First, a little bit of context. I was already a big fan of Knights of the Old Republic, which I still have for my old Xbox system (even though the system's dead; I got a Steam replacement). I'd also played some of the other early BioWare RPGs, like Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights, both of which I played around with, and Jade Empire, which I played more extensively. But of all of these franchises, it was Knights of the Old Republic that was by far my favorite. It also came out at a time when the Star Wars franchise was at a bit of a nadir (little were we expecting the lows of The Last Jedi or The Rise of Skywalker or The High Republic which were yet to come.) The prequel trilogies were out, and while visually lavish and beautiful, and chock full of some really cool ideas (like Darth Maul) they were ultimately mostly frustrating and disappointing because of what they could and should have been and yet weren't. Knights of the Old Republic was part of a wave of Star Wars rehabilitation, that also includes some other great video games, like The Force Unleashed, as well as the well-received (and mostly deservedly so) animated Clone Wars show. Perhaps because of this context, I like Knights of the Old Republic better than it deserves, but even so, it's considered a classic for a reason. I don't know that the recently announced remake is going to be any better, in spite of obviously going to be prettier; I suspect that they'll have to ruin it with some kind of new diversity mandates, or something. Carth Onasi will have to be black, have dreadlocks and be the main character's gay lover, or something.
Knights of the Old Republic II was also a good game, although because of developmental rushedness, the ending is a little bit confused and it almost takes some reading offline to understand exactly what was supposed to have happened. As a quick aside, and then I'll try to stop mentioning this so much, it's clear that the original concept of the main character was that he was a guy. Have you not seen the promotional art for the game? They decided in retrospect that the "canonical" interpretation was that he was a she, and they've written up all kinds of details about who The Exile is. She even makes an appearance as a force ghost in The Old Republic. This is fine, though. Ultimately, we can accept at least some degree of space wizardry is magical anyway, so why not have action-grrls here and there who can do it too?
Knights came out in 2003, and Knights II in 2004. Seven years later, The Old Republic came out, after a fairly long lead-up; it was announced in late 2008 and came out almost at the very end of the year 2011. Of course, while fans were excited, there was a sense of "uh... what?" to the announcement as well. The Old Republic was announced as an MMO, which is not the kind of game that BioWare had ever done before, not the kind of game that Knights or Knights II had been, and arguably, not really the kind of game that the fans were interested in. Certainly I wasn't; grouping up with randos on the internet to have to play didn't sound fun to me at all, and going on boss-fight dungeon raids didn't either. I also had no interest in a subscription payment method.
I think in retrospect, the skeptics were proven sorta right. The majority of the consumers wanted RPG-like content, and were content to dabble in grouping on occasion. A relatively small yet healthy community of groupers and raiders has developed, and some content specifically for them has been developed in the years since. But BioWare also, belatedly, but not too terribly so, I suppose, decided to make the solo content more accessible for those who really didn't want to do any grouping at all. (Like me.)
Today, if you sit down to play this game fresh, you'll find that your first choice is to pick a character class. This isn't just a mechanical choice, as each character class has a fully realized separate story from the other seven classes. You can play a huge class story where you travel to a total of twelve level-gated planets (although there is level-synching, so those gates aren't as hard and fast as they used to be once upon a time). In addition, each of those planets has a faction story; each of the eight classes belongs to either the Republic or Empire faction, and you have a faction quest string that's as big (sometimes bigger) than the class story, also on each planet. There's not quite as much variety here; rather than eight, there's obviously only two, and sometimes the class and faction stories mesh quite well. Sometimes they don't, even though most likely you'll be doing them mixed together as you wander around on the planet.
In addition to these story quest strings, there are also a ton of unstringed exploration quests; characters standing around in the environment with a quest icon over their head. If you go talk to them, you can pick up one-off quests. Some of them are even repeatable, although most are not. Many of the repeatable ones are Heroic quests. Once called Heroic 2+, they were designed for a group of 2 or more characters. As part of their focus on solo players, they were rejiggered to be more challenging than normal exploration quests, but certainly doable by yourself. These exploration quests and Heroics often have a similar theme to what's going on in the faction quests especially, but they are just asides that have no impact on the story. If you do them, it's great; a little extra credits and XP and some modest gear rewards, but hardly required or necessary.
Although each character class story is substantially different, the progression of planets, due to their original level range design, is not. This leads to a pretty predictable arc as you're playing. However, because of the well-done level synching, you never feel like there's a difference between operating on an end game planet vs a beginning planet, other than that higher level characters will have more options and abilities unlocked, and will probably be cosmetically superior, having acquired more gear. Anyway, I'll talk more about this progression and the stories, planets, NPCs, etc. in a future post.
Although BioWare have played around with subscription costs, the need for subscriptions at all, what you get for a subscription, etc. we're at a point now where you don't need one to have a good experience in the game. However, if you're going to be pretty serious about playing through it, like I was, then a subscription is probably worth it. I bought it in the two-month at a time chunks. It's cheaper if you buy it for a year, but since I didn't play for a year straight, I think what I did worked out well. It gave me some conveniences and advantages that were worth it to me, and when I wasn't playing, I let it lapse automatically without having to go remember to cancel or anything like that. I suspect a fair bit of the money that BioWare still makes from the game isn't from subscriptions, but rather from micro-transactions. They create a lot of cosmetic options, many of them can be bought for "real money". While I like a lot of the stuff that the game drops naturally, I also have to admit that some of the cosmetics are really cool and are super tempting.
One of the other changes made was that some of the group content that was important to the story now has solo options. These are Flashpoints, and they were the original idea for how to do raids. About half of the flashpoints are now soloable, and they are all the ones that have some tie to the story. The ones that are not are completely side stories that have no impact on the main thrust of the game, but are interesting if you're into that kind of thing. Nowadays, story progression that is added is often in the form of new solo flashpoints, which you can then go back and play as a group in a harder mode if you like. Different types of content is also now available for the groupers; Uprisings are kind of like mini-flashpoints; shorter and faster to do, but require a group. They are quick and dirty raids for people who don't have tons of time. Operations, on the other hand, are very complex dungeon raids that require eight or even sixteen players to complete. Sadly, when BioWare were still experimenting with this stuff, they didn't always hit the right beats, and sometimes legacy things are left in that are kind of a pain. For example, there's a long questline for both the seeker droids and macrobinoculars missions that you can do solo. There's actually some really cool stuff in those, but when you get to the end, you find that you're gated behind Heroic 4s, which you can't do solo. So, you can spend several hours on the questline, only to be left with a cliffhanger at the very end that you can't complete without a group. And good luck finding anyone that still even wants to group up for that anymore, even if you're willing to try. The whole Dread Masters storyline is another one that you get loads of info on, and you can even do quite a bit of it, before you're gated because the end of it is a pair of operations.
I think those three in particular are jarring and disappointing because of the time you can put into them solo only to be left hanging. Also, because they are now quite old, and the devs and most of the players have moved on, they linger and no solution has ever been given for them. Sigh.
Another interesting aspect of it being a kinda sorta wannabe MMO instead of an RPG is that in the online environment, stuff doesn't "stick" like it did in Knights and Knights II. You'll have to learn to deal with terms like "trash mobs" and "drawing aggro", even if you don't pick up on the jargon, you still have to deal with the reality of them. You can kill all of the troops in an aggravating and tedious "trash mob" on your way to an objective, only to have to deal with them all over again on your way back, because they reset fairly quickly. Of course, this can also work the other way; you can expect to fight hordes of trash mobs only to find that someone just ahead of you on the same path has killed them all and they haven't reset yet, giving you free and easy passage. Sometimes you find yourself leapfrogging with another player between trash mobs; if he draws the aggro on a mob, you can walk right by unharmed, but then you pick up the next one. This reset thing also has other interesting side effects. Sometimes you have a quest to "sabotage five communication towers" or something like that. You only need to find one, though, and after you sabotage it, you can just sit and wait for it to reset and sabotage the same one over and over again five times. Sometimes the reset time is too long, and there's even a group of players all hanging around the same area waiting to jump on the first reset.
Not everything works like this, of course. In the online gaming jargon, there's a thing called "instancing" in which you go into a little "room" where you don't and can't interact with other players. This performs very much like a little mini-offline section of the game, and most story quests end with a private instance, so the behavior of the instance can be more predictable than it would be in a purely online environment.
After the main stories are all complete, there's (now) quite a bit more story to do. Loads of story flashpoints and new planets have been added. There's also a very long string of quests called "chapters" that function like strung together story flashpoints, kind of. This new content is pretty cool, and there is a faction division of sorts between it, but there isn't anything really that continues the class specific stories. In fact, this new content doesn't even fit all character concepts equally well. It was clearly meant to be played primarily by the Jedi Knight, or possibly the Sith Warrior, and it makes considerably less sense for the non-Force-using classes. Although you can do it anyway. It's just clear that from the writer's perspective, they're mostly expecting you to do it with a Jedi Knight.
A final note on this part of the review; the game is ten years old here in the next few weeks. Although it's not very well optimized, its age means that any computer from the last five years or so can probably play it pretty well. When my brother was assembling my computer from (mostly used) components, we were having trouble getting the graphics card to work without causing issues, so we punted and didn't put it in. Yes, I'm running the game without any graphics card at all. Very occasionally when a lot is going on on the screen at once, like in a big flashpoint boss fight, or a super detailed environment like Mek-Sha, I do notice a little bit of lag and then I remind myself that even without a graphics card at all, I have the graphics settings turned pretty much all the way up and I forget that. On Mek-Sha I turned them down temporarily so it would run a bit better. Other than that, I've had no problem running the game at all. It's not a graphical tour de force, of course. My son played Ghosts of Tsushima on the PS4, so I know what a really pretty game looks like. But it's certainly attractive enough most of the time. Most of my complaints about the graphics aren't really about the technical quality of them. Rather, the stylized nature of the graphics and the relatively few elements that are repeated a lot are what mostly drags them down. Sure, sure... the action cut scenes aren't going to be winning any cinematographic awards anytime soon, but you don't really think about that much when you're playing. You do think about how every other NPC seems to have the same face just with a different facial hair overlay or something like that, and the strange spikey bits that look insane on the armor. I'd say the graphics are comparable to another one of my favorite games to play: Street Fighter IV. In general, I'd say that SF4 actually looks a little better in terms of character modeling, although technically there are obvious similarities. The clunkier animation, repeated elements, and worse clipping of Old Republic are notable, but the fact that there is so much more content is worth pointing out. (As is the fact that Street Fighter IV was almost four years older than Old Republic. It's a PS3 vintage game.) Certainly it looks wonderful compared to Knights or Knights II.
Long story short on the graphics and tech specs; they mostly do the job. It's not amazing, but it's also not so bad that you are constantly reminded of them either; mostly when playing, you don't think about it much at all. I don't think I've ever really heard many players have serious complaints about the graphics from a technical standpoint, although there could be some complaints about decisions that were deliberately made (like all of the fatso tubby nearly Jabba-sized characters out there, for instance, or gigantic shoulder pads that are the size of trash can lids and tipped with sword-points.)
But that's starting to inch into the next category, so we'll end Part I here, I think.
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