STAR WARS™: Knights of the Old Republic

I approached this game doubting if I could ever appreciate it considering its age, and considering the fact I was playing on some tiny laptop instead of on a nice desktop PC monitor, but was pleasantly surprised. The game drew me in right from the beginning with classic Bioware storytelling magic, great music, entertaining dialog options, and great storytelling. That said, it is not without flaws. Unlike Bioware classics like Neverwinter Nights, buffing spells tend to have an annoyingly short duration, meaning if you want to play a character that casts buffing spells to augment their combat prowess, you will generally need to recast all of those spells every time you move on to the next room of the games dungeons.. I found this aspect of the game tedious. One other criticism I have for this game is that there is a lack of shades of grey in the storytelling. There is the light side and the dark side, and the villains were almost cartoonishly villainous at times. But I guess it's Star Wars, so what should I expect? Still a good story (for a Star Wars game). The game also had a slight political bent some may find irritating, but it's not as bad as Mass Effect: Andromeda in that regard. I found the politics of the original Mass Effect trilogy much more neutral and appealing, personally. This game had some fun side activities like dueling matches in the Hutts' arenas for prize winnings, and some of the dialog and role-playing interactions with NPCs can be hilarious and fun, particularly for those playing a dark side character. For those familiar with the original Mass Effect trilogy, that is pretty much what you are getting here -- except this game takes place in the Star Wars universe instead of the Mass Effect universe. But the storytelling, gameplay, dialog, etc is all very similar. If you enjoyed the Mass Effect games, you should definitely play Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

Imagine my surprise that it is unplayable on modern systems no matter what I do. Would have been nice to get a heads up from GoG before I bought it. Black screens no matter what I try...just awesome.

Classic game with interesting well written characters, great quests, great art direction and atmosphere, etc... For those wondering why we dont receive games like this anymore 1) 99.9% of games today are not made by passionate artists, they are made with market research teams, which means that a bunch of passionless non gamers are paid to create graphs of data on the latest gaming trends that they then force on the developers in order to attempt to guarantee success. Artists ran the game studios in the 90s/2000s, but now genuine creativity has been pushed aside for the fear of being unsuccessful, even though most of these passionless trend data games are often unsuccessful because of how generic they are. 2) Lack of independent thinking among consumers has led to gaming journalists becoming way to influencial despite having objectively corrupt opinions on video games. These companies were never very good at reviewing games, but nowadays they are just complete frauds who care mostly about the politics and ideology of a game and its devs rather than how genuinely fun and creative a game is. Game studios today feel like they need to pander to these frauds in order to achieve a high score that will boost sales. 3) Improvement in graphics has led to game studios not focusing on core gameplay and are often trying to trick consumers into buying games solely on graphics, often at the behest of the publishers. Almost no game today is marketed on gameplay innovation like they did in the 90s/2000s, it is always "look how pretty this game we made is, but please ignore how generic the gameplay, art direction, characters, quests, and everything else is". Corporations really want consumers to prefer graphics over content, because then they can assemply line that crap out very quickly, which is what many franchises have been doing for years now. There are many more problems with modern game design than just this, but these are some of the main issues.

I played this when it first came out on the xbox it was literally why I bought an xbox. It is one of my greatest games played. HOWEVER I bought the game on gog and wanted to share the experience with my kids however nothing I could do could get it to work I followed all the gog troubleshooting looked on reddit for solutions. But what I did find in the install files was the troubleshooting for the game and it specifically states this game requires Windows XP and earlier. I tried compatibility mode nothing works I tried installing on different laptops and there is always a problem; one wont start while another gets 1 hour in and then constantly crashing. Another has permanent small window. It's sad to see this great game get terrible treatment, if crashes ever get fixed definately buy it, but until then dont waste your money.

It's been over a decade since Knights of the Old Republic was released, and I can honestly say that in my opinion, I don't believe a better RPG has been released since - though some have come very close. KOTOR is what every RPG should strive to be. A compelling story, right from the start - interesting (and occasionally hilarious) companions, a variety of visually distinct locations, excellent gameplay, and a very diverse character development system. It has one of the best plot twists in video game history midway through the game, and HK-47 is hilarious as a murderous Minsc-like stand-in. There are a few flaws; occasionally my character would get stuck in the terrain, usually necessitating a reload. Fortunately these were fairly rare, and the auto-save feature generally prevented me from losing too much progress. There were a few other bugs, but nothing that stands out in my memory at the moment. A few gameplay mechanics caused problems - most notably, your character doesn't begin the game as a Jedi, and there's a level limit of, if memory serves, 20. This means that on the first planet, if you do everything possible and continue to level up, your later progress as a Jedi is limited. Fortunately, leveling up is triggered manually with enough experience; after level 2 (which the tutorial forces you to take), you can simply wait to 'trigger' levels until after your Jedi training, though this understandably increases the difficulty in the early game. These minor problems aside, I strongly recommend this game to any RPG fan - even if you don't care for, or even like, the Star Wars setting. While it's true that Star Wars fans are bound to have a greater appreciation for the setting, KOTOR's RPG mechanics and storytelling are so successful that any fan of the genre is almost guaranteed to enjoy it.