KOTOR's Gameplay Sucks

[KingHodor]

Yeah, compared to BG2, which was almost more of a strategy game than an RPG, KOTOR's combat was extremely simplistic.

There was no more kiting or pulling aggro with archers, no protecting said archers by shielding them with melee fighters, no more wide selection of crowd control spells that could incapacitate whole groups of enemies by using them smartly and precisely.

Now it was just "Fill your (really small) party with Jedi or melee fighters, spam Flurry or Critical Strike, and cast the occasional force push, lightning or healing spell". Maybe the combat required actual strategy on higher difficulties, but on normal difficulty, Jedi would just plow their way through the enemy hordes with the most basic of maneuvers.

On the other hand, the actual "role-playing" (as in what your character said and did between the inevitable fights) felt a lot more impactful, even if the difference was often purely cosmetic.

 

[Terrible Opinions]

Yup.

KotOR had no real balance at all and its method of character/party control was crude and clunky.

I'll always have good memories of the game, but it had a lot of flaws I didn't notice when I was 15.

 

[tangoprime]

It's based on Star Wars D20 and it works perfectly in it's intent to emulate that, the same as NWN does with D&D. It's not meant to be some action game.

This. It emulates the star wars d20 perfectly, which was the intent, and the reason it went to the studio it went to because of how well they carried D&Ds mechanics into Neverwinter Nights. Plus the ability to pause, queue things up, and watch it play out is gorgeous, especially when you have lightsabers/vibroswords fighting. That's one of my sore points with swtor, the great fighting animations that you never get to watch because you can't pause and queue like you could in KotOR, and you have to spam hotkeys.

 

[Milanezi]

You got me wrong friend, gameplay is ALWAYS important, I know I said "gameplay has little to do with RPG", but what I meant to say is "the key factor is the ROLE playing"

And I'm sure you know combat is a part of this mythical ?role-playing? that?s supposed to exist in RPGs too. You can fight like a fighter, back stab with your thief, cast with the mage/priest etc...

Anyways, since you do like adventure games and character customization also, I was wondering if you played the Quest for Glory series. I've heard it's very well done.

Yes, but you see, in a RPG you ARE the rogue, fighter or whatever, gameplay merely makes the actions revolving around your character a good experience or a bad one, obviously, a truly broken gameplay will likely take everything down with it. In non RPGs, you merely CONTROL a given character, eventually you might identify enough with him/her, but that's a different story.

Haven't played Quest for Glory, I still have to finish those last Walking Dead games, the gaming list got big all of a sudden and my time got smaller lol I want to play Assassin's Creed 3, but can't bring myself to do it since I didn't finish Revelations, I also haven't played Max Payne 3 (or any other Max Payne, which may help me come to terms with not playing this new one), I gotta get Lord of Shadows 2 though (I didn't expect to enjoy the first one half as much as I did), and I'm surprisingly feeling like buying DMC (since it's a reboot and looks like it's more God of War oriented than the other Devil May Cry, which I sucked by the way), then there's Halo 4 (don't ask, didn't get it yet because in Brazil we only get the dubbed version, it's sad) and Far Cry 3. The hardest thing is, if I ask myself, of all those games, SINCERELY, the only one I really want to play, it's Far Cry 3 and MAYBE Lord of Shadows 2... But I KNOW as soon as I get to the store shit is gonna happen...

 

[BreakfastMan]

snip

Idk man, everything was so simplified and easy in KotOR, I could literally breeze though the combat (on hard) while being half asleep.

I have no damn idea how you would go about doing that, especially considering the difficulty of a number of fights in that game. You probably just rolled up a solly-guardian. Everything is piss-easy then.

And yea, if you were resting all the time and then complaining about how it was too easy, you def weren't 'doing it right'.

I was not complaining it was "too easy". Those are your words, not mine.

You said battles "could be won by simply summoning a bunch of monsters and flinging those at the enemy like cannon fodder, then have a mage spam AOE attacks" That sounds like too easy to me.

Being as I am not the same as you, please don't presume that I have the same opinions or likes as you. Whether you believe it or not, I love the hell out of BGII. Me simply giving an easy, cheap way I found to win most battles does not mean that I did not. Believe it or not, I don't consider lack of difficulty a negative in my games.

 

[Hollock]

I was pretty young when I first played it and it was my favorite game, but i tried it last year and couldn't make it through the first mission because I didn't care. You're right.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

Hey, it's time for another deliberately inflammatory statement sure to rile up people's emotions while I hide behind the facade of an opinion! Cheers all around.

Actually, I agree. I hated KOTOR so much I couldn't finish it. I only got it because someone told me that it was like Mass Effect 1 - which is it not, at all. Ugh.

Although I had a very different experience in combat than you did. I wanted to play a Blaster specialist like Han Solo. I made one, started to get cool, and then the game said "Whoops! You're a Jedi now! Here's a lightsaber that you will utterly suck at because you've build your character to be good at blasters. Oh, you didn't know that Blasters suck and that anyone with a lightsaber can just reflect your bolts? Too bad - you will now suck at everything forever."

It seems story can trump gameplay when it comes to RPGs.

Actually, this is where I disagree. I thought KOTOR's plot was awful. It was the same trite illogical crap as in all Star Wars related stuff. And that includes the original three movies.

I mean, if you went in to KOTOR hoping for the Best Star Wars Fanfiction EVAR, then sure, it's good for what it is. But it doesn't stand up compared to most other WRPG plotlines, and that's saying something. The only reason the boring samey KOTOR plot gets a free ride is that people love anything half-way descent if it has a Star Wars logo on it.

Ugh. KOTOR was the biggest waste of money I've ever spent on Steam.

 

[mitchell271]

TBH, I think Star Wars RPG is still one of the better D20 games out there.

Have you ever played Pathfinder? It's even better.

OT: It may just be Star Wars D&D but I agree with you. One of the only reasons I love D&D is the friends I play it with and the crazy things that happen. The gameplay in KOTOR just gets tte job done.

 

[Monster_user]

I actually enjoyed KOTOR's gameplay well enough. Never paused during a match to queue any attacks though, did all of that in real-time.

I thought Mass Effect's gameplay was enjoyable. I played a soldier, and used the sniper rifle whenever I could. Pretty much just played ME as a straight shooter. Tried to avoid pausing during fights to queue up Biotic or Tech powers.

I'm not really big on Crysis 2's single player gamplay, or the Call of Duty, or new Battlefield games. I enjoy Crysis 2's multiplayer though. Shattered Horizon before the weapons update was another one I liked.

Game play might not be the best but at least it was fun to play through. All games don't have to have a deep and complex fighting system to make them playable. What it lacked in some areas it excelled in others. Hopefully they will make a 3rd on at some point and improve on the gameplay mechanics.

agree with this. it "worked", and if i remember right i think there are some "hardcore hard of all hardcoreness bro mode" mods out there that make each fight a bloody quicksave/load match to figure out how to beat them.

and as mentioned by previous people, the actual combat didn't bother me, getting to play an rpg and customize myself to kingdom come in an enthralling storyline is what has gotten me to play the game 30+ times.

I may have just rolled a bad character, but every major boss fight seemed to be a quicksave/load match, and hoping for any luck with the rolls. I killed Bastilla because I was running out of supplies and she kept bring me down to 5% health everytime I got in close. I almost never had enough pre-E:IV bacta stuff on hand, and my force powers only worked on the grunts.

I completely failed to brute force Malak. I did come up with the idea to lay down as many mines as the game would allow simultaneously, and let Malak walk through them, dumb AI,... Never tried that before, as being poor I couldn't afford to replace those mines.

I primarily played with a lightsaber, and that poision sword from the sith tomb.

 

[Vuliev]

Isn't that because the party has just three members instead of six and they're not using AD&D? To be fair, what were your options in BG? The fighters could do 2 things basically, bash them or shoot them. Most other classes would fall together in this except wizards and the other spellcaster's occasional spell.

And god I hated the sleeping spam.


Furhtermore, didn't people here actually ever play D&D or SWD20? I figured most people attracted to kotor or even bg would have and would understand why it's setup like it is.

I've played the tabletops, liked them, and then hated KOTOR for trying to shovel those systems into a computer game. Die-roll-based gameplay only works (meaning isn't clunky, awkward, and unsatisfying) for turn-based-strategy, not RPGs, in video games. Straight porting a D20 system into a video game loses so much of what makes D20 tabletops fun, i.e. the human interaction, and you don't even get the pleasure of rolling the dice yourself to make up for it.

 

[AD-Stu]

Combat mechanics in the KOTOR games were something I tolerated, not something I enjoyed.

But then I never got into D&D or any of that other stat-based stuff and the idea of spending hours trying to find the optimal character build that breaks the game doesn't do anything for me either...

 

[Erttheking]

I know, it's why I'm having a hard time getting into it.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

I actually enjoyed KOTOR's gameplay well enough. Never paused during a match to queue any attacks though, did all of that in real-time.

I thought Mass Effect's gameplay was enjoyable. I played a soldier, and used the sniper rifle whenever I could. Pretty much just played ME as a straight shooter. Tried to avoid pausing during fights to queue up Biotic or Tech powers.

I'm not really big on Crysis 2's single player gamplay, or the Call of Duty, or new Battlefield games. I enjoy Crysis 2's multiplayer though. Shattered Horizon before the weapons update was another one I liked.

Game play might not be the best but at least it was fun to play through. All games don't have to have a deep and complex fighting system to make them playable. What it lacked in some areas it excelled in others. Hopefully they will make a 3rd on at some point and improve on the gameplay mechanics.

agree with this. it "worked", and if i remember right i think there are some "hardcore hard of all hardcoreness bro mode" mods out there that make each fight a bloody quicksave/load match to figure out how to beat them.

and as mentioned by previous people, the actual combat didn't bother me, getting to play an rpg and customize myself to kingdom come in an enthralling storyline is what has gotten me to play the game 30+ times.

I may have just rolled a bad character, but every major boss fight seemed to be a quicksave/load match, and hoping for any luck with the rolls. I killed Bastilla because I was running out of supplies and she kept bring me down to 5% health everytime I got in close. I almost never had enough pre-E:IV bacta stuff on hand, and my force powers only worked on the grunts.

I completely failed to brute force Malak. I did come up with the idea to lay down as many mines as the game would allow simultaneously, and let Malak walk through them, dumb AI,... Never tried that before, as being poor I couldn't afford to replace those mines.

I primarily played with a lightsaber, and that poision sword from the sith tomb.

yeah you probably rolled a bad character, when people describe kotor as "easy", it's usually because they know exactly how to put every point into the character creator correctly and which weapons/powers cause extreme game breaking over poweredness.

i definitely had a few mine traps myself setup in kotor II when i was trying to keep mira's level down

Spoiler

before i could persuade her into becoming a jedi

 

[Canadamus Prime]

I've been replaying KotOR II with the restored content mod recently and one thing I did notice is just how crappy the combat is. All you do you cue up a bunch of actions you want your character to do and then sit back and wait for him/her to do them and even if you don't do anything your character will still attack anyway using the basic attack anyway. So it makes me wonder what I'm there for aside form wheeling the character from battle to battle and making arbitrary dialogue choices.