Well, since I previously talked a bit about replaying Knights of the Old Republic, I figure I should revisit its sequel as well.

Set an uncertain amount of time after the original, the player takes the role of the Jedi Exile. The Sith have returned to the galaxy, wiping out most of the jedi, and they’ve now set their sights on the Exile, believing him/her to be the last remaining Jedi.

Unlike the first game, the sequel starts you on your Jedi path straight away. While owning a lightsaber only comes much later on in the game, right away you get to start selecting force powers. The upshot of this being, that as you proceed into the later stages of the game, you’re a veritable Jedi powerhouse, cutting down enemies with lightning, and healing your companions from near-death with ease.

This game also introduced the influence system with your travelling companions. As is usual with these RPG games, as you travel to different locations new NPCs join your party. What was new in this game however was that your actions could determine the amount of influence you had with these party members. So if you helped out someone in trouble with the local mob, then your good-aligned companions would look more favourably on you, while you’d lose influence with those more inclined to the dark side.

The great thing about this system being that having increased influence would mean that your companions would only tell you certain things once they trusted you, and for some of them, once that trust reached a certain level, you could actually train them in the ways of the Force, and they’d become Jedi characters. Really helpful having a couple of jedi around to use Force Healing in the tougher fights.

However, the game suffered from one big flaw. Lucasarts had been incredibly keen on a tight development timescale for this game, so as a result, it was rushed onto the market. As a result of this, bugs are rife (some causing big gameplay issues), and huge sections of the game had to be abandoned, leaving several parts where its clear something was significant, but doesn’t actually lead anywhere.

Despite this, I still love this game. Revan’s character in the first game was very well defined (in terms of his/her backstory), whereas I find it more easy to role-play the Exile, as their past and motivations are a blank text. Getting influence with your companions and having them become Jedi was a great addition to the game, and gives you lots of different things to attempt on various run-throughs.

The new Sith Lords are great as well. Darth Sion is a really great, freaky creation, and Darth Nihilus had a great sense of mystery.

The bugs are the main downfall. Just the other night, I had a quest which stuck whenever I tried taking the light-side path to completing it, and so I eventually just had to take the hit and gather some darkside points in order to progress. Perhaps not a huge issue in terms of making progress, but in a role-playing game it really drags you out of the character.

Oblivion had petitioned LucasArts to allow them to complete the game in a later patch, straightening out the bugs, and providing some of the missing content, but sadly LucasArts said no. Some of what was intended (The HK Droid Factory for example) can still be found in the depths of the PC data files, and there is a project making progress at trying to restore some of this content.

Overall, I really do love this game. Its just such a shame it was never completed to the developer’s original intentions, as I reckon it’d have surpassed its predecessor. As it stands, the first game probably pips it to the post for stability, and having a more complete, coherent storyline, which is a shame, because the potential really was there.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 14:13 and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.