Today I thought I would discuss a video game that I have enjoyed very much. As the title of my blog entry indicates, that game is Knights of the Old Republic. I have to say that I really enjoyed both the first game and the sequel to the game. I would, however; have to say that I prefer the first game over the second.

With the first game, I really enjoyed the story line and how you interact with the other members of your party. Each party member had a story of their own that you could explore depending on how often you talked to them and probably somewhat the choice of what you say to them. The second game does have an influence system in which you can talk to your party members in a way that will cause them to follow you more. The problem I see in the second game is that, imo, the stories that each party member had were not necessarily as developed as they were in the first game.

I really think that the gameplay in the two games is very similar in many ways. I really didn't like in the second game that towards the end you don't really have as much choice in where you can go. In the first game you could choose to hold off going to the Star Forge System and could wonder around as much as you wanted to finish off any side quests that were available or play any of the mini games that were available. In the second game, once you reach a certain point there is simply no going back to any of the other planets. In many cases, you could not return to a lot of the planets or if you do return the amount of things that you can do are incredibly limited.

In general, the first game seems like it was developed a lot better than the second. I remember playing the first game repeatedly and still finding new things I had missed before on the tenth time I played the game all the way through. I can't say that I have played the second game more than 2 or 3 times, so there may be things that I have still missed, but I just haven't felt compelled to play it through that many times. I think the main reason for this is that the ending is just not very satisfying. I mean, you get to the end and all you get is Kreia telling you what will happen to the rest of your party in the future before she dies. Also, there does not seem to be a lot of differences between the light and dark side endings. I don't know, maybe I have still missed something, but I just do not feel the second game was quite as good as the first. I'm also not really sure why there was no online content that could be downloaded for this game. I know that they really did not provide much in the way of downloads in the first game, but they could have at least left the option open so that they could add some new content to the game. Oh well, I guess you can't have everything. Maybe I set my expectations for the game higher than I really should have.

I still feel that both games are worth the time I spent playing them. I just feel like the second game left me wanting much more than it gave.