sithy you are doesn't grant you any better access to the computer than you'd have going light side.

EDIT: This makes telling the computer what it wants to hear the "quick and easy" path, as it happens. Sure, when nobody's looking, you can pretend to be a Sith Lord to fool the computer, but if you could accomplish the same thing with a bit more effort without even pretending to sacrifice your principles, shouldn't you?

EDIT: A good comparison would be to go to Korriban and lie your ass off to Vice Principal Whatsherface about how badly you wanna be an edgelord Sith initiate, and see if you get Dark Side points for lying to them about wanting to be back in black.

[Caelestion]

Yuthura Ban.

[AvatarVecna]

I've got Jolee to my party and he seems alright. He's not a fan of the Jedi though he obviously was trained as one and I think I'm going to take him along for a while to see more of his dialogs. I believe he's really the origin of the whole Gray Jedi concept that seems to have become quite popular in recent years. KotOR was released 13 months after Attack of the Clones and the Gray Jedi philosophy seems in many ways to be a response to much of the nonsense ideology spilled by the Jedi Council. The Gray Jedi way seems like an approach to make the Force more attractive and heroic to audiences without negating what the Jedi said in Episode 2 by making them seem misguided. And not only does it seem to work and make sense of Episode 2 and 3, it also appears to fit nicely with Episode 7 and the title "The Last Jedi". But more on that once I've gone through all of Jolee's dialogs and played through Korriban.

Oh yeah, almost forgot about this BS. Yeah, some of the Jedi stuff in this game is more in line with the movie Jedi than the by-the-lore Jedi of the time. Jedi marrying people, in this time period, wasn't a big deal, but is made out to be a big deal in both KotOR 1 and 2. IIRC Jolee was trying to tap Sith booty, so that might've been a bigger deal than regular marriage, but my recollection was that marriage at all was frowned upon in the games even though Jedi marrying wasn't an issue at the time lore-wise. I dunno, maybe it's just one of those weird discrepancies you're not supposed to think about, like whether Master Vandar is proof that Yoda has a speech disability.

[rooster707]

One thing that very much surprised me is that I got Dark Side points for telling the computer guarding the star map the answers it wants to hear to make me sound like a Sith Lord. Wasn't the whole point to fool it into thinking I am Revan? Then why do I get Dark Side points for lying to a computer? That seems stupid.

IIRC, it said it was scanning your brainwaves or something to see if you're being honest? So if it can tell when you're lying, I guess there's no reason to give you the option to. Or something like that.

[Nerd-o-rama]

You still spoke lies. The Force is nothing if not mindlessly dogmatic to the principles of what is 'good' and 'evil', and I guess lying is Always Evil No Matter What.

Lies, or truths from a certain point of view?

(No one in Star Wars has ever equated lying with the Dark Side, although successful Dark Siders are usually pretty deceptive. It's black and white about some weird things but lying isn't one of them).

Also it's kind of remarkable how anachronistic KOTOR is about the whole Jedi Marriage thing in trying to align itself with the prequels, considering not only that the canon-at-the-time Tales of the Jedi comics prominently featured the very married-with-children Nomi Sunrider as one of its main characters, but also that prior to a poorly explain legal snafu, Nomi's daughter Vima was going to appear in KOTOR in Bastila's role. Aka the most plot-important NPC in your party, spoilers. There's a lot of worldbuilding stuff in KOTOR that would have made a lot more sense 40 years before the film than it does 4000, but that's near the top of the list of weirdness.

Oh and going back to the Jedi Code since I'm on this subject: Bioware didn't invent the term "Jedi Code", but they did come up with that little five-line poem version, which I rather like as a summary of Jedi philosophy even if it's still reductionist and can be misapplied, especially "there is no emotion, there is peace". Like, that's an impossible oversimplification, it's just way snappier than "don't let your emotions guide you but instead approach existence with a calm, rational heart". The difference between which is, ultimately, what trips up most fallen Jedi, up to and including Anakin Skywalker, so actually maybe the poem is kind of crap now that I think about it.

[Ebon_Drake]

IIRC, it said it was scanning your brainwaves or something to see if you're being honest? So if it can tell when you're lying, I guess there's no reason to give you the option to. Or something like that.

Yeah, I remember it the same way. It wasn't just listening to your responses, they had to be your genuine thoughts in order for it to recognise them as matching Revan's thoughts. Lying to it would give different brain patterns or something. If you fail that test, it sends robots to fight you and then gives you access after seeing how your brainwaves work during combat.

On the whole Jedi lying thing in general, IIRC the game only gives you dark side points if you're specifically doing it for petty or malicious reasons like constantly using the mind trick to get out of paying space port fees. I don't think it gives you dark side points for most of the lies on Korriban, except for the ones that are malicious or petty.

Oh and going back to the Jedi Code since I'm on this subject: Bioware didn't invent the term "Jedi Code", but they did come up with that little five-line poem version, which I rather like as a summary of Jedi philosophy even if it's still reductionist and can be misapplied, especially "there is no emotion, there is peace". Like, that's an impossible oversimplification, it's just way snappier than "don't let your emotions guide you but instead approach existence with a calm, rational heart". The difference between which is, ultimately, what trips up most fallen Jedi, up to and including Anakin Skywalker, so actually maybe the poem is kind of crap now that I think about it.

The game's Jedi Code didn't really do much for me, but its Sith Code is cool as heck.

[Nerd-o-rama]

Yeah this game's Jedi Code and Sith Code work terrifically as a contrasting pair, honestly. The Sith Code in particular gives a very plausible Dark Side ethos that's still intensely centered around the accumulation of power for the self in a way that's almost, but not quite, Nietzschean will-to-power. The Jedi Code is passive, aspirational statements, the Sith Code is dynamic and positive-sounding declarations about what I can get out of the Universe. It's great.

[Kish]

You cannot "fool" anyone into thinking that you're who you are, that doesn't make any sense.

I remember reading somewhere that the SWTOR-era Jedi code is a corruption of the original, which was:
Emotion, yet peace.
Ignorance, yet knowledge.
Passion, yet serenity.
Chaos, yet harmony.
Death, yet the Force.