After 18 years, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is finally getting a remake. While updated graphics and improved storytelling is definitely something for all fans to be excited about, there are a few aspects that might make longtime fans start nervously sweating — especially if those fans are the kind of gamers that like to replay a game and explore all possible paths. Namely because of the lure and horror of the dark side of the Force.
Behind the cartoonish character models that populated the original Knights of the Old Republic and the bright and colorful worlds that the game’s engine was able to render, there was a story full of drama, tragedy and horror. It was all made easier to bear with the game’s cast of wonderfully-written characters and their random banter, but it was still there. There is no doubt that the remake’s detailed models and realistic world will make those themes and the darker side of the game’s world that much more pronounced — meaning the player’s part in all of it could easily become a lot more painful than it ever was in the game.
Among the planets available to visit, Taris was a planet-wide city riddled with prejudice, Tatooine was a desert where corruption ran rampant, and Kashyyyk was a forested world where slavery and betrayal had become the norm. As a Jedi on the path of the light, players could make those worlds better, but as a dark Jedi, players became a part of those issues, if not their cause.
Taris alone was filled with dark side options that could have made a person ill at the thought of it. One of the first characters players might encounter in Taris’ Upper City Apartments is Dia, a woman who locked herself up in her apartment after a bounty was placed on her head. The reason being that she had upset a man named Holdan by defending herself and cutting his cheek when he got drunk and tried to make a move on her.
Players can choose to help Dia by persuading Holdan to remove the bounty. They can also choose to collect the bounty themselves by killing Dia. It’s a horrible enough decision to begin with, lessened only by the fact that the limited technology of the early 2000s created an emotional distance. That will change in the remake.
The same can be said later on when players are able to free or murder an alien prisoner of the Sith or slaughter infected residents of the Undercity, the latter of which should resonate a little different in this day and age. There’s also Sharina Fizark’s wraid plate, which dark side players can steal or acquire through deception, leaving Sharina and her children trapped in Anchorhead without any money to survive on.
Knights of the Old Republic offered players the option to commit a variety of terrible acts in the game, certainly worthy of the dark side of the force. These are far and away some of the most evil actions in gaming, even if it didn’t seem that way at the time. With the remake, it will become clear. This will not only be because society’s views have shifted substantially since 2003, but because the aliens in Aspyr’s Knights of the Old Republic remake will likely be more lifelike, and everyone else, with all their suffering and issues, will undoubtedly be more human.
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