Gadon: In order to rescue your Jedi friend, you’ll have to win her in the swoop race. Now, if we could return to talking about gang politics…

Me: No, hold up, what the hell is a swoop race?

Gadon: So, what you’ll need to do is break into the enemy base and disable their security…

Me: Are you listening? What the fuck is a swoop race? What even is a swoop for that matter? How do I race them?

Gadon: Great! Thanks! See you after you get back!

For those who have played this game before, you almost certainly know what dialogue sequence I’m referring to. It’s on the first planet of your adventure through space, and immediately you’re informed that your quest to save the lady Jedi you’re looking for will involve…some kind of race? But at no point until you actually get the vehicle near the end of this quest line does anyone bother telling you what a swoop is or how the races work. As it turns out, this one interaction and my reaction to it as displayed above almost perfectly encapsulate the experience of playing this game. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) is a game in which you’re routinely handed a ton of information sans context and expected to just run with it. Spoiler alert, though; if you can manage to make sense of what this game wants from you, it can be an incredibly rewarding effort. However, this leaves the game with the distinct feeling that it doesn’t really want to be played.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. Let’s start out with a bit of backstory on this game in the interest of fairness. KOTOR was released for the original Xbox by BioWare in July of 2003. BioWare’s main claim to fame at this point in time was the revered Baldur’s Gate franchise, and I think it’s safe to say that some elements that cemented that franchise’s popularity still come through even now with titles like Mass Effect. Still, despite having been around for 8 years at that point, the team at BioWare simply hadn’t had that many projects to sink their teeth into. Combine this with the fact that the game industry still had many lessons to learn about design in densely populated 3D space and player usability, and it will give you a little context for what’s coming up in this analysis.

Let’s rip this band-aid off right now; KOTOR is just a hot mess of a game in a multitude of ways. Without even examining any of the technical problems with the game, it very plainly suffers from a complete lack of player direction. And I don’t mean “The game doesn’t hold your hand and put a glowing marker over every objective”. I mean, “At the beginning of the game you’re told to pick a class without being told what the differences between them are, you’re given a stat sheet with minimal explanation of how each stat works, told to pick skills before you’ve had a chance to try combat, and expected to fine-tune your stats to a degree that some min-maxers would find tedious.” What I just described is the character building segment, which happens as soon as you pick “New Game”. Before we’ve even technically begun, the game is practically challenging us to a chess match to earn the right to start playing. And it only continues throughout the game. Every minute of play it felt like I came across some new, utterly baffling design choice that completely lacked explanation. For instance, it’s typical in RPGs for quest-givers to have unique names that make them stand out. It makes them more memorable and helps them stand out from other NPCs that are little more than the window dressing of video games. KOTOR, however, decided that some quest givers would have generic names like “Taris Citizen” or “Sith Teacher”. To further confound the issue, many characters with unique names do nothing at all.

So, why does this matter, right? I mean, the combat is fun. And sure, I get it, if you go back and play it a second time knowing how all the systems work, it becomes brilliant. But the thing is, you don’t want to design a game that is deliberately antagonistic to the player outside of the play. Take Dark Souls, for example. It’s guilty of some of the same issues, but that’s not why people like it. When people say that Dark Souls is delightfully difficult, they’re referring to the punishing but fair play; the combination of level design and combat balancing that produces a game that is difficult to master but by no means impossible. That’s being antagonistic within the context of play. Throwing a bunch of numbers at the player in the first five minutes and not explaining what they are is antagonistic outside of play, and there’s really no reason for it. Think about it this way; you could design the greatest game ever made, but if you don’t build it in a way that teaches people how to play, it’s going to be frustrating to newcomers. This is where I think BioWare’s state as a developer is relevant; I have a completely unverifiable theory that the team fell into a common trap for new developers in which you get so caught up in the fine-tuning of the mechanics, you completely neglect teaching the player how to use them. It’s easy when you see the product from the inside every day to forget that the goal is to have someone else pick it up and play it themselves. If you plan on playing this game soon, I encourage you to go through the game acting as if you’ve never played it before to see what I mean. Take only the direction that’s given to you, and see how long it takes you to ask yourself, “How am I supposed to know what to do here without being a developer of the game?”

Before I get into more technical gripes, I will bring up something else that has a negative effect on player behavior; level design and poor management of negative possibility space. To the unfamiliar, negative possibility space is essentially when you don’t account for what a player may try to do in your game, but it’s usually in the context of level design. Imagine a level that has a huge mountain in it, and also that you realize using a combination of skills will let you jump to the top. Neat! So you scale the mountain, waiting to see what the developers have hidden up there for the clever adventurer. You get to the top and see…nothing. The developers themselves didn’t realize you could get here, so they didn’t place any special objects. KOTOR creates a similar effect almost constantly with the poor decision to place an absurd amount of doors that are non-interactive. This in itself wouldn’t be so bad if non-interactive doors were consistently cued visually. Instead, you can almost never tell until you actually attempt to interact with one. Even some that appear to be interactive are actually locked and can never be opened. The downside to this is that it HEAVILY disincentivizes the act of exploring the map. If most of the doors don’t lead anywhere, why spend so much time checking all of them? Of all the poor decisions that went into this game, this and the infuriating environment suit portions are the ones that are least excusable. We knew better than this even in 2003.

Now, the mechanical side is really what saves this game in a lot of ways. If you ignore the complete contempt for the player in conveying how these mechanics work and take the time to learn the stat system, you can absolutely have a lot of fun with this game. Still, there are definitely a bunch of unintuitive decisions to be found here as well. To be fair, I think that some of this comes from their Baldur’s Gate lineage; the original BG was basically a slightly modified Dungeons and Dragons, and even in KOTOR a lot of that terminology remains. Even for someone who is vaguely familiar with tabletop games, the appearance of the jargon was somewhat confusing. The upside, of course, is that D&D has a very robust statistic system, and a game that adapts it can’t really go wrong unless you’re just trying to make something bad from the outset. I think the strangest mechanical element would probably have to be the level system. KOTOR uses a very non-standard “20” level cap, and to make things more confusing, the cap is split between two different classes you take on as the game progresses. On top of all this, leveling in your second class is demonstrably better than leveling in your first one, so if you leveled up a few too many times early on (which will almost definitely happen your first time through since they give no indication that this is how leveling works), you’ve essentially sabotaged your character. Again, this feels like something a developer worked on for a long time, perfected, and then just assumed the player would figure out through magic or something.

Since this is my first time playing KOTOR, I figure I might as well say whether I liked the game overall. The answer is a pretty solid “maaaaaaaaaaybe”. This game rides a very fine line between incredible and unplayable. It’s mechanically deep once you take the 6-month community college course to become a licensed KOTOR Technician, but the barrier to entry is pretty steep. To be honest, I’m not even sure I could recommend this to someone who doesn’t have a ton of patience. I would love to based on how awesome it feels when you start to get the hang of it, but it just feels like there’s too steep a learning curve. And I mean, there’s a great Star Wars story being told here as well; narrative is one of the few things BioWare consistently gets right, and it really shines here. I’ve never really been a huge Star Wars fan so I never checked out the extended universe, but now I have to admit I’m intrigued. On top of that, there are great supporting characters that are more like people than the pack mules of the OTHER game I’ve been playing recently. For all the complaints I have about this game, it really does get a lot of elements right. I just don’t know if it’s enough to take it from “good game” to “great game”.

On the flip side, if you have even a passing interest in how games are made, I would say you absolutely need to own this game. Partly because you’re probably the kind of person that won’t mind the learning curve so much, and partly because all the things I said above and more are best analyzed firsthand. It really is something to behold when you realize a game actively does not want you playing it. But in the end, as I said at the beginning, that swoop race interaction is a great mirror to the experience of the game as a whole; when I first heard about it, I was confused and had no idea what was happening. But despite the initial confusion, both the swoop race and KOTOR ended up being thoroughly entertaining.