KOTOR Wrapup

I was up till 3:30 last night finishing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, playing through till I’d gotten both the Jedi and Sith endings. My final impression? KOTOR is, as I said early on, two games in different genres that go together about as well as chocolate and broccoli.

One game, the  “series of interesting choices” as Sid Meier defines games, is the branching narrative of the Republic officer who awakens on a warship under attack, and is faced at every turn with a series of character-defining decisions, steadily escalating until the fate of the galaxy truly hangs in the balance.

The other is a “kill stuff, level up, get better gear, kill more stuff” RPG.

RPG as roadblock to the story game

You can play the RPG and pay minimal attention to the moral-choices game, just clicking through dialog choices to get on with the action. The character game isn’t an obstacle to RPG play at any time, and can be seen by game-mechanics literalists as just a particularly slow and verbose way of selecting talent trees for your player character. That’s certainly not the way I played it, but I get the sense that a lot of hardcore gamers, and academic game analysts, particularly in the ludology tradition, did.

You can’t, however, play the character game and just click through the RPG: the killing-stuff gameplay sets up roadblock after roadblock to the progress of the character game. It’s just bizarre from a design standpoint.

For example, take the final sequence of the game. Your party’s invaded the Sith Lord’s lair, and you have to fight your way through several levels of really tough lackeys to get to him. Great RPG play: the combat is challenging, well done, and forces some real tactical thinking (the walkthrough I’ve been resorting two has three different approaches to clearing one level).

But it has no effect at all on the character game, except to act as a roadblock.

The character game, stripped of spoilers, goes:  You infiltrate the lair, and fight your way through to someone you know. Do you kill them or persuade them to join you? If you kill them, overall victory against the Sith will be a lot harder, but you may fail to persuade – or you may just want the satisfaction of killing them. You then fight your way through to the Sith Lord. No matter what choices you’ve made along the way, you have to defeat him to end the game.

So, none of the RPG fighting changes anything in there. And the only change it has on the boss fight is, you might have used up too many resources on the henchmen to survive the final battle (as I did my first play through).

Your only choices are fail, re-fight, or proceed as if the trash-mob and mini-boss fights hadn’t been there at all.

I would have loved “KOTOR the character game” immensely. I’d even have enjoyed “KOTOR the RPG.” Together, the games were a constantly frustrating series of pointless obstacles:  “I can’t proceed with the game till I plug in a mouse and shoot down space fighters.” “I can’t proceed with the character game till I clear a level of droids with flamethrowers.”

The consequence was that I ended up bypassing almost all the optional questlines and activities, most of which I would have enjoyed, because I felt I’d wasted so much time on the random roadblocks.

The story game: choice constrained?

I’ve written about choice constraints in the story game, and did a pretty good presentation for Alice Robison’s class on it. There definitely were points where I felt the designer’s concept of options was so limiting as to be immersion-breaking and immensely annoying. However, overall, I feel that I got to express myself pretty well as my “projective identity,” to use Jim Gee’s term.

The choices I had were a pretty good reflection of morality and faction politics in the Star Wars universe, though the extremes of pocket-emptying charity and mustache-twirling villainy often provided gross over-simplifications.

I did want one option that wasn’t open to me, and my Sith play-through in the middle of the night was an attempt to approximate it. I found myself wanting to be the Sith Gorbachev, to be a Light ruler over the Dark forces the way a couple members of the Jedi Council were pretty Dark rulers over the Light side. The branching structure didn’t permit it, but came close enough to let me roleplay it out in my head in a series of endgame choices

An unethical game?

Overall, I find Manuel Sicart’s conclusion that KOTOR is unethical per se as overstated as his similar conclusion about World of Warcraft based on an analysis of a badly-implemented early PvP patch. The character game could have been more nuanced, losing the cartooony moral extremes. The RPG game could have not penalized playing gray: there are powerful Light and Dark Force powers, but in the middle you can’t use the best of either.

I found the character game deeply engaging: I spent tens of hours thinking out my choices in particular situations (the Bendak’s Bounty quest would make a terrific law school final exam), dreamed several nights of my player character embedded in the story, and find the story I crafted through play as one of the very best Star Wars fictions.

The interaction between the two “games” in the game, and the fact that the RPG repeatedly threw up roadblocks to gameplay in the character game, was major, major fail, and would have led me to abandon the game early on had I not been playing it for a class. I’m glad I stuck with it, but that’s no credit to the designers, who served up a near-fatal problem for story-focused gamers.

Next up? Reading some KOTOR fanfic, now that I don’t have to avoid spoilers. And KOTOR II should arrive today: I want to see how a different studio handled the property (I know how badly it was bungled, but still), and I’m hooked enough into the story to want more.

Oh, and the volume of the KOTOR graphic novel compilations that I’d been missing came yesterday. Transmedia ftw!