Night of the Rakghoul (actually it's more like mid-afternoon)

 

I gave Knights of the Old Republic a try back in 2010, prior to the release of SWTOR. I didn't get very far, in part because the game did feel dated. That's not usually a problem for me – a lot of my favourite games come from the 90s or early 00s – but I hadn't played KOTOR back when it was new so I wasn't looking at it through any nostalgia filter and I didn't feel it held up. Mass Effect was also fresh in my mind at the time and that led to me drawing any number of unfavourable comparisons. Then there was the fact that Taris, the first world on which the game is set, just wasn't very interesting.

So it was with some apprehension that I came to that same world in SWTOR for the first time. Thankfully it's a big improvement on Coruscant.

This isn't my first time on Taris, but it is the first time I've ran through it on a Trooper, and so far I'm enjoying it. Like other worlds it does suffer a little from SWTOR's tendency to give each planet a very limited colour palette, which provides each with a distinct identity but can get monotonous, and all the more so because of the lack of any day/night cycle. I gave Neverwinter a pass on that because that game does deliver strong visuals in most of the zones. In SWTOR it just feels like laziness.

Taris mostly makes it work though, helped along by a far more open layout than Coruscant's endless corridors, and by the atmospheric music.

The story telling is also a lot stronger on this world. There's a sense that what's happening on Taris is more meaningful than the petty squabbles between pompous senators and petty criminals that characterised so much of Coruscant. The mission givers on this world actually seem to give a damn about what they're doing, whereas on Coruscant I rarely felt sold on the urgency of whatever it was I was being asked to do.

Even the cutscenes feel more energised, with some interesting camera angles that break away from the more or less constant use of shot reverse shot on the previous world. The action is often framed as if the character is being observed by someone or something lurking just out of sight, which plays nicely to the theme of Taris being overrun by the rakghouls.