KOTOR 2 vs The Witcher

Hm...

So I downloaded the leak of TSLRP.

I've been playing it for the past three days.

Hm.

As far as the game goes- it's okay. Bits of it are really good. I love the characters, the story and so on.

It does have some pretty severe problems though.

The main one is: The Witcher.

I haven't blogged about it, but I recently bought and played The Witcher through. I thought it pulled off the trick of allowing the player to make genuinely moral choices better than any other game has.

The reason for this is... The Witcher doesn't have a morality scale.

For me, every time a game says DARK SIDE POINTS GAINED! or PARAGON +2 etc. etc. they are ruining the concept of moral choice.

In the real world
1) You don't get told when your character has shifted/people think it has
2) You often don't know what repercussions your actions will have.

This simply isn't the case in KOTOR - whenever you make a decision in the game world, you always know how it's going to affect your alignment. Things get slightly more complicated when you're considering how your companions react to you but the relationships system is more than slightly nonsensical.

Fitting things onto a good/vs evil scale of any sort removes one very important thing: complexity. Morality is an incredibly complex and arbitrary thing. One of the tag lines for The Witcher was that there were no good or bad choices, there were just choices. It was taken as red that your character was generally moral (in that he wasn't a cartoon villain - more on that later) so whatever choices he took, they were justifiable. Support the order? Support the Scoiatel? Neutrality? These are all perfectly valid choices.

Problem number 2 with KOTOR is... the Star Wars universe has no middle ground. You can't play a complex character - only a cartoon villain who steals from the poor and murders anyone he can - or a sickly sweet paragon.

I wanted to be a dark jedi this time around because I hadn't been previously. So I went around killing people. But I was nice to my companions. Why? I liked them. The game balanced these equally. Apparently murdering people is balanced by being polite when talking to someone.

I shouldn't be surprised, really. This game is American and the Americans do seem to have a genuine problem accepting that right and wrong are just ideas and that often it's just a matter of perception. Hell, this is even the case in Battlestar Galactica a lot of the time and that's one of the most mature and well written pieces of fiction ever created.

With that in mind, it's very clear that there are two ways the game is *meant* to be played. Either as dark or light. You can mix it up by being dark on some planets and light on others but then you run into the - which characters do you want to play with - problem.

With that in mind, I'm going to play the damn thing again as it wants to be played. I'm going to be a light jedi and see what happens. I can't get a good feel for the game if I'm playing it in a way it doesn't want to be played.

So, out of KOTOR 2 and The Witcher, which is better? Well that's fucking obvious, it's The Witcher. No contest. The Witcher's gameplay is better, the moral choices are more realistic, interesting and poignant...

It's a shame really. I was getting all excited by the prospect of the KOTOR MMO and then I played KOTOR 2. KOTOR 2 is, I think, as good as a star wars game is likely to get as far as morality goes. It's a bar so low you'd trip over it but I doubt any Star Wars product will ever beat it.