KOTOR2 is an Interesting Mess

This is going to be a screenshot free post because I never could sort out how to actually take screenshots successfully with Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. I ultimately had to disable the Steam Overlay because it would cause me to lose access to the mouse randomly. If I took a screenshot with ShareX I would generally get either a black screen or the most recent loading or UI screen and not actually what was up on screen at the time when I pushed the button. I broke out some of my older screenshot options like DXTory and Fraps and they were similarly oblivious to the existence of this game. I even attempted to enable the in game screenshot functionality by editing the ini file and that did nothing either. This whole sequence is an allegory for what it is like to play Knights of the Old Republic II.

Yesterday I finished of KOTOR2 and I have to say it left me with one of the least satisfying endings I have experienced in awhile. Before anyone asks I did in fact play with TSLRCM (The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod) and M4-78EP (M4-78 Enhancement Project) both installed which supposedly restore items that were cut from the game before release and make bits of the story flow together better. So I believe I did in fact get the best possible experience I could have, but even with that the game is somewhat of a mess. Don’t get me wrong I am glad that I finally played through it and there are bits of detail outlined in this game that came up in SWTOR later that I was somewhat oblivious to. The game had some notorious development issues and if you are curious about some of that check out this long form review of the game.

I think more than anything the game suffered from an identity crisis. If you had told me that this was intended to be the further adventures of Revan until six months before release, I would have believed you. You play a character known as the “Jedi Exile” which for all intents and purposes COULD have been Revan, the character you play in the first game. You are a character that has had your connection with the force damaged, and you have officially been exiled by the Jedi Order for your “betrayal” of the Jedi Code. You followed Revan into battle against the Mandalorian forces and instead of following him on further into the Jedi Civil War, you returned to Dantooine to submit to the will of the council. Given that you were the only Jedi to do so… they were not really certain what to do with you and as such Exiled you.

This would have been a reasonable start of a game… playing out this sequence of events. However instead you start the game as T3-M4 from Knights of the Old Republic as you are attempting to keep the Ebon Hawk from falling apart. You are put through a sequence of events as you try and save the ship and land it safely on a mining colony. If you thought this was the tutorial for the game, you would be wrong… because while you can skip it… you then continue onwards to Peragus where you finally get control of the main character for the first time. Again you go through what feels like a sequence of tutorialization as you explore the colony where the robots have run amok and seemingly killed everyone. Upon solving those events you make your way to the nearby Citadel Station hovering over the dead world of Telos.

Immediately after landing on Telos your ship is put into impound and you are placed under house arrest, which now begins the THIRD tutorial section of the game. It is only after solving the events on the Citadel station that you finally regain control of your ship and can explore the galaxy freely. However what feels super odd about this process is that you are one hundred percent on rails for the first three sequences in the game and then suddenly are given free reign in a choose your own adventure style as to which of the planets that you want to tackle first. There is no call to action really, just some information that T3 deus ex machina’s his way into a list of last known locations for the members of the Jedi Council.

I mean in theory you are trying to recruit them to your cause because the Sith are real and they have returned to the galaxy and you are apparently being stalked by a Sith Zombie. However there is zero sense of urgency as you explore these worlds and find lost spanners and shit for the general populace that side note… now hates with much passion the Jedi order. I am not sure what order I should have done the worlds, but I started with Dantooine, thinking that this was the first planet that you visited in KOTOR after escaping Taris. In theory this was probably a good call even though you don’t actually pick up any new companions here. With companions in mind… it might have been a better call to go to Nar Shaddaa first given that you would encounter one of the last core companions earlier.

So getting back to the identity crisis. This game attempts at several points to teach you some lesson or pass some judgement upon you as the player. For example it does this whole sequence where it judges you for all of the combat that you engage in and how it doesn’t exactly align to the Jedi code. Then moments later those attempting to judge you decide that you have to die… forcing you once again into combat and diminishing the impact of what that message might have been. Additionally there is still the problem that the Jedi Exile is not sufficiently different from Revan as to make it seem like you are playing a unique character. Making it even worse is the fact that the character that serves as the narrator for the game… often draws parallels between the two of you.

I think Obsidian had some really interesting ideas, but those ideas did not add up to be a complete game. Instead they sort of applied Band-Aids and glue to join those ideas into something resembling a story. As a result while Knights of the Old Republic is this master class in narrative design and applying the correct amount of pressure at the correct time, the sequel just ends up being this mass of cool ideas assembled into a crude presentation of a game. In my mind I thought this game was released after Fallout New Vegas, but it turns out this is probably what they were working on just before they got the call to make a new Fallout game. Both games are trying to do some interesting and ambitious things, but I can only assume they learned from the mistakes with KOTOR2 in order to stick the landing with New Vegas.

Like I said earlier I do not regret that I played my way through this game. All told it took me around 40 hours to beat it. There are probably some side content that I missed along the way, but I also don’t really feel like much of the side content was meaningful in the way that a game like Witcher 3 makes it. This is a game that had been hanging out on my list that I was always curious about, and now that curiosity is sated. The Jedi Exile is also a character that appeared later in Star Wars the Old Republic and now that I have played this game I understand why so much of a big deal was made about her. Much like they made Revan male in the Canon, they made the Jedi Exile female and named her Meetra Surik. This feels a little odd but I understand it greatly simplifies talking about the characters in the future.

So here we are at the end of the post. Have you played KOTOR2? What were your thoughts? Drop me a line below and especially if I missed some great truth about the game.