Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic shifts Star Wars four thousand years before the film saga, to a time when the Jedi and the Sith were numerous and the galaxy shook under war. The player begins as an insignificant crew member on a ship that is attacked right at the start, and gradually works their way toward their own lightsaber and an answer to the question of who they really are. The journey leads across several planets, from the urban levels of Taris through the Jedi academy to places the player wouldn't expect at the outset. The narrative has a clear core but also leaves plenty of room for the side stories of companions.

The rules system draws on the Star Wars tabletop role-playing game and translates dice rolls into a combat model that runs in real time but can be paused at any moment to plan the whole party's actions. The player chooses a class, distributes attributes, skills, and possibly Force powers, learns to wield both a lightsaber and a blaster, and decides whether to rely on diplomacy, hacking a droid, or brute force. Decisions accumulate on a light-side/dark-side axis, which affects the price of Force powers, the reactions of species, and the ending of the game. A party of up to three characters in the field forms the core of the game, and the conversations with companions rank among the best the studio had written at the time.

Technically the game was built on a modified Neverwinter Nights engine and looked solid on period computers; today it runs without problems, and the community has prepared bug-fix and texture packs that address the resolution and errors of the original release. The music sticks to the orchestral language of Star Wars but has its own motifs that don't directly compete with the film scores. Critical reception was very strong, and the game quickly became the benchmark for licensed RPGs. Its influence can be seen in how companion conversations and moral choices were later built in the studio's other games. Even today it stands as one of the best-told adventures set in the Star Wars universe, even if the combat system feels slower than we're used to now.