The Kotor 2 version still isn't great, but at least they use the juxtaposition of assassin and protocol droid in much more interesting ways.
He, like everyone else in the second game besides maybe Kreia, had more to say than just their lens of stereotype. You had rather normal conversations with HK that were only occasionally interspersed with his meatbag hating quips. I mean, it even made Carth a decent, restrained guy who acted his part having become a general.
Having to work for it in Kotor 1 = being told you're a super duper Jedi potential while the Jedi Council doesn't give a shit that you just almost conquered the galaxy (seriously, Kotor's plot is almost Fallout 3 levels of stupid).
Kotor 2 actually requires you work for it it by having to gain influence with your party members and having to search for lightsaber parts. And the story frames your power as something dangerous and problematic.
The problem for me was that 1 had to become a Jedi overnight during a simple quest. Now looking back that's the big hint about the PCs past, but when you put that in a medium like video games, almost everyone will assume it's typical stupid dev expediency to offer the player the chance of becoming a Jedi without the entire game revolving around only that.
Plot twists are neat things, but you should not have your games make people think you've been doing an incompetent job of making a game.
While I'm at it: The big thing I love about 2 is how the PC isn't a Tabusla Rasa whereas in 1 they, for all practical purposes, treat you as one to keep the trope going while you really aren't that keeps the game having the same typical feel to it. The PC has a history in 2 and you not only meet people from the PCs past but talk to them like they have a past and even greet them the same way with no false new one forced in with something like "Ooooooh it's
you! It's been so long I'd forgotten you completely!" happening.
Again, they even do this with using Carth who could have been replaced by some random Republic general we never have seen or will hear of again.
2 pulls of having both a sense of personal history happening to everyone as well as history in the broader sense it is typically used in, not the drama "history" of 1. In that respect 2 treats the KOTOR setting as it should be, a window into the ancient history of the Star Wars universe that makes you feel like you're living in it, not as a simple setting that doesn't even look different from what it will 10,000 years into the future.
So yeah, it's kind of important.
Lucas started the ball rolling and contributed a lot in places, the crowning achievement being TESBs twist ending, but he wasn't a Tolkien or Herbert who single handed made a world himself. In fact in a lot of places he was working against the better insights of many, like Leigh Brackett's contributions that could have made Star Wars into something a hell of a lot different and more interesting.
SF Debris has a good series going on about the development of the movies.
what a great game.
. It really shines in LAN but the campaign was cool too. Didn't like Academy, dunno why it didn't ring with me.
