Star Wars : KOTOR. A comment I made that I thought belonged here as a review.

Someone on r/gaming asked the following in one of the DAE threads :

I haven't played either of the KOTOR game, and they've been hyped to all hell. If I play it now, will it live up to the hype? Does they gameplay hold up or is it clunky?

After typing this block of text that is my answer, I thought it might be of interest to some people here. I know it's an odd kind of post, I hope it's no bother... Do delete it if it's inappropriate.

Happy coincidence, I finished playing through it for the first time like two hours ago, so I'm in a good position to answer that. I'll tell you about my experience. Note that I did use some mods but I was careful to follow guides about them that said they were all compatible. Also deleting those mods didn't fix my issues.

The gameplay feels clunky and old, yes, but you get used to it very fast. What really set me back a bit is the quantity of glitches I experienced. Of course you might not experience the same problems, but here goes. Also it was bought and used from Steam, I don't know if other versions out there might work differently (GOG...). Edit : Also there's a pretty good FAQ stickied on r/kotor that deals with most common issues.

It started when I launched the game for the first time. I actually had to relaunch and alt-tab a few times to get past the developer screens. Yes. It started well. I was able to switch the resolution of the game up a bit, but not to a widescreen resolution of course, the game is too old. Then I created a character and launched a new game and the game kept minimizing / tabbing out. The first cinematic wouldn't play. I googled the fix to that and it was due to me being on a more recent Windows (10, but I noticed people under 8 had trouble too). The fix included playing in windowed mode, on a square window on my wide screen. EDIT : which is not in the options. It's something to change in the gamefiles. "Not ideal for immersion" I thought, and it wasn't, at first. But I got over it.

Fuck, this is already a block of text and I haven't started playing the game yet. But it'll get quicker now.

In certain zones of the game (mainly, but not only, outdoors) I experienced texture glitches on the light beams in the environment. I think the transparency was glitching and it looked like cheese strings everywhere. I actually made you an imgur album so you could see how it looked like. Thing is, when I got this glitch, it got pretty damn laggy, I'm talking down to 5 fps when my screen was full of cheese strings. I also got stuck and my character couldn't move after combat. Turning Vsync and anti-aliasing off solved both the fps issues and the movement ones. Still had some cheese strings though.

When I got further in the game it started to crash at random places and while entering random zones so I got used to quick-saving every thirty seconds.

I'll now write in bold so you see it even if you decided to skip the blocks of text, or you decided you shouldn't bother three paragraphs in. IT WAS ALL WORTH IT. I'm really glad I stuck with the game. The story and characters were so good. It has the same heart as the first Mass Effect game, if you played it, but somehow I feel the scope of it and the character development are bigger. And I loved the first Mass Effect, it got me addicted like crazy.

Hope that helps, and that it doesn't turn you away from this fantastic game. I'm going to recuperate for a week or two and dive in KOTOR 2 head first.