Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (2003)

Think I picked this up about a year after its release. Most likely on sale or when it hit the bargain bin. It took about 30hrs total with 1/2 that around the time I got it and the rest recently when I finally went back to finish it. It was a decent enough RPG and a good SW game.


Story was decent enough and gameplay was fine. Its always fun to use sabers, force powers and blasters on the mobs of enemies. I played through on the light side but did pick some dark side approaches, but in the end was still more of a good guy then bad. I know many have replayed it multiple times to see the good and bad endings but I don't feel like playing it again at this time. Maybe some other day but probably not.


While I did like it since it was more scifi than traditional RPGs, it still felt like I was just playing a D&D style game with the Force instead of magic. While there were blasters and rifles, the engine didn't seem built well for ranged combat. I normally had 2 melee people and 1 guy hanging a bit back with blasters but felt the ranged combat was lacking. I always felt too zoomed into the combat for ranged to work well. I think NWN even did it better since I can zoom in or out as I wanted. The last level was also a respawning grindfest.


Even the with a melee/force focus, I think I prefer NWN and its many modules. While that engine is older, I felt like I had more control over the combat vs Kotor. The ability to zoom out in NWN allowed for ranged combat to work better. I also had issues with the path finding during combat as my people would get stuck in close quarters and waste time trying to get to the enemy. I also got tired of opening boxes and remains just because of the slow animation. Though this is games in general since other RPGs I would be bashing barrels but it just seemed slow here.


A little bit better ranged combat by having a more open/zoomable field would have helped my enjoyment. While the dialogue was good it was nothing that could not have been done in NWN1 though Kotor did look prettier. While I enjoyed it I think I'll stick to the Jedi Knight FPS games (Due for a replay) instead of replaying this and I already know to avoid Kotor2.

I only used a few mods during my gameplay as I hated the ship shooter parts. The mouse control was horrible so after suffering through the first few encounters I got some mods to remove that mini-game. I used this link to get kitty kitty's no_fighters.zip and also the no_turrets_after_leviathan.zip from tk102's posts.