A Jedi is never alone – Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

**Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic** (Bioware/LucasArts, Xbox, 2003)

Bioware were reportedly offered a choice between making an RPG based on the Star Wars prequels or one based in a different period: an even longer time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Was there ever any real question which they would go for? For a developer coming in off the back of Baldur’s Gate and whose website to this day promises “rich stories, unforgettable characters and vast worlds to discover”, the opportunity to define something new in the Star Wars world was surely irresistible.

For all that Bioware were staking their own ground with Knights of the Old Republic, it was very much the Star Wars brand that helped it to chart-topping success, like so many Star Wars games before it. Outside of the two spectacular exceptions of Final Fantasy and Pokémon, RPGs were not generally chart-dominating material and never really had been. It was released on the Xbox console, which was getting Microsoft a useful foothold in the games market but hadn’t played host to a single #1 in . But just like Star Wars was able to weave its magic to get a Nintendo 64 flight sim to Super Chart Island, it could do the same here.

From LucasArts and Microsoft’s side it’s easy to see the appeal of taking an approach that worked on PC and trying to make it work for a bigger audience including on the console that was already closest to the PC. That’s what Bioware successfully did, although my first impression was of how startlingly unfriendly Knights of the Old Republic is to the uninitiated. I haven’t played table-top RPGs since a brief childhood encounter with the simplified Sorcerer’s Cave, and KotOR makes its origins in that world all too clear.

It’s the kind of game that throws phrases at you like “Vitality Points (VP) denote character health”. Denote! In combat explanations there are numerous references to rolls, with the mechanics of virtual dice poking through to the surface. And the game involves juggling a vast inventory of items and equipment whose uses are not exactly readily apparent. It comes as no surprise when the intro level throws in a background light saber fight just to keep up interest while it throws all of its mind-boggling detail at you.

Bioware actually did a very good job of simplifying combat in practice though, coming up with a mostly automated turn based system that usually lets you forget the mechanics and see the spectacle without too many seams showing. Even for boss battles there is a lot of loading your characters up with enhancements, pointing them at the enemy and then finding it’s over before you know it, but the chaotic rush of beam blasts in between feels more like a Star Wars fight than a couple of people rolling dice. And the combat is really not the centrepiece to this game, even more so than for most RPGs.

Instead, the centrepiece is… well, there isn’t really one, and that’s the point. There’s an epic story, but as invested as you are intended to be in that, there’s an obvious expectation that you should be invested in just exploring the world, picking up stuff, talking to people, and doing odd little jobs for the reward of experience. Want to spend time playing cards? No problem! And if helping someone do a dance audition and gaining some experience points that improve your combat skills makes little more sense than the growth mechanics in Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness, it doesn’t matter because it’s both a lot more charming, and a smaller detail of the game.

The most surprising success of KotOR, as a newcomer and not a massive Star Wars fan, was that it sold me on player-created character in a way which later Bioware games I’ve played didn’t. The Star Wars setting means that instead of chaotic evil, true neutral and all that, you get a simpler light side/dark side duality. This approach would later prove a bit of a plague, but it works well in KotOR. First, its dark side options tend to involve not just being a bit of a dick but getting notable advantages in terms of your time — a resource which I guard particularly closely. If I don’t have to spend the time saving up 2,000 credits because I can just use someone powerful as a threat instead, that really is quite the temptation. It also works because the game’s late plot twist makes for a compelling and consistent resolution whichever side you end up taking.
Knights of the Old Republic never quite shakes off the awkwardness of competing instincts to retain the complexity of its game origins or to simplify them, its own unresolved light/dark duality. It did, though, manage to refresh a fictional universe at a time when it needed it, and work as another demonstration of the ability of games to tell stories through filling in a world of details around you.

The attempts at freedom aren’t wholly convincing when you get a bit under the surface and realise how much of it is on rails; how much there is only one route through to what you need. And the control goes further. If you don’t talk to your party members for a while then you get prodded into conversations, lighthearted intervals on a schedule. Some of those conversations are a joy though, and the willingness to mix tones like nothing since Metal Gear Solid helps to bring the world to life. Bits like Jedi party member Bastila using the Force to trip up another companion when she got annoying, and said companion Mission Vao describing her brother’s girlfriend as an ’intergalactic skank’ were some of my favourite moments when playing. The systems never line up completely smoothly, but suspension of disbelief isn’t tested any more than the baseline for games.