I am not exactly sure what is going on, but I have been on this single player game kick. It sometimes happens over the Holiday break and then continues forward into the next year. I went on a bit of this last year playing through several of the titles by Spiders, the game studio behind Greedfall and a number of “Bioware-like” titles. I’ve talked about bouncing off of Dragon Age Inquisition and the joy of revisiting that game and finally latching onto it. Similarly I bounced off of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords back when it came out on PC late 2004. There were of course a number of reasons why I bounced, not the least of which was the fact that World of Warcraft had just released. On top of that there was also the suicide death of my nephew that we were contending with. I know at some point I gave the game an attempt at playing it, but ran into a number of technical difficulties that I never quite pushed through. Similarly when a re-release happened on Steam in 2012 I once again gave it an attempt at playing but kept running into technical problems. We scan forward to now and a dozen unofficial addons later, and I am now successfully playing and engaged with the sequel to one of my favorite games.

Another reason I was super interested in playing KOTOR2 is the pedigree of it coming from Obsidian. This is the same studio that created my beloved Fallout New Vegas which was a very similar scenario of them working within a pre-established IP. However I had forgotten that they also created Neverwinter Nights 2 between these two games, a game that I so thoroughly bounced off for both mechanical and narrative reasons. So I went into this game hoping for hidden greatness, but what I am ultimate finding is lightly messy “goodness”. This is another game that had a fraught development life cycle and a number of things were left on the cutting room floor that have been since restored by fans of the game. The key problem I am having as I play through it is that the game as a whole is missing the clear call to action that Knights of the Old Republic had. Each planet in that game lead you to the next planet in sequence and there was a sense of urgency in your actions because you were trying to beat another group to the chase. In KOTOR2 you have some vague threats and a galaxy that has more or less forgotten that the Jedi were ever a force for good and see them as destroying the galaxy in some fool crusade. You have a few evil forces working against you, but there is no clear path forward other than “maybe find some other Jedi”.

The other challenge that this game has against it is that it takes a really long time to get into what feels like the normal flow of the story. The game starts with you taking control of a droid and attempting to save the Ebon Hawk, the ship from the first KOTOR. This sequence plays out fairly slowly and acts as a prologue, which is skippable. Then you become stranded on the Peragus mining facility and finally take control of your primary character throughout the game. This effectively ends up being prologue 1.5 and it is very much not skippable and the actions taken within this section start to have some weight applied to them. Finally if you make your want through Peragus you gain control of the Ebon Hawk once again… only to immediately lose it as soon as you dock with the Citadel Station at Telos. Surprise surprise your first “planet” is a space station where you are under House Arrest. This serves as the “tutorial planet” where you have to determine which of the factions you are going to support in order to finally go on a mission to reclaim your ship. Which leads you to finally encountering your first plot point in the form of the individuals that seem to have stolen your ship and indirectly send you out on a mission to find other Jedi. I am being purposefully vague here because plot points happen, but also they happen in a way that ultimately feels bad.

So I presently find myself in this uncanny valley of enjoying myself, but also at the same time admitting that Knights of the Old Republic II is not exactly what I would consider to be a good game. There are moments of greatness, but the tapestry that is woven has giant chunks that went horribly wrong. Granted I do realize that we have not arrived on the Bioware formula with this game that ultimately lead to things like Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Star Wars the Old Republic MMO. KOTOR and KOTOR2 are the prototype upon which those games were built, and KOTOR2 specifically seems to be trying to do some interesting things that are mostly landing flat. This however is the challenge of spelunking into the backlog and pulling out a game that is at this over fifteen years old. Normally the thing I struggle with these older games is when the mechanics of gaming has evolved in a different direction than what was the standard at the time. This however is not really a problem with KOTOR2 because it does a good enough job of mouse look once you invert the Y axis. What I am struggling with instead is that this game comes from an era when the plot lines were not so emphasized and things just sort of evolved as you progressed through taskwork. KOTOR2 struggles with this more than its predecessor, but I am now engaged and committed to seeing this through. Like I said I am enjoying myself and I am enjoying the character development, but also it seems to be just dumping large amounts of exposition on me that I don’t necessarily feel like I have earned yet. Obsidian had some really interesting ideas and I am glad that they used this game to polish those ideas so that we ultimately got Fallout New Vegas, but this game is a bit of a challenge. I see why I ultimately bounced off when I was nowhere near as focused as I am currently. The post Lacking Plot Urgency appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

I am not exactly sure what is going on, but I have been on this single player game kick. It sometimes happens over the Holiday break and then continues forward into the next year. I went on a bit of this last year playing through several of the titles by Spiders, the game studio behind Greedfall and a number of “Bioware-like” titles. I’ve talked about bouncing off of Dragon Age Inquisition and the joy of revisiting that game and finally latching onto it. Similarly I bounced off of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords back when it came out on PC late 2004. There were of course a number of reasons why I bounced, not the least of which was the fact that World of Warcraft had just released. On top of that there was also the suicide death of my nephew that we were contending with. I know at some point I gave the game an attempt at playing it, but ran into a number of technical difficulties that I never quite pushed through. Similarly when a re-release happened on Steam in 2012 I once again gave it an attempt at playing but kept running into technical problems. We scan forward to now and a dozen unofficial addons later, and I am now successfully playing and engaged with the sequel to one of my favorite games.

Another reason I was super interested in playing KOTOR2 is the pedigree of it coming from Obsidian. This is the same studio that created my beloved Fallout New Vegas which was a very similar scenario of them working within a pre-established IP. However I had forgotten that they also created Neverwinter Nights 2 between these two games, a game that I so thoroughly bounced off for both mechanical and narrative reasons. So I went into this game hoping for hidden greatness, but what I am ultimate finding is lightly messy “goodness”. This is another game that had a fraught development life cycle and a number of things were left on the cutting room floor that have been since restored by fans of the game. The key problem I am having as I play through it is that the game as a whole is missing the clear call to action that Knights of the Old Republic had. Each planet in that game lead you to the next planet in sequence and there was a sense of urgency in your actions because you were trying to beat another group to the chase. In KOTOR2 you have some vague threats and a galaxy that has more or less forgotten that the Jedi were ever a force for good and see them as destroying the galaxy in some fool crusade. You have a few evil forces working against you, but there is no clear path forward other than “maybe find some other Jedi”.

The other challenge that this game has against it is that it takes a really long time to get into what feels like the normal flow of the story. The game starts with you taking control of a droid and attempting to save the Ebon Hawk, the ship from the first KOTOR. This sequence plays out fairly slowly and acts as a prologue, which is skippable. Then you become stranded on the Peragus mining facility and finally take control of your primary character throughout the game. This effectively ends up being prologue 1.5 and it is very much not skippable and the actions taken within this section start to have some weight applied to them. Finally if you make your want through Peragus you gain control of the Ebon Hawk once again… only to immediately lose it as soon as you dock with the Citadel Station at Telos. Surprise surprise your first “planet” is a space station where you are under House Arrest. This serves as the “tutorial planet” where you have to determine which of the factions you are going to support in order to finally go on a mission to reclaim your ship. Which leads you to finally encountering your first plot point in the form of the individuals that seem to have stolen your ship and indirectly send you out on a mission to find other Jedi. I am being purposefully vague here because plot points happen, but also they happen in a way that ultimately feels bad.

So I presently find myself in this uncanny valley of enjoying myself, but also at the same time admitting that Knights of the Old Republic II is not exactly what I would consider to be a good game. There are moments of greatness, but the tapestry that is woven has giant chunks that went horribly wrong. Granted I do realize that we have not arrived on the Bioware formula with this game that ultimately lead to things like Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Star Wars the Old Republic MMO. KOTOR and KOTOR2 are the prototype upon which those games were built, and KOTOR2 specifically seems to be trying to do some interesting things that are mostly landing flat. This however is the challenge of spelunking into the backlog and pulling out a game that is at this over fifteen years old. Normally the thing I struggle with these older games is when the mechanics of gaming has evolved in a different direction than what was the standard at the time. This however is not really a problem with KOTOR2 because it does a good enough job of mouse look once you invert the Y axis. What I am struggling with instead is that this game comes from an era when the plot lines were not so emphasized and things just sort of evolved as you progressed through taskwork. KOTOR2 struggles with this more than its predecessor, but I am now engaged and committed to seeing this through. Like I said I am enjoying myself and I am enjoying the character development, but also it seems to be just dumping large amounts of exposition on me that I don’t necessarily feel like I have earned yet. Obsidian had some really interesting ideas and I am glad that they used this game to polish those ideas so that we ultimately got Fallout New Vegas, but this game is a bit of a challenge. I see why I ultimately bounced off when I was nowhere near as focused as I am currently. The post Lacking Plot Urgency appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.