Star Wars - Knights of the Old Republic

I'm still on holidays, connected to the world only by a 56K dial-up modem, which obviously makes playing most MMORPG impossible. On the positive side, I just bought a new PC: Athlon XP 3000+, 1 GB of DDR400 RAM, and a ATI Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card. The machine scores 5550 points on the graphics benchmark 3DMark 03, which is about twice as much as my previous PC. A real nice gaming rig. Just the machine to play some pretty 3D games on: Star Wars - Knights of the Old Republic (SWKotor or Kotor for short).

SWKotor is an excellent single-player role playing game running on PC or XBox. It plays 4000 years before the Star Wars movies, but the situation is similar: The Republic is fighting against an onslaught of Sith, headed by a dark Jedi lord named Darth Malak. You start the game as a fresh recruit for the republic, having the choice between 3 character classes: soldier, Scoundrel, or Scout. About one third into the game, you become a Jedi, where you again have the choice between 3 different Jedi classes. The game uses the d20 rules system from WotC, which is the same system that 3rd edition D&D (they stopped calling it AD&D) is based on, just with the skills adapted to the Star Wars settings.

The story is fairly linear, with a couple of subquests, but in most situations you have the choice on how to approach it. For example a woman asks you to help her, because the evil crime lord has put a bounty on her head; you can either help her, ignore her, or kill her and cash in the bounty. For good actions you get "Light side" points, and for evil actions "Dark side" points. Those cancel each other out, so you probably want to collect only Light side or only Dark side points, ending you as a Light side or a Dark side Jedi, with different powers.

Combat is pseudo real-time, but is handled in combat rounds in the background. With the help of auto-pause settings you can switch between a combat mode that feels very much like real-time, a combat mode that is totally turn-based, and a default intermediate setting, where the automatic pause only occurs at the start of the combat. That is an excellent way to handle it, as different players prefer different styles of combat, and this one makes everybody happy. Besides normal attacks by sword, blaster, or light saber, you can start special attacks, use Jedi forces, or use items like grenades or med pacs in combat.

Graphics are great. On my new PC I was able to play with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering turned on, which made graphics even better, while still running very smoothly. Kotor is relatively bug free, with the 1.03 patch. I experienced some crashes related to the auto-save when zoning. But as these crashes occur AFTER the auto-save, and only catapult you back to the Windows desk top, recovery is rather painless.

SWKotor is so much fun, I can't help but compare it to the much less fun Star Wars Galaxies. Kotor gives the player what he wants: Playing a Jedi. SWG is built upon the pseudo-argument of "We can't have everybody running around as Jedi". Well, why not? It is not any more illogical than having a fantasy world like EQ in which everybody is a mighty adventurer, or having everybody in CoH being a super hero. Playing a hair dresser in SWG is just not as popular as playing a Jedi.

Single player games like Kotor motivate the player by giving him a sense of purpose with the story line, and by having him advance relatively quickly. Who says that this is incompatible with a MMORPG? Final Fantasy XI showed that a MMORPG can have a story line, by offering special quests every couple of levels. City of Heroes showed that level 1 players could already feel powerful, if you don't force them to kill bunnies. And the general trend from EQ to now is that leveling is getting faster. There is probably a hard core market for a game where reaching the highest level takes 1000+ hours, but the average player would be a lot more attracted by a game where reaching the highest level takes not more than 200 hours. And I don't think that all those people would stop playing after reaching the highest level, as long as they can create new characters of different classes, different races, and hopefully with a different story line. Keep your players by offering them lots of fun, and not by making reaching any goal tediously long, now that would be a new concept for MMORPG.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:06 AM Permanent Link