MMORPG is the genre that requires a strong commitment and a lot of time investment. For this purpose I feel like anything that isn't the greatest MMO of all time in your eyes should not be played for more than 20 hours. I played this for 15.5 hours (that's not counting my first brief attempt years ago), and I wanted to give it a few more before finalizing my thoughts on this. I already knew I wasn't gonna commit to it, but the few additional hours would help me reaffirm myself in my convictions. Unfortunately, due to my hard drive failure last month and my subsequent distro-hopping, I had to reinstall this game thrice. And the last two times it would randomly start redownloading itself, with the first time being after it was installed, and the second time after reaching 80%. The game is 46GB in size, and my internet speed is 3Mbps. So I finally decided it's not worth the trouble just to reaffirm my thoughts on the game I am already planning to abandon.

This game had quite a challenge. Not only did it have to blend the KotOR gameplay with the MMO genre, but also somehow be a sequel to both KotOR 1 and 2, which are tonally and narratively very different games. I kinda feel that it failed at both tasks, though it's not a catastrophic failure.

Story-wise it resembles KotOR 1 much more than 2, which is a good thing in my book. I feel that the KotOR 1 tone and style of storytelling is much more fitting for an MMO anyway, as MMO's goal is to create a living and breathing world, not to convey some agenda or an overarching message. And I genuinely liked the story for how much I played through it, even though I never finished it.

The problem is how that story and the story-driven gameplay fits into the gameplay systems. And it kinda doesn't at all. I was impressed with how more than one person can participate in a conversation, but that's about the only feature that arises from the marriage of KotOR and the MMO design. Most of the time in this game you're practically playing a single-player game with some hub areas. And yet, if judged as a single-player game, it has terrible quest design (which is common, but forgivable in MMOs). The world itself, which I consider to be the most important aspect of this genre, feels very artificial and lacks interactivity. Which isn't helped by its WoW-like linearity.

Finally I want to comment on the art-style, which I consider to be an important part of any MMO, as it can make or break immersion. And here I really don't like it. It has this mobile-game cartoony aesthetic, and I just don't get why. As a sequel to KotOR 1 and 2, why does it differ so radically? This makes me not want to explore the worlds, as they all look cheap and plastic to me.

All this comes together in a Frankenstein monster of a game, different parts of which don't come together in a natural form. Rather it kinda fails as both a KotOR game and a Star Wars MMO. That being said, it is still a decent experience, as long as you're willing to invest huge amounts of time into something flawed. I am not.

I'm changing the rating.

When I first played it, I didn't get that far, and my poor internet connection was making it hard with the constant updates and the game randomly choosing to redownload itself.

Recently I got a renewed interest in the Old Republic's lore and figured I'd give the game another chance despite its gameplay flaws, for the sake of the story. Started a Sith campaign because I wanted to see the Sith academy and whatnot.

Around the same time I began trudging through the painfully boring novel, The Old Republic: Revan. It's bad enough that this game and the novel have canonized the events of KotOR 2, but to my surprise, despite Drew Karpyshyn writing the novel and some of the game, it embraced some of the nonsensical lore of KotOR 2.

What I'm referring to is the planet Nathema and the idea that a place (or the entire universe as in the case of KotOR 2) can be emptied out of the Force or separated from the Force. And, from what I understand, the guy that did that, Tenebrae (aka Vitiate, aka Valkorion) is something like the main antagonist of this game, which makes the concept central to the lore of this game.

The Force is not magic that exists in the universe and can be removed from the universe. It is the divine principle that precedes the universe and guides it. The universe is the product of the Force, not the other way around. From which you can surmise that it's the universe that exists within the Force, not the Force existing within the universe. How can the inferior control the superior? This is as stupid as saying "We have separated New Jersey from God."

This is fucking with the entire cosmological and metaphysical model of Star Wars, which is basically the thing that makes Star Wars special. Without its metaphysics based in real-life mystical traditions of various cultures, Star Wars is just another dumb generic fantasy universe that might as well have dwarves and elves and other generic DnD creatures.

The brilliance of Star Wars was always the fact that the conflict at its core is between different philosophies, not factions or races. So, when games like KotOR 2 and TOR mess with its cosmology and metaphysics, they practically ruin Star Wars. These games might as well not have Star Wars in their title. And what's worse is they're ruining the overall lore of Star Wars because Lucasfilm were essentially trying to keep a consistent canon, which would make these new inventions part of the SW history, and they'd be referenced in other stories down the line.

Now, there have been other ridiculous ideas in other Star Wars games, like the Valley of the Force in the Jedi Knight series, which kinda goes against the philosophy of Star Wars, but it doesn't really violate any fundamental mythology of it. This, on the other hand, is very egregious and damaging.

But at least, TOR doesn't build its entire story around this concept like KotOR 2 did, so at least the story here is entertaining, which I can't say for KotOR 2. And also it's not a broken mess, and doesn't look bland and desaturated like KotOR 2 did. And it's more original than KotOR 2, seeing how that game was built on the engine of the first KotOR with very little mechanical or graphical changes.

In retrospect, I think I'll decrease the rating for KotOR 2 as well.