Despite shipping with content noticeably cut, the game was a hit. Lightsabers and other weapons were more deeply customizable. The morality of their decisions with power brokers in the galaxy was more complicated. If the player character went far enough to the Light or Dark side of the Force, they got secondary classes with special Feats and Force powers. There was a party member influence system that allowed the protagonist to train Jedi while simultaneously picking at the core philosophies behind Star Wars.
The opening level allowed the player to decide how the former game ended, which affected some of which characters the players interacted with in the game. The Sith Lords took an incredibly solid foundation and built something magnificent. It deals with classism and discrimination from the narrative outset in ways Star Wars frequently ignores, yet was still eclipsed by its sequel.ĭuring a quick turnaround that produced a beloved but unfinished game, Obsidian took Star Wars and turned it on its ear, raising stakes not just by creating a grander enemy but by having a protagonist-antagonist that questions the intrinsic morality of the Force, a person that wants to destroy this ethereal power that binds and penetrates all life forms.
While the game kept to Star Wars conventions, merely set so far away from the film canon that new good guys and bad guys could be utilized to tell the standard morality tale, it remains more interested in picking apart Star Wars’ moral assumptions than most Star Wars mass media properties (Empire-apologetic EU books notwithstanding). Knights of the Old Republic’s D20 combat and morality choices may not have been as groundbreaking for old-hand RPG fans as they were for me at eight years old, but they helped define what I thought videogames would be. And although the game can be remade, the context that made it so special is gone forever. With thousands of at-bats, very few pieces of art that have made me reconsider what is possible in media have been Star Wars or Star Wars-adjacent. For years on end, I’ve been looking for a game or a film to make me feel that way again. KotOR’s entire plot hinges on a huge twist.
An old thing can’t make you experience the same feeling of novelty and surprise. We think we want more of the same when we really want to relive a feeling of newness from that first time we had our minds blown. The problem with remakes and long-awaited sequels is inherent to nostalgia. These games have cast a long shadow over subsequent Star Wars games, and fans have long clamored for a remake, which was finally confirmed to be in production by Aspyr Media earlier this year. Set 4000 years before the original trilogy of Star Wars films, KotOR was a smash hit, with new characters fitting familiar archetypes, and a setting of new worlds caught in conflict between the Galactic Republic and a Sith Empire led by former Jedi. BioWare’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Obsidian’s sequel Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords, setting a precedent and expectations for Star Wars games to come. While A Galaxy Far, Far Away has played host to many great games, two in particular from the first decade of the new millenium have stayed ever present in the minds of fans.
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