KOTOR's Gameplay Sucks

[Soviet Heavy]

Hey, it's time for another deliberately inflammatory statement sure to rile up people's emotions while I hide behind the facade of an opinion! Cheers all around.

Anyways, I've never found either KOTOR's actual gameplay any good. It's basically an autopilot corridor slasher with some incredibly broken abilities thrown in. Flurry outright supplants your basic attack 99% of the time as a Guardian (the 1% being your force Jump ability), and 100% of the time as anything else. You get a defense penalty as a result, but your DPS triples if dual wielding and anything that might get a chance to hit you during the cooldown period is already dead.

The right lightsaber combinations can result in permanent stunning attacks, or a saber so powerful it one hit KOs any opponent.

Outside of the dialogue, the only other gameplay mechanics aside from the broken combat are the puzzles and the minigames, both of which are pathetically easy. The puzzles are just basic math and logic problems, with the option to skip them altogether being viable if you upgraded your computer or repair skills enough.

So what does that leave the games to stand on? Their story content, which thankfully makes up for the rote showing of everything else. And then it depends on what you prefer: a Prequel tale told properly and with the appropriate pomp and splendour with KOTOR1, or the cynical commentary on gameplay mechanics and the Star Wars universe's inherent madness in KOTOR 2.

It seems story can trump gameplay when it comes to RPGs.

Hurray for inciting debate!

Also, yes Captcha I do shop at Canadian Tire, will you leave me alone?

 

[Iyon]

Well, I'll spare you from debate, at least for a little while, and agree with you. This will actually be my third post today about not liking KoTOR's gameplay. If my roommate catches me making another post like this I may have to start fearing for my life...

Anyway, most of the gameplay seems to be based on building your character and the combat is essentially just dice rolls based on the stats. To me, that's just really boring. Especially since they don't really try to cover up the fact that it's just dice rolls. I find it ends up being a pseudo turn-based combat system that's not very enjoyable.

I like character building and I like strategy, but the best combat systems are able to combine these things into a system that's actually engaging and fun.

 

[Auron]

It's based on Star Wars D20 and it works perfectly in it's intent to emulate that, the same as NWN does with D&D. It's not meant to be some action game.

 

[Zhukov]

Eh, I thought the story was crummy as well. KOTOR was made back before Bioware had got the hang of spoken dialogue. Evil Bastilla in particular was just hilarious.

Although I suppose you can only do so much given the source material. "Come to the dark side, we have cookies!" "No! The light is stronger!" "Nu-uh, is not!" Yeah-huh, is so!"

KOTOR2 gets points for trying something a bit more sophisticated, but just came out a bit of a mess with no ending. Come to think of it, the gameplay wasn't improved either.

 

[Baldr]

I'm going to let you in on a secret. The game mechanics were not original to that game. They just copied the Star Wars D20 RPG ruleset. Looks like someone beat me to it.

TBH, I think Star Wars RPG is still one of the better D20 games out there.

 

[Sixcess]

Usually I'm a purist about older games - I don't like remakes or graphics upgrades etc as I like to experience a game as it was in its era. KotOR is the one exception to that rule in that I'd like to see a remake because I doubt I will ever get through it as it is.

Quite possibly it's just because I didn't play it at the time, so I've no nostalgia to blind me to its faults. The gameplay is clunky - but then again I could say the same about DA:O, SWTOR and to a lesser extent Mass Effect (ME2 improved that a lot.)

Does anyone actually play Bioware games for the actual gameplay?

 

[DustyDrB]

Man...I actually love it. I don't know what it is about that sort of in-between old school and new school RPG combat, but I really enjoy it.

 

[lucky_sharm]

I thought the gameplay in Dragon Age was alright. Definitely more tolerable than KOTOR's at any rate.

 

[chimeracreator]

Unfortunately the combat in it was largely just filler that existed to pad out the game's length by breaking up the plot. It's a shame really, but Bioware has never been good about tying plot directly to game play, but I suppose with KotR 1 and 2 they can at least claim that by the end you are really just the most badass person in the entire galaxy, so that mechanical outcome fits with the plot at least.

 

[BreakfastMan]

BG/d&d gave you a bunch of abilities that needed to be managed, the spell system had much more depth to it and they had some challenging battles which you had to figure out, kinda like a puzzle.

Just gotta say, about the spell system... Not, it did not have a deeper one. It just gave you a metric crap ton of spells, half of which were useless garbage anyway (touch spells can just go feck right off). All KOTOR did was cut the fat, removing the awful ones that no one ever used.

Also most of the battles in BGII (never played 1) could be won by simply summoning a bunch of monsters and flinging those at the enemy like cannon fodder, then have a mage spam AOE attacks and a ranger shooting everything that moves.

OT: I like the gameplay in the KOTOR series, myself. It felt like a nice middle ground between an action RPG and a tactical RPG, and I really enjoyed that. Sure, it was always unbalanced as hell, but that really isn't a knock against the actual gameplay itself, is it?

 

[CleverCover]

To be honest, I'm still not sure how the attacks worked beyond inputting some commands and hoping my characters survived. And grenade/mine spam. Lots of grenade/mine spam.

But the story was fucking epic and the twist shook me to the core and I had Carth and Mission and Zaalbar and HK-47. I didn't careeeeeeeeeeee.

Actually...maybe if I did know, I wouldn't have had such a painful time against Malak? Probably. Might try again one day. On PC so I can skip the Telos section. >.>

 

[BreakfastMan]

BG/d&d gave you a bunch of abilities that needed to be managed, the spell system had much more depth to it and they had some challenging battles which you had to figure out, kinda like a puzzle.

Just gotta say, about the spell system... Not, it did not have a deeper one. It just gave you a metric crap ton of spells, half of which were useless garbage anyway (touch spells can just go feck right off). All KOTOR did was cut the fat, removing the awful ones that no one ever used.

"removing the awful ones" huh ? LOL. KotOR didn't even have a spell system, PERIOD.

Funny, I could have sworn that the force power system was a direct analog to the typical spell system presented in most RPGs...

And sure there was some useless spells/abilities in BG (as is the case in pretty much all RPGs), but saying it's not deeper than KotoR, combat wise is just a nonsense. The mage vs mage/party vs party battles, the abundant variety of monsters with different attacks/resistances, preparing by taking potions/using abilities/casting spells even before the battles even started, having to remove protections from enemy wizards...

Don't know how you played, but all that stuff was in KOTOR. Jedi v. Jedi battles, all sorts of different enemy types with different attack types, having to prepare before hard battles with stims/buffs/mines, using debuffs against enemy jedi/breaking enemies shields...

You should of not cheesed/abused the rest function/spell system and played it the right way, not resting until you were almost depleted. You wouldn't have been able to summon a shitload of things before every battle and would of had to use some resource management and not be able to launch all those powerful AoE attacks left and right.

Oh, you are bringing out the old "waaah, you just didn't play it the right way, so you just don't know how good it is, waaah!!!1!" argument? You know you have pretty much lost the discussion in the eyes of most people when you bring that POS up.

Come on now, first you say it's not deeper than you say you like the 'nice middle ground between an action RPG and a tactical RPG'.

This means exactly jack diddly. Like, exactly nothing, so I have no reason why you bring it up. It doesn't really counter anything.

 

[Vkmies]

While I love both KOTOR and Mass Effect, I have to agree. KotOR is basically that, and Mass Effect is basically mediocre 3rd person cover based shooting taking over the combat and puzzles of KotOR. Otherwise, they are pretty much the same. You don't really play those games for the exhilirating gameplay.

 

[Auron]

Isn't that because the party has just three members instead of six and they're not using AD&D? To be fair, what were your options in BG? The fighters could do 2 things basically, bash them or shoot them. Most other classes would fall together in this except wizards and the other spellcaster's occasional spell.

And god I hated the sleeping spam.


Furhtermore, didn't people here actually ever play D&D or SWD20? I figured most people attracted to kotor or even bg would have and would understand why it's setup like it is.

 

[DeadFOAM]

That's nice.

KOTOR is still one of my favorite games. You can have your opinion and I can have mine. I don't see any cause in attempting to sway you.