Knights of the Old Republic: 20 Years Later

The iconic RPG hits a milestone this month

I can’t wrap my head around the fact that Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was released 20 years ago this month. 

As I near 35, my childhood feels dreamlike with these landmark movies, games, and books from my life getting 2 decades away from me. The first experience I had with this crippling feeling was in 2021 when I discovered that Jimmy Eat World’s song, “The Middle,” turned 20 years old that year. I screamed in my bookstore, unable to wrap my head around how 20 years had passed since that album came out (Bleed American is quite the album, btw). 

Just takes some time little bit of 20 years later

I didn’t get Knights of the Old Republic during its release - I distinctly remember playing that Fall in my childhood home on my Xbox with a CRT television and the fireplace roaring. I would run to our computer and use dial up to get onto GameFaqs when I needed help on quests or didn’t know where to go next. GameFaqs was (and still is) a message board website dedicated to video games and a place to ask questions to people in the community if you were stuck on a level or needed to find the last collectible. GameFaqs was fundamental to my early gaming and I’m glad that it is still up and running to this day. Knights of the Old Republic would’ve been impossible for 14 year old me without it. 

KOTOR (we’ll abbreviate from here) was fundamental to my understanding of role playing games. I did play Pokemon and Final Fantasy 7 and 8 but KOTOR helped me understand the role of equipment, party members, and an active time battle system. 

I recently went back and played KOTOR to see how it held up after 20 years and honestly, while it is dated in obvious ways, it’s still as good as it was in 2003. 

KOTOR was developed by BioWare right before their acquisition by Electronic Arts. BioWare was known for their creation of the Baulder’s Gate video games which were successful critically and developed a hardcore fanbase. Baulder’s Gate is a D&D ARPG similar to Diablo and those D&D elements were brought into the creation of KOTOR.

The whole concept of KOTOR is based on a Star Wars D&D tabletop game that the BioWare team played. Many of the characters in the game were based off of builds that were played in those tabletop games. Carth Onasi was already a fully developed character before production on the game began. Those D&D elements were brought over to the game with how you built your character with allotted stat points, their class, and how much DPS they did in combat. Essentially, KOTOR was a game for nerds by nerds and built from the ground up with that in mind. 

Should we start a SW D&D club or what?

The story of KOTOR is still talked about to this day even though canonically, nothing has continued on (there have been talks of Revan and some Easter Eggs but we have not seen anything yet). Whatever character you create, you are thrust into the Old Republic Era of Star Wars which is about 4000 years before A New Hope. You wake up on a Republic ship that is being attacked by Sith and you escape with Carth Onasi where you jump around from planet to planet looking for star maps. Along the way you pick up companions to help in your quest and train at a jedi temple. As you progress through the game you can make choices that either give you light points or dark points and will affect the end of the game. It will also affect how others see and treat you (dialogue choices!). 

The main baddie to the game is Darth Malak who is a Sith Lord on the hunt for the Star Forge. Malak is the apprentice of Darth Revan and has a metal prosthesis attached to his jaw due to Revan slashing his face in a disagreement. 

The hunt for the Star Forge is one of the ancient technologies that pulls energy from a close star and combined with the Force can create an infinite amount of ships and droids. It was created originally by the Rakatan which was a race that once ruled the Star Wars-universe. I’ll save the Rakatan-lore for another time but they were big-bad. 

The Star Forge

The game over its playtime funnels you into the endgame decision to either destroy the Star Forge or use it. A binary choice but for 2003, it was revolutionary to see how my choices affect an outcome to a game so dramatically. 

20 years later, I purchased the game on my Xbox Series X from the game store and loaded up an up-res version of KOTOR. I wasn’t sure if my nostalgia had covered up the flaws of the game and was about to be severely disappointed or if BioWare truly made a masterpiece. I was happy to find that the game has stood the test of time. 

My playthrough was going to be standard - a Female Soldier class and a light side lean. Nothing fancy. 

I think it’s important to note that since KOTOR, I became a massive BioWare fanboy and have since played all of the Mass Effects/Dragon Ages. So going back to KOTOR, you easily can point out the DNA that made it into their game over the last 2 decades. Much like playing Morrowind to Skyrim, not much has changed under the hood at its basic level. While conversations do not have the dialogue-wheel from later BioWare games, it follows the same protocol where you choose an option and your character more-or-less says what you selected. You also never know how the receiving party will take it most times and it becomes a game of figuring out how to talk correctly to strangers. This might say more about my personality and brain-wiring but learning how to engage in conversation was learned heavily from games like this. 

The active combat reminded me quickly of Dragon Age where you select different attacks and your character auto-attacks, hitting with either success or miss depending on your stats. Mass Effect and Dragon Age are less D&D in the sense that it doesn’t feel like a crit-role every time you press a button to attack. It feels closer to an MMO than a traditional RPG. Of course the KOTOR-name became a MMO for the PC with several tie-in books.

Once the game opens up and the player crashlands on Taris, KOTOR, unlike contemporary games, doesn’t point you this way and that - you have to just run around and figure the world out yourself. Running around the apartment complexes and the cantinas, you pick up side quests in the area that offer exp points that are highly valued in this game. Leveling up is not taken for granted like I feel it can be today. You have to work to find all the ways to capture needed exp points to level you and your party up or you won’t get far. KOTOR is unforgiving with its difficulty or at least, for a game of this caliber. 

As I went into the underbelly of Taris I found the beauty in old game level design. The maps are easy to wrap your head around and have a definitive purpose of existence. They are not built to get lost in or overcrowded with enemies - they feel purposeful. 

I love them

I made my way to Dantooine and then Tatooine, the open areas of the deserts were sparse compared to what games have become. In fact, playing KOTOR made me boot up Dragon Age: Inquisition again to see how similar these games are. While we are 20 years from KOTOR, we are only 10 years from DAI. Obviously the combat and UI is better along with the scope of the game. But while KOTOR’s open areas felt sparse, DAI felt cluttered with many things to do that don’t really matter. In DAI, you have little side quests like creating new camps, collecting shards or close rifts but it doesn’t feel important to the game - it’s more like busy work. That busy work burns me out quickly because I’m left asking myself “what am I doing” rather than feeling like I’m contributing to the universe of the game. Now while running around the open landscape areas of KOTOR does feel sparse, the characters or situations you meet out there are important or at least have good writing. On Tatooine, you come across a man in the Dune Sea who is surrounded by droids that are aimed to fire on him if he moves. He’s here because his wife caught him cheating. You can answer the riddle of each droid to get them deprogrammed to fire so he can finally be free to apologize to his wife. It’s just a small throwaway quest but it feels part of the world and not just “collect this” or “destroy this.” DAI does this with every area you’re in so you’re just running around doing the same type of side-quests in snow or desert. Now I’m not saying DAI is a bad game (I do love it) but games have become bloated with junk like this to keep players in the world but it does not feel genuine. 

Another great example is on Dantooine when you are put in the middle of a murder investigation and have to use your Jedi interrogation skills to decipher who the killer is and what their motive was. You can easily make the wrong call and get a bad ending to the side-quest but getting the right ending rewards you with a ton of experience. 

And there is all the Revan and Bastila stuff! KOTOR gave us Revan who is one of the more complicated Sith characters in SW-history. That’s its own post for another time, as well.

Reflecting on KOTOR while playing it in 2023 I was surprised how much I still enjoyed the game even if it’s a little clunky and sparse. The story and characters are developed and fully motivated. BioWare’s charm hinges on their ability to create such lovable and real characters. I think that is why Mass Effect: Andromeda was such a hard pill to swallow because no one felt memorable (maybe we’ll get to that another time). 

Good games are good games. It’s still why I boot up Skyrim every few months or playthrough Halo: Reach. It’s wonderful to have games tied to your nostalgia that are also fun to go back to. Will games made now have the same longevity? It’s hard to say but I know there will never be another KOTOR (unless we finally get that remake) and that’s ok. I still have it and it’s still fun to play.