Written by Jeff Buckland, 12/1/2003
Played on:
Windows
Before Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was released for the Xbox, Microsoft's console had a pretty sad shortage of RPGs. Luckily for gamers, KOTOR turned out to be a shining example of how an RPG needs to be done - it has great graphics, tons of gameplay, a brilliant story, and more lightsabers that you can handle. After a couple of delays, Bioware has unleashed an excellent PC port of this revolutionary RPG. While I can heartily recommend it for any PC role-player, what about those who maybe don't like this type of game? Let's jump in and find out.
KOTOR looks great, both in its ability to show some excellent detail and at maintaining a usually decent frame rate. The game works just fine on a system at its minimum requirements, and while those requirements are a tad steep, it's not far out of line with other recent games. This is the first PC use of Bioware's Odyssey game engine, and there are a couple of features here that take advantage of the new pixel shader features on modern video cards. Granted, this game looks great more because of the quality of the art rather than the engine features, but the engine is not holding the game back in any way.
I'm not really sure why, but KOTOR only allows the "Soft Shadows" feature to work on Nvidia cards - ATI users still get shadows, but they're a bit less realistic. It seems to me that the game caps the frame rate at times, but since you can pause at any time and pure action isn't really the focus, a super-high frame rate probably isn't a big deal.
I particularly appreciate the loading times in Knights - the game uses up surprisingly few system resources and loads & saves very quickly. One could probably attribute this to the game's Xbox roots (where Bioware only had 64MB of RAM to work with), but it wasn't really a given that it would be this way. No matter how we look at it, the game and its engine are both lean and mean.
KOTOR is not without its bugs, though. A few display issues aside, I had the game crash on me several times, and this is one of those games that simply will not behave if you Alt-tab away from it. This usually resulted in a crash or a corruption of graphics that would force me to restart the game. There are also some serious issues with a couple of specific ATI video cards (Radeon 9600 specifically, I believe), although Bioware has issued a beta patch to address them.
So far, my save games have been corrupted twice - anyone who has had this happen to them knows the feeling of having this happen. Since the game auto-saves somewhat regularly, I lost around ten minutes of gameplay each time, but it's still really frustrating. At least the Quick load & Quick save features are nice and speedy.
One thing that's frustrating is that the game does not support 1280x1024 as a resolution. 1280x960 is there, but for those of us with LCD monitors that have the former as a native resolution, it means we have to settle with a screen mode that is non-native no matter what. The thing is, LCD monitors always look better in their native mode than anything else, and it's frustrating to be forced to use a non-native mode.
The PC version of KOTOR has forsaken the gamepad-controlled scheme and replaced it with a standard mouse-and-keyboard setup. This means that the game plays similarly to a standard third person action game or MMORPG. It works perfectly, although I'd have liked to be able to look up and down at all times - not just when I press a key for a temporary first person view.
Bioware also had the foresight to include plenty of keyboard shortcuts for the standard game functions, but there also ways to do just about all of this with a mouse. There are some bugs with the interface, especially when you are holding down the right mouse button (which allows you to freely spin the camera around). There are several situations, like a conversation that pops up without the player starting it, that cause the game to screw up if a mouse button was held down when it started. Some of these issues just cause the game to skip conversations, while others can screw up badly enough to make you restart the game and/or load from your most recent save.
The Xbox version of KOTOR had excellent graphics when compared to the best the console had to offer; the PC version is much the same. The textures look great and are pretty high-resolution on the PC, and while you'll need a video card with plenty of memory on it to set the textures on "high" and get good performance, it's worth it if you have it.
Many of the unique special effects seen in the Xbox version of KOTOR will require a fairly modern video card for the PC version. And while the game will run without these features, you really need a pixel-shader capable video card to get the full splendor of the game. Of course, the great character design and awesome animations remain, and those alone make up some of the best art seen in any RPG.
KOTOR takes place in the Star Wars universe, but it's three thousand years before the events in the six movies. Instead of the Empire, the bad guys are the Sith - they're still run by evil ex-Jedi, and they basically work just like you'd expect the Empire to. Your character starts out as a soldier, but soon finds that his or her ability with the Force is very strong, and over the course of the game you can become a powerful Jedi yourself. The game allows a light side or dark side solution to almost every quest, and you will eventually have to pick a side.
