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Headscratchers for the video game Knights of the Old Republic:

  • How did Juhani not recognize Revan from when she was freed from slavery?
    • It's possible that Juhani only saw Revan in his/her fully-concealing outfit, and didn't know what he/she looked like underneath it.
    • Juhani never saw Revan, only heard about him from the other Jedi on Taris.
  • What's the deal with the Dark Side character models? I don't see why me being a Darksider to the max means I have to look like I haven't been outside in a decade. There's no canonical basis for this. Hell, EU doesn't really follow this all that much either.
    • Emperor Palpatine disagrees with you.
      • Funny how Palpatine's deformity had nothing to do with the Dark Side and was a result of his fight with Mace. Anakin, Maul, and Dooku looked normal as well (aside from their eyes).
      • Yeah, all that lightning Luke absorbed did a number on his face, which really goes to explain why getting shocked by Force Lightning made Palpatine....oh. Yeah. Neither Anakin, nor Maul, nor Dooku had been using the Dark Side for long enough or with such strength to have it so heavily affect them, unlike a Dark Side Revan would have been.
      • Anakin was thus affected in Revenge of the Sith. And personally, I feel a little let down with a game like Jade Empire, where your character isn't physically warped by the force of his/her own evil.
      • That's the whole point, you shouldn't change based on how many Dark Side points you have, you should change based on how many powers you use that could effectively alter your appearance. In KotOR II, it's possible to use only Light Side powers, not neutral or Dark Side, and with the right conversational choices you can still look like you've been using force lightning for half a decade before you even get to the first planet! Even if handwaved with the Force altering the person's looks to fit their personality, it should be much more gradual, with the change happening more quickly based on how good or evil one is, not more extensively. If sexy Sith can convince people of things without even having to resort to force hypnosis, why must KotOR be otherwise?
      • You're asking a lot from a relatively simple old-school RPG system. And keep in mind that to go * all the way* Dark Side, you pretty much have to reveal yourself as the kind of person who doesn't give two shits what people think of you and actively enjoy having people dislike you (you know, doing stuff like insulting people, kicking them in the groin and laughing about it), so the appearance change is in-character for you. Remember that sexy Sith are almost invariably * lesser* Sith.
      • The earlier Expanded Universe material (West End system went into detail on it) explained it as a Dark Side side effect. I could also see it this way - the Force changes its user. They push the universe, the universe pushes back. A Dark Sider will gun for as much power as quickly as they can grab it, not allowing their bodies time to acclimate. Plus, the constant stress of the Sith way of life and its reliance on fear and anger is like being on steroids. A constant stream of stress hormones will screw someone up and make them look a lot more old and worn than they really are. Light Siders have the Good Feels Good relief on occasion, and are about slow, incremental increases in ability - which may (only partly) justify their still-reprehensible infant conscription.
      • Luke also seems to fit the trope. I mean, he still looks like he's 20 on the cover of Outcast, but on the cover of The Swarm War, he's aged. He's also shooting lightning. So he can even reverse his aging. The trait seems to be sexually transmitted, looking at the cover of Sacrifice.
      • Guys. Being Dark Side DOES affect your face. Anakin never used force lightning, and before he got his helmet he had evil eyes. Darth Maul's teeth can't possibly be that dirty really, and his eyes aren't natural for his race. Long story short: if you are evil and a Jedi, you will look evil. That's how it works.
      • I've never heard it directly confirmed one way or the other if the lightning actually deformed Palpatine or just stripped away some disguise technique he was using and showed what he actually looked like. I mean, yes, he said he was deformed, but... well, he lied all the time, and saying the horrible Jedi assassination attempt deformed you seems a pretty good way to score points with the senators. So I can very easily believe that long-term, extensive use of the Dark Side just turns you into a pale, yellow-eyed freak, and the Sith that don't look like that haven't been Dark Side long enough, aren't powerful enough in the Force for it to affect their bodies, or are able to hide the changes to their appearance somehow.
      • And the reason that main character turns all evil looking faster could well be related to how powerful he's supposed to be.
      • KotOR 2 pretty clearly showed that Maul WAS affected. Get Bao-Dur, a member of the same species as Maul, full Dark Side, and his skin color changes to match.
      • Except that Darth Maul's skin was naturally red from the start (the black was tattoos), so we know he wasn't affected in that sense.
      • Wait, what? What source said that? Bao-Dur's a Zabrak, just like Maul...
      • If you do your research, Zabraks, like humans, come in different colours: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Zabrak
      • The game came out two years before Episode 3, nobody involved knew about the lightning thing. This is the system the EU had in place before the movie retconned it.
  • How could Alek and Malak be the same person if Alek isn't remotely Malak's size?
    • It's possible that he had some sort of bodily-modification surgery to make him stronger. Hey, he might even have a suit of Vader-like armor under his clothes that bulks him up.
    • Or like many Sith lords he eventually bulked up on stims or by actually working out.
      • Some people view it as simply an unneeded retcon: tying the comics into the game when there is no need to do so.
      • Retcon? The KOTOR comics are so tightly plotted, and Squint was so blatantly set up as a Well-Intentioned Extremist from the start (not to mention other hints like the red suit), that he very likely was supposed to be Malak all along.
    • And while we're on the subject of Malak—Alek Squinquargesimus? Really? Really? I know, I know, stupid names are a Star Wars tradition, but It Just Bugs Me.
    • I think that's the point:
      • ... How the hell are you supposed to pronounce that!?
      • "Meat-bag".
  • How did Calo Nord survive the "that" in No One Could Survive That!? And why does Malak bother at all with sending him, a mere bounty hunter, to destroy the protagonists? Wouldn't sending Bandon immediately be a more logical choice?
    • Malak is as genre blind as they come. Obviously he feels obliged to follow the Sorting Algorithm of Evil, even though this makes no sense (the protagonists are clearly the biggest threat he faces, so he should send a bloody army of Sith right away, not keep them squirreled away in his base). On the other hand, Bastila and co. are making a point of staying low, so sending the best bounty hunter you can buy after them may not be such a stupid choice. Bandon may be a Jedi, but that doesn't necessarily make him good at finding people — and of course an army attracts attention. But there's still no excuse for not hitting you with everything he has after he does find you.
      • Partially true (in that he was Genre Blind) but still rather unjustified. You most certainly are NOT the biggest threat Malak is facing, unless you happened to miss the Galaxy-spanning WAR he is waging with the Republic — which is well on the way to losing but doubtless has billions of servicepeople — with even billions more waiting in the wings as conscripts, and hundreds of millions of ships. To say nothing of the thousands upon thousands of enemy Jedi. Your team is a strike force sent on a very important, but very, VERY limited mission which does not entitle directly confronting Malak's main war machine until the very end. Malak has other things to do until you start getting too close to the Star Forge.
      • He does finally become slightly more genre savvy towards the end: when asked if his whole army will be enough to stop the player, he responds 'Of course not, but it might slow them down'. Too little, too late, though.
      • At that point, he knows you're threatening him because you're right in his base. Before that, he may have suspected or known how powerful you were, but that wouldn't matter much if you weren't doing anything important. Then again, why not assume anything someone so powerful was sent to do was correspondingly important...
    • Well, if you want guessing... my theory for how Calo Nord survives: As soon as Malak is notified that a small freighter just got away from Taris, using the Sith governor's access code for the planetary defenses no less, he immediately sends troops down to its takeoff point to find out the very important piece of information he now needs — "Who was on that damn ship, and was Bastila one of them?" These troops would of course have to pick up and question any survivors to find this out... and Calo Nord was that survivor.
      • Despite being blown up and having half a ton of girders land on his head, you mean. It's still a ridiculous example of No One Could Survive That!, even without being bombed with the rest of the planet.
      • The girders didn't land on his head. A bunch of girders landed on * Davik's* head, leaving a bright flash and a lot of smoke and a two-second interval when we can see nothing. * Then* a bunch of girders fall down on the spot where Calo was standing the last time we could see him. If this didn't scream "Calo escaped when you weren't looking!" in neon letters ten feet high for you, you really are Genre Blind. Notice that Calo is nowhere to be seen when the smoke clears — the lack of a body labeled "Calo Nord" in that scene is very intentional.
      • Actally you CAN see Calo after the girders fall down, but the body is unreachable because of the said girders. When playing through a second time I took a good look, and it seems like the girders fell on his back, not his head... And like mentioned below, he has some VERY good armor...
      • Don't forget, a considerable number of people survived the orbital bombardment. Taris did recover, but the only way Calo Nord could have survived the thermal detonator, collapsing roof is by jumping out of the way and then heading for the nearest air raid shelter.
      • False. Surviving a thermal detonator even in the original, non-EU canon is VERY doable, albeit generally requiring quite a bit of luck. Calo has very, VERY good armor and likely suffered worse injuries during his early life as a slave. The main question is how he survived it when his facial area is more-or-less exposed, but given the severe wounds we have seen people come back from in the mythos, it isn't unbelievable. From what I remember, you can see that the girders fell on his legs rather than his back, and the ceiling itself likely didn't collapse altogether.
      • If Lord Malak wants to question survivors from a particular building, he's obviously going to stop bombing that building. As for the girders and being blown up — you did notice that Calo Nord's suit of armor is the second-most powerful in the game? He only has to have enough still-living bits stuck together to throw in the bacta tank, after all... he doesn't show up healthy again until a full act later. Besides, in a game where the main protagonist once survived a ship-to-ship turbolaser broadside through the window, Calo Nord got off easy.
    • Now, as to why he didn't send an entire Sith army after you right away... Simple: he didn't know where you were going past Dantooine, and he can't attack Dantooine until he's had time to assemble his fleet. Likewise he can't throw armies of Sith around at random, hoping to bump into you somewhere. So, he sends a very skilled tracker after you to try and find out where the heck you are and what you are doing. Later on in the game, once they've had enough reports on your movements to figure out a pattern and a likely ambush point on your route, then you run straight into Saul Karath's flagship. Funny how that works out.
    • It was really a win-win situation for Malak. He had one of the best bounty hunters in the galaxy right in his ship. He could save his own forces for another time and let this bounty hunter take a crack at bringing in Bastila. He succeeds? He's got his ticket to winning the galaxy and he can simply pay Calo Nord and send him on his way. If he fails? Well, that saves Malak the trouble of paying him, and then he can move on to Plan B.
  • Did the Outcasts survive? Did they reach the Promised Land?
    • To the first question: well, it is stated that the Undercity and surrounding areas may have possibly remained intact (only the surface of Taris was bombed). As for the second question, whether or not the Outcasts found the Promised Land depends on what the PC did in K1, so it's probably going to be kept ambiguous.
    • Of course, that all hinges on their Promised Land being real anyway. The whole thing sounded flakey.
      • The Promised Land is most likely real since you found proof of its existence (and the bigwigs having an underground bunker with supplies that can last for a hundred years is a pretty popular rumor, so it doesn't sound all too flakey either), and if the Outcasts did reach it, they are most likely alive. An underground colony has got to be the safest place on the entire planet.
      • This has been answered by Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO. The Outcasts did reach the Promised Land, and it was wonderful... for five minutes, before the planetary bombardment irreparably damaged it. The Outcasts struggled on regardless, and ended up dying out about a dozen generations later from radiation sickness and rakghoul attacks. There are some traces of them left in the form of holocommunications, but all that indicates is that they eventually lost even basic technology and knowledge. They really had no chance thanks to Malak's spurious decision to destroy Taris. Isn't learning fun?!
  • Why did the Jedi allow a team of non-Force-sensitives with no real affiliation to the Republic to travel with Revan? The Jedi are allegedly masters at everything, so why permit them a motley crew of unaffiliated support staff?
    • Well, Carth was heavily affiliated with the Republic, and his piloting skills ended up being essential. T3 was needed for his slicing skills. Zaalbar had sworn a Life Debt to Revan, so good luck trying to get him to go away. And Mission wouldn't want to be separated from Big Z, not to mention that she had a number of useful talents herself (stealth, demolitions, etc). The only one who really doesn't make sense is Canderous, since he did use to be a sworn enemy of the Republic and there was no guarantee that he wouldn't stab everybody in the back. However, he has a pretty good case for being "co-owner" of the Ebon Hawk, doubly so since everyone above him in Davik's chain of command isn't around to say he stole it (and, being a Mando, he could argue it's his by right of "spoils of battle" anyway)
      • The Council said that the reason that the only Force-adepts in the party were Revan, Bastila, and Juhani was that traveling with more skilled Jedi was likely to attract Malak's attention. Revan and Bastila both had to be present and Juhani's padawan status put her beneath the notice of the Sith leadership.
    • Jedi are not "Masters of everything." Kreia basically says point-blank in Kot R 2 that their only real skill is using the Force, without it they're pretty much helpless. Now, yes, you're playing a pretty well-rounded Jedi in these games, but that's not every Jedi, and even your main character can't have all skills to cover all situations. Rather the point of an RPG party. A small, well-rounded strike force is the best compromise between One Riot, One Ranger and sending in the entire army. Sure, a lot of them weren't necessarily loyal to the Republic, but that works out, too. Anyone noticing this group may assume it's just a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits, not a top-secret Republic strike force.

  • Why couldn't they just bash open the door leading to the Vulkar base? It seems to work everywhere else.
    • True, but if you made your approach that obviously, by the time you reached the swoop garage they'd have just picked up the prototype and carried it out the escape tunnel. Sneaking in via their back door lets you catch them cornered in the basement.
  • Even more obvious when Bastila makes her Heroic Sacrifice and you and Carth can't bash the door down to retrieve her. You have lightsabers of all things, why do you constantly have to make round trips or give up at all? The sequel at least handwaved it away with "magnetically-sealed" doors.
    • Unless the doors were made of the same material as the vibroblades, which can withstand contact with a lightsaber. It's also worth noting that even 4000 years later in The Phantom Menace we see that it still takes time for a lightsaber to actually melt through a blast-door.
  • How come the Sith never recognize the Jedi among the player's party, especially Bastila, except for that one smart Sith officer on Manaan? Bastila makes a big deal out of staying on the Ebon Hawk on Korriban, fearing the Sith would recognize her, but, well... they didn't on Taris and Manaan.
    • On Taris, there's really no choice — you're stuck in a city the Sith are practically doing house-to-house searches in to find you, so Bastila's even less safe hiding alone somewhere than she is with the entire group. On Manaan, there's an enforced truce between the Republic and the Sith, so the risk of her being yoinked off the street by a platoon of Dark Jedi is low. But on Korriban, she'd be in the middle of dozens of enemy Force-sensitives, on a planet where the Sith are the government and could literally throw an army at her if they wanted.
      • Juhani is a padawan, Jolee's been out of contact for 40 years and Revan always wore a mask. Since there are hundreds of Jedi at this point in history, the arrival of a few is not going to cause that much panic among Sith forces. Also, while the actual Dark Jedi will probably know her, not every single Sith trooper is going to know what Bastila looks like.
      • Then it makes no sense that Bastila follows you to Korriban in the first place. Even if she stays on the ship, the Sith are going to learn about her the moment some port inspector boards you.
      • Czerka runs the Korriban port under subcontract, remember? You only start running into Sith after you leave the docking bay area.
    • Also remember that what she's most afraid of is being recognized as a light-side Jedi by an enemy Force-sensitive... and there are way, way fewer of those walking around Manaan and Taris than there are on the home planet of the Sith Academy.
      • *That's actually not true.* What she says is that she's afraid of being recognized by recent defectors from the Jedi. On other Sith-controlled worlds, the odds of running into anyone who knows her personally are astronomical; the galaxy is a big place and there are only so many Jedi who met Bastila in person often enough to recognize her on sight AND defected to the Sith. But there are a few, and Korriban is where all of them go to train. She knows for a fact that there are several Sith here who know her, personally, because they've met her before in person. That's very different from random Sith grunts who are (canonically!) working off nothing but a written description and have no reason to expect her to show up.
      • So how come your even more light-side heroic protagonist can walk around freely and the most these Sith she's so worried about can sense is "There's something odd about you..."?
      • Really? The very first Sith Academy instructor you talk to picks up immediately on the fact that you're a Jedi. Only your "Yes, but I'm here to defect to the Sith, like a lot of other Jedi are this year" tactic gets you an invite to the Sith Academy rather than a lightsaber upside the head. The problem is that unlike you, Bastila can't use that tactic — the instant she sticks her head inside the Sith Academy, she's getting dogpiled and Fed-ex'ed straight to Lord Malak. Your identity, on the other hand, is somewhat less widely known.
      • That's not what happens; when you pull that with Yuthura Ban, she calls you a liar to your face and says that even if you're telling the truth about being a fallen a Jedi, she knows you're hiding some ulterior motive, and she specifically says she'll welcome you to the academy like anyone who has let-me-in-MacGuffin, if you can get one, because she won't give you one herself.
      • Note that sensing the bare fact that someone is Force-sensitive is a * lot* easier than sensing whether someone is Light Side or Dark Side, which frankly seems to be an entirely separate issue (as much as some people lump them together). If it weren't possible to hide your LS/DS alignment, Revan and Malak wouldn't have been able to get away with their grand plan in the first place, given that it's pretty clear they'd already started tumbling to the Dark Side long before they defied the Council.
      • The Force power that lets you actually see someone's "Force aura" as Light Side or Dark Side is stated to be very rare and something special the Miraluka keep to themselves. The fact that you can learn it from Visas in KotOR 2 is because of how special your talent is and your relationship to Visas; it's not meant to imply that all Jedi or even Jedi Masters can do it.
    • It's because the Sith know who she is, and you happen to be on a planet controlled entirely by them. It doesn't matter as much for Juhani, Jolee, or your character since you're all pretty much no-names to most Sith. Whether Bastila's light-side or not, if she got spotted, the whole planet would be on top of her before you could say "hey, that's Bastila!"
    • Also, Taris is a eucemenopolis with many billions of people on it. Most of the Sith troopers are there on police and patrol duty, and its well-known and acknowledged that police officers on such duty could easily pass a known fugitive within a few feet in a crowd and never realize they were there, unless they were actively checking every single face they saw - which, with the crowds on Taris, isn't going to happen.
      • Still, nobody bats an eye when a Jedi in full Jedi robes with a lightsaber on her belt walks on a supposedly Sith-occupied planet.
      • Gameplay and Story Segregation. I'm sure that lore-wise, she wouldn't go around showing everyone her lightsaber and would try to cover her face or just not make eye contact with any of the Sith soldiers.
  • Why do you need a map to get to the Eastern Dune Sea on Tatooine, even if there are markers everywhere that keep you on track?
    • Sand storms.
    • Cartographer's Guild. They're willing to resort to some pretty underhanded measures to ensure people use their maps.
  • Can someone please explain to me why Force-persuading witnesses to tell the truth (in a murder investigation!) gets you Dark Side points, but bribing them to lie in court does not?
    • I could give you a big, long, complicated, philosophical discussion about the Force, but essentially, Force morality works however the writer wants it to work, so really, the best answer I can give you is 'because'.
    • The morality in the courtroom thing is really contradictory, but that's because they intentionally wrote it to be a morally gray situation. It really * isn't* clear whether the "right" thing to do is to get Sunry a conviction (upholding justice and honor) or to get Sunry off (sacrificing the outcome of one court case for the sake of the countless innocents who will be harmed if the Republic loses its supply of kolto). Playing the case straight or trying to fix it are both morally neutral actions.
      • ...However, mind-raping people remains one of those things that inherently fucks up your mind and drives you mad and sucks you toward the Dark Side regardless of your intentions when using it — Dark Side use of the Force is like a kind of mind control that warps your personality to evil even when you try to use it for good.
      • And note that this gets even worse in the sequel, to the point where there seems to be a Gray Side of the Force. Once you go beyond simple good/evil stories, an actual manifested alignment like the one in D&D or the Star Wars RPGs becomes one of the more difficult elements to use well.
    • Bribing people to lie in court doesn't actually use the Force, correct?
      • No, but it's still an evil act.
      • It's a chaotic act, in D&D terms. Whether it's "evil" is much more up in the air, given that you have a * specific reason* to want to get Sunry off that has nothing to do with Sunry himself at all (if Sunry is convicted, the Sith get one step closer to seizing control of all of Manaan's kolto, and this is because the Selkath remain foolishly deluded about what the Sith are like).
    • The Jedi don't believe in the death penalty. If you disagree with them, you get Dark Side points.
    • Aren't we forgetting the in-game answer? Using the Force to unethical ends is darker than simply performing unethical actions. Using the Force to do it corrupts not only oneself, but the Force as well. It's stated early on that use of the Force for unethical purposes is dark.
      • In regards to the trial thing earlier: I'm told that cut content indicates that at some point the player would find a message that the Sith whom Sunry was accused of murdering had sent earlier to a superior, revealing that she was planning on killing Sunry on the very same day when he killed her. Perhaps the developers cut this element to add some moral ambiguity to the game.
    • Where did you get this? I certainly got DS points when I bribed the hotel manager.
  • Since you haven't been surgically altered or anything, why is it that almost nobody seems to recognize THE MOST INFAMOUS JEDI IN THE ENTIRE GALAXY, BIG BAD TO END ALL BADS, DARTH 'GOD DAMNED REVAN'!?
    • How badly was Revan hurt when Malak attacked his ship? Maybe bad enough for Bastila to rush him off to the nearest plastic surgeon quick smart. Remember the protaganist in Saints Row? You can give her a sex change and this is hand waved by her being blown up and needing surgery.
    • Because he always wore a mask, as seen in the cutscenes. The only people who know Revan's face are in on the secret.
      • If the explanation for nobody recognizing him is supposed to be the mask, then the real question should be why nobody was in the slighest bit concerned about a Jedi wearing a Vader-looking mask during his entire life. It's a plot hole no matter which way you look at it. The player character is both the most dangerous and the most famous person in the galaxy. Even if you don't assume news channels throughout the galaxy broadcasted a hologram of his appearance, which is a huge stretch, there are still dozens of Jedi walking around on Dantooine and dozens of Sith walking around on Korriban. Someone should have recognized the player character, and the Jedi Masters who brainwashed him should have anticipated that happening. Yet nobody does. But when it suddenly becomes convenient for the plot, characters do recognize you, like the isolated Rakata on the final planet, even though they couldn't have, because Revan was wearing his Darth mask when he first went there, whereas the player character doesn't.
    • He most likely didn't always wear a mask. But, all his charisma aside, Canon!Revan (as of Star Wars: The Old Republic) doesn't look that remarkable apart from his tattoos - odds are good that he simply changed his style and he gave people an uncanny "that guy resembles someone I can't quite pin down"-feeling at most.
      • Even as a child?! Remember that the Jedi Academy on Dantooine has several of Revan's teachers who reminisce about him, who teach him again without realizing what was going on. For this to make sense, Revan had to have been wearing a mask since birth that he never took off - EVER.
      • Not impossible. Just look at Michael Jackson's kid.
      • People develop and change in appearence. Sometimes the change is subtle enough that they are still recognizable even to acquiantences years later, and sometimes they change to such a degree that one's best friend or other family member wouldn't recognize them when looking right at them. We don't know to what degree Revan changed due to development, but it is very concievable that he looks fairly different than he did as a boy. To say nothing of the fact that Revan as Revan's true identity is probably not that famous. Only a handful of people from his generation and the elder ones would make the connection and many of them are either dead, defected, elsewhere, and/or in on the conspiracy. Revan is famous across the galaxy (and even canonically) as Revan and the "Revanchist." We do not know his canon name or appearence — and many even thought that Revan WAS his actual name (which we now know is not the case) — and we know this is a fictional world, fercripssake. How do you think somebody INSIDE that world would manage when the only connecting point would be his appearence (which was almost entirely obscured when he was in any way truly notable prior to the ambush), his rough physical profile (which he likely shares with a billion or so other people in the galaxy), and his voice (which we have little reason to believe was recorded with any frequency, much less dispersed with enough regularity for him to be instantly identifiable to every single layman even in the dregs of the galaxy like Anchorhead).
    • The only teachers I remember running into on Dantooine were the Council, who were the guys who altered Revan's memories in the first place. Even if I just never talked to the right people, it's not too much of a stretch to say that Revan as an adult looks different than he did as a callow youth, and he certainly wore the mask for most of his military career and his whole time as a Dark Lord of the Sith.
      • Pretty much what the above guy says. Anybody who actually knew Revan without his mask was in on it. These are Jedi, they can read minds. "He knew Revan's face, let's put him in the conspiracy.
      • Wait a minute, wait a minute. The Jedi at the council KNEW that the player was Revan. Remember the arguments you weren't privy to? The comment "We fear this may lead you down an all-too familiar path?" How they covertly steer you towards the Star Map? The only people of consequence who knew Revan's true face were the Jedi Masters that did, in fact, recognize you and use you to their ends. Heck, the whole POINT of a dark-side conversion later on is anger that the Jedi were intentionally misleading and manipulating you to achieve their own ends.
      • Yeah, weren't you paying attention to the Tomato in the Mirror? Everyone who would have recognized you was in on it. When you learn you're Revan, you ask Jolee about his loyalty, "What about you, Jolee?" "What ABOUT me? I already knew who you were!", so really, everyone who recognized you either was in on it or didn't give a damn.
      • Although in the above case Jolee wasn't in on the plan or knew Revan (he can't have been either, he's been stranded for 30 odd years), he was just a clever bastard and figured it out. Probably within five minutes of meeting the party.
      • Jolee was stranded on a planet that Revan went to only a few short years before to access the Star Map. More than likely, they met then.
      • Jolee would have known when you activate the Star Map, because he seems to be genuinely surprised that you can do without much effort where he failed for 30-ish years. Odds are he figured out your identity after that.
      • It should also be pointed out, no one expects to see Darth Revan walking around. Everyone except those "in on it" think he's dead. You know Michael Jackson's dead, but if you saw a guy walking around who looked like him, would you think it's him?
      • Does anyone in the world look like what Michael Jackson did before he died? The whole grown-man-with-unbroken-voice thing is also pretty distinctive.
  • Why did Revan and Malak decide to start wearing obviously evil outfits while they were still Jedi doing what they believed to be the right thing?
    • They looked cool.
      • The same reason Anakin is wearing straight-up black robes at the beginning of Revenge of the Sith. And then everyone is surprised when he turns Sith.
    • The prequel comics reveal that they wore toned down versions of their uniforms before they fully announced their Dark Side nature, not to mention being only vaguely associated with the Jedi Council as a whole.
      • Revan in his original guise as "The Revanchist" went around telling people he had to wear a mask and deliver his message anonymously because otherwise the Council would unfairly punish him for telling the truth. (And he was, after all, right, from his point of view.) It was only after the whole Revanchist movement turned Sith that people started speculating the mask was part of a Sith getup.
  • Why would the council even consider sending the unstable Juhani (who just recently failed the most important test of her Jedi initiation) along with a hopefully reformed Sith Lord and the most important war weapon the Jedi have? I know they can't send the whole Order, but one competent Knight (or, better, a Sentinel who actually exists for this kind of mission) wouldn't draw any more attention than a Cathar, I think.
    • Given that Juhani's still being alive at this point means that you must have passed your test, presumably they are slightly less worried about you going Dark Side than they would be otherwise. Also, they have empirical proof that of all the Jedi on Dantooine you might try to corrupt later, Juhani is not one of them — as you already had your opportunity to and never even bothered to try.
      • It would be pretty stupid for Revan to do anything evil like trying to corrupt Juhani while the Jedi were basically holding him prisoner. They can't discount the possibility that he was just playing nice while he was in their power and the minute he took off he'd be back to his old ways. Or if they believe that they can't be fooled like that, why would a newly fallen Revan not corrupt Juhani just because he didn't before he fell?
    • And they're right to put their faith in Juhani, after all — if you go Dark Side, Juhani is one of the party members you have no chance of converting to your side and that you have to kill.
    • Cynical Translation: She is well and truly indoctrinated, and due to pathetic fighting skills, she is therefore useless for anything besides endless self-pitying monologues. Another reason to go to Kashyyyk first.
      • Right. Because it is of absolutely no use whatsoever to have a fairly competent Jedi who by enough counts has survived quite a bit of hell and who by any count succeeded in defeating and severely wounding her Master. Not every Padawan can come anywhere close to accomplishing that.
      • While I agree with you here is one thing I'd like to point out: The game implies Juhani's master let her win to test her dedication to the Light Side. Depending on what dialouge path you go through, Juhani herself will point out how arrogant she was being to think she could actually defeat and critically wound a Jedi master when she was still a novice.
  • Why didn't Malak destroy the Jedi Enclave earlier?
    • It was on his to-do list, and he wasn't in a secure enough position until recently.
  • What kind of Sith name is "Darth Bandon"? I mean, don't they take new aliases after the "Darth" title exactly to avoid that kind of idiocy?
    • Hey, at least it's better than the Legacy Sith names. Darth Krayt! Darth Talon! Darth Kruhl!
      • Darth Krayt named himself for the firce, deadly, legendary draconic beasts of his homeworld. Seems like the right sort of thing to inspire fear.
    • Besides, Revan and Malak started the "Darth" bit, but didn't take aliases; their given names were apparently ominous-sounding enough. It was the Traya/Sion/Nihilus generation of Sith that followed that paired aliases with the "Darth" honorific.
      • "Darth" apparently comes from a Rakatan word meaning "Emperor", or something to that effect. And Revan and Malak rediscovered the Rakata. Makes sense, right?
      • The theory of Rakatan origin has been Jossed by the KOTOR comics, which show that the word "Darth" was in use before Revan became one.
    • That's contradicted by the comics (and not stated outright by the games). According to the comics, Malak's real name was Alek (not too clever with the alias, granted) while Revan's real name is... conveniently never revealed. His alias derives from his sobriquet, "the Revanchist". Pretty transparent, but still not just using their real names. Darth Bandon, on the other hand, is just an idiot. At least it wasn't Darth Barry. And we can all be glad that Carth wasn't Force-sensitive, if you get my drift.
      • a) We don't know Darth Bandon's real name. b) Bandon = Abandon. As in he abandoned the Jedi. See? Makes sense.
      • I say half-right. Bandon = Abandon. But in the definition of "Audacity". In-Universe the Audacity to become the Apprentice of the Dark Lord of the Sith. In my opinion, the Audacity to consider yourself a primary character.
      • Bandon means disposal or control, which fits with the nature of the Sith.
      • Given that he's a character with no backstory that exists to show up and get killed, you can see why they didn't bother with a cool name.
      • I also consider that the original Darths (IRL I mean, not in canon), were both named similarly to Bandon. Darth (In)Sidious, and Darth (In)Vader. So I personally think that Darth (A)Bandon is more in tune with the originals than most.
    • Am I the only one who keeps reading that as "Darth Brandon"?
      • No.
  • Why does Jolee Bindo have a "neutral" stance to the Light and Dark Sides, even though he emphatically shouts down any "dark" actions you might take, to the point of sending his own friend to be executed for a (somewhat justifiable) murder?
    • Jolee does * not* "send" Sunry to be executed. Jolee expresses immense disappointment and contempt at Sunry's actions, but remains ethically torn about what the right course of action is (given that it's not just his friendship at stake but the Republic's position on Manaan). No matter what you decide to do in the court case, Jolee tells you that he understands why you did what you did but wishes there could've been a better way.
    • Jolee is Chaotic Good. Since KOTOR games have only one Karma Meter (light/dark), "chaotic" and "good" probably cancel each other out.
      • You cannot meaningfully explain an abstraction with another abstraction. D&D alignment is just as ridiculous as Light/Dark.
      • And, no, he isn't. Jolee isn't a member of the Jedi Order, but he actively tries to respect the Wookiees’ customs, wants the Republic to succeed, and is willing to take orders from the Main Character. Where's the chaos?
      • The fact that he went to Kashyyyk in the first place. He actively chose to neither help the Jedi try to hold the Republic together or the Sith to take it over; he chose to withdraw and do nothing. And * actively choosing* to withdraw and do nothing when you've spent all your time gaining the power to intervene on one side or another is what makes you Gray.
      • This might make sense, except that playing the game, you often get Light Side Points for "chaotic" actions, such as using terrorism against Czerka.
      • The LSPs are for using minimum necessary force against bad people. Wantonly killing Czerka employees who haven't opened fire on you yet is a DSP-gaining action.
      • I think it represents Jolee's following of the Potentium view of the Force, enabling him to use both light and Dark Side powers equally.
      • Jolee is not a follower of Potentium. He does not question the existence of the Dark Side.
      • Aye, I don't believe it had even been named yet. But he DOES use Dark Side powers (or can at least), which is more than halfway there.
    • Jolee is actually a little bit light-sided. Also, being neutral doesn't mean that he doesn't care what happens. He's not a saint, but he doesn't have to approve of killing innocents.
    • Considering that most of the truly Dark actions you can undertake tend to be the actions of a psychotic killing machine, you don't really have to be a good person to find them objectionable.
    • No matter how much he talks about being done with the Jedi, Jolee still considers himself a Jedi deep down. He says as much when Sunry admits to murdering a Sith agent in cold blood and again if you turn to the Dark Side at the Rakata temple.
      I am a Jedi, Sunry.
      I am a Jedi, and I will never bow down to a Sith.
    • Jolee is a Gray Jedi, like Anakin Solo later becomes. He knows that both sides exist, but believes that there must be balance between them.
      • Except that Jolee usually approves LS aligned actions and he disapproves DS actions. And he tries to kill you on the Rataka Temple when you accept Bastila's offer.
      • Jolee disapproves of DS actions but he will occasionally acknowledge they are necessary. He asks you to avoid killing the Czerka employees if you can, but then muses that maybe killing them wouldn't've been so bad — and if you * do* kill the Czerka employees he basically accepts it. This is nothing like the kind of lip you get from Bastila for Dark Side or even neutral actions.
      • Maybe Jolee is using the "do as I say, not as I do" principle, in as much as Jolee knows he's grey, but he is determined to make sure that he man knows to once have been Revan is not going to become dark again.
    • Jolee follows the Light Side, but not the Order. He doesn't like the Order as he disagrees with some of their positions, particularly those on love and attatchment. He does what he wants to do, and isn't going to let anybody tell him any differently. He believes in the Republic, but the Order is too restrictive. Mostly he wants to be left alone, with a "screw everybody else" philosophy, but not a "kill everybody else" philosophy. To put it simply, there's Lawful Stupid and Chaotic Stupid, Jolee is in the middle, leaning towards good, and considers the council to be the former.
      • Note that Jolee's stated reasons for following you around are that he was bored on Kashyyyk and he's curious to see what becomes of you. He follows you around with full awareness that you're Darth Revan and you might revert to Sithhood at any time but, unlike Bastila, sees no need to desperately try to force you to stay in the Light. (One might surmise he's old enough to have made his peace with the idea that following you might mean death.) He does * not* actually care all that much about killing Malak and openly rants to you about how he thinks all these life-and-death Light-and-Dark struggles are a waste of time, and no matter what you do eventually your choices will be canceled out by someone else's. (And, hey, in KotOR 2 it turns out to be true — Light Side or Dark Side Revan, the galaxy ends up looking about the same.)
      • On the whole true, but with several minor falsehoods: Bastila did not so much see no need to desperately try to force you to redemption — she clearly did if you speak with her — it's just that her own stability and loyalty to the Light was starting to fall down beneath her feet and thus she was increasingly in no position to force HERSELF to stay on the Light Side (even when you YOURSELF are Light), much less a fanatically Dark Revan. And Jolee certainly doesn't believe they are pointless, only that they are needlessly costly and bloody.
      • If you take Jolee and Carth around in the same party, they'll get into an argument about the importance of the current war. Jolee says himself that he cares about the Republic and doesn't want Malak to win, but he also knows that even if Malak does win that things would sort themselves out in time, so he doesn't worry about it as much as the others do. As for not worrying about death, his story about the boy and the snake basically sums up his feelings on that subject.
    • Jolee believes (as do followers of Potentium) that the Force itself does not have a Dark Side, but that its powers can still be used for evil, which originates in sentient beings independent of the Force. They belive that any Force power can be used for evil (even supposedly Light Side ones) and that supposedly Dark Side powers can be used without fear of corruption, as long as the intent isn't evil.
      • Doesn't work. He continually talks about the light and Dark Side and even says that the Dark Side can never be truely defeated.
    • Jolee is a Light Sider, but he's less puritanical about it than Bastila et al. A fair few older Jedi in the Star Wars universe seem to end up a bit more relaxed. Qui-Gon Jinn was a Light Sider, but he broke the rules a lot and Yoda is hardly a paladin. Jolee is just an irrasible old man that has no time for the Order these days, but still would prefer the light.
    • Unlike the traditional Jedi, Jolee doesn't use the Dark Side/Light Side distinction as a moral criterion in itself, but he's neither blind to it nor to the implications of the Dark Side. He's a good person, if not a zealous one, so of course he objects to something that will turn you into a yellow-eyed homicidal maniac. He's largely on the Light Side to the extent that it implies moral goodness, but his position supposedly balanced in the exact middle comes perhaps more than anything from the fact that he does not entirely approve of the Light Side either, at least as the Jedi teach it. The Sith believe in drawing strength from your passions until you're just about tearing people's throats with your teeth for the fun of it; the Jedi believe in extinguishing all your passions out of fear some of them might lead you to the Dark Side. (This probably doesn't work, considering how many cases like Anakin Skywalker we have who snap precisely because of trying to hide emotions they can't get rid of and don't get to deal with openly.) It's easy to see why one might want to seek a middle ground.
    • Basically, he's a demonstration of why games eventually moved away from single-axis morality systems; they don't really make sense from a storytelling perspective and frame moral issues in a very weird way. He has a complex moral and philosophical outlook that he explains over the course of the game.
  • What in the bleeding blue blazes is up with Igear? "I want to stop myself and everyone else from living in a flawless paradise so I can continue to sell junk in a trash heap and get pushed around by the Sith!" "Cool, how much will you give me for condemning everyone here to a dirty, short, meaningless existence?" "Oh, a hundred credits."
    • Turns out, he was also selling Villain Balls. Meaning that he had to be in possession of several.
    • If I recall correctly, it was because he believed that the Promised Land was a wild goose chase.
      • You recall incorrectly. Igear tells you in his first conversation with you that 'there might be something to it'. But, since all of Igear's social status and power is tied up in that his salvage shop is the only source of credits to the community, and going to the Promised Land means that they wouldn't need his shop anymore...
    • He's a particularly over the top variant on the Card-Carrying Villain. That accent and a name like Igear, I mean seriously? He's obviously putting it on for professional reasons, to maintain his standing in the Guild of Shifty Shopkeepers or something. The pained innocence act is part of the guild charter.
    • I would agree if there weren't so many sad examples in our world right now of people wholeheartedly destroying the world just so they can maintain their position in it.
    • "Better to rule in Hell, then serve in Heaven".
    • To sum up, he's just generally a prick.
    • Or he got a glimpse of the future and figured that dying quickly of a bombing was a better deal than a slow, prolonged, agonizing death from disease, rakghouls, pollution, and radiation. No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.
  • The swoop track on Taris is regarded as the most popular race track in the galaxy, right? And when you win (only needing to beat a time of roughly forty seconds), the guy tells you that you're the best racer in twenty years. But then on Manaan and Tatooine, you have to beat times of about twenty seconds! I can understand that they have to make the one mandatory race easier, but if so, why hype it up as supposedly being better than the other two tracks?
    • I always saw it as that swoop accelerator making the Taris track look simpler than it really was. The next swoop bike you get was simply left aboard the Ebon Hawk by Davik, with no acceleration cheat to simplify things.
    • This troper always thought the Taris race was a longer track than the others.
      • It also doubtless helped that Taris — and its Galactic-standard Swoop arenas, racers, and the like — were blown up by Malak, which means that any other Swoop racers looking to compete would naturally gravitate elsewhere (in this case mainly to Manaan). Doesn't entirely account for the amazingly low times in backwater Anchorhead, but since Anchorhead is so out of the way, it is possible that nobody knows about any accomplishments the swoop racers there have made.

  • How is it that moral characters like Bastila and Carth with casually stand by if you decide to go around killing people for no reason? Yes, I know the council needs Revan to find the Star Forge and with the Exile, they're just banding together in troubled times, but you would think some of these supposedly good characters might actually try and physically stop you, not just dismiss your actions with a "You just better not do it again" attitude.
    • At least until the final break at the Rakatan Temple, the entire Dark Side playthrough of KOTOR is one giant What the Hell, Hero?. By all rights, as soon as Bastila starts seeing you performing every depraved, psychotic action in the book for virtually no reason except sadistic fun, she should be warning the council that the plan is failing and you're on your way back to the Dark Side. But, of course, she doesn't. The entirety of KOTOR as a Dark Sider feels like a school play where everyone else is going by the script and you're the pain in the ass kid who just makes up lines as he goes, no matter that they violate the entire spirit of it. Except the play keeps going as if it never happened. KOTOR II was much better about this.
      • "The play" took care to mention that Bastila is being drawn to the Dark Side herself, through the mental bond her and you share. This is how Malak gets into her psyche in the first place. (And in the Light Side version, she's vulnerable to him because of all the guilt and self-doubt she's carrying over having violated the Jedi Code by falling in love with you. Or if you're playing some kind of Dark Side psychopath romantic, she's got both. Underneath that icy exterior Bastila's head is simply not on straight for the middle third of the game, no matter which way you slice it.)
      • It also helps that they to a very large degree probably have no choice in the matter. The main objective is and always has been to find out where the frell the Sith are getting their seemingly limitless war material and shutting it down, because if that fails the war is entirely lost. The increasingly evil nature of their commander is likely to be a concern, but can anybody really do anything about it? Bastila is already slowly coming undone, HK-47 ENJOYS it, T3-M4 probably doesn't know one way or the other, and everybody else probably is suffering from a combination of "what the hell are we supposed to do?/What the hell CAN we do?", "Focus on the mission, that is more important", and "Better to keep an eye on him to be able to intervene if necessary (yes, that is Genre Blindness, but it is hardly irrational)." And what ARE they supposed to do? You effectively command the ship and order everybody to and fro; you pick the destinations, you pick the gear, you pick the crew. Suddenly shipping out back to Dantooine or even Coruscant without warning would likely tip a DS Revan off and have him do something unpleasant and — possibly worse — might tip MALAK off. And for all we know, perhaps somebody DID call the Jedi Council when Revan was away only to get the word that Wait and see, because we will be able to deal with this problem after the mission is complete.
    • In KoToR 2, it’s explained that the Force Bond the Exile forms with the party compels them to aid you, and doubles as an emphatic link.
      • Case in point: if you get pissed off and kill a guy after breaking into his house early on, Atton demands an explanation, describing being 'suddenly filled with such rage and malice'; later on, Mira demands to know why she can't stop herself from killing the mooks you encounter, something she's loathe to do.
  • The Sith Academy on Korriban. Masses of wannabes are slaughtered just trying to get into the Academy, before training even begins. Still more are slaughtered during training, by failing tests or killed in petty feuds and power maneuvering. Master Uthar even declares that only one Sith will be selected from four apprentices vying for the position, and all the other three will have to wait another year before trying again. Given such an insanely selective training program, why is your average grunt Sith a complete pushover who couldn't make it through even one of the trials you finish? Furthermore, why are there gazillions of them on the Star Forge and elsewhere?
    • I think the Sith Academy was more about training Dark Jedi rather than basic Sith troops. After all, while they wore Sith officer uniforms, all the hopefuls you meet carry lightsabres and use the Force. Sith troops themselves are probably trained at military academies elsewhere.
      • Sorry, got my terms mixed up. What I meant by grunt Sith in this case was the Dark Jedi who you regularly encounter...and generally kill with only slightly more effort than the Sith Troopers. By the end of the game, you've very likely killed dozens, maybe hundreds, of these Dark Jedi. Could any one of them have made it through the training portrayed on Korriban alive? I doubt it very much. And even if they could, the 'one Sith a year' thing doesn't exactly fit well with the Sith Zerg Rush you get on the Star Forge. Gameplay and Story Segregation for the win!
      • Is it possible that there are other Sith academies dotted around the galaxy? After all, there's the academy on Malachor V. In addition, remember that many Dark Jedi in Malak's army were original regular Jedi who turned to the Dark Side. Presumably most of their ranks are made of fallen Jedi, not brand new ones.
      • Pretty much. A lot of the Dark Jedi you encounter in the game are simply that: fallen Jedi who were pulled away from the Order, either at the beginning by Revan or during the subsequent war. It’s worth pointing out that Revan apparently had a policy of bringing Jedi prisoners or potential converts to the academy on Malachor V and using the Dark Side powers there to break them and turn them.
    • The Korriban academy's teachings were probably altered to reflect Malak's viewpoint instead of Revan's once Revan "died”. In that case, Malak's whole schtick about brute violence makes a lot more sense if it’s some recently-adopted doctrine.
      • It is instructive to note that no one at the academy, not even Master Uthar, had ever met Darth Revan.
    • Very possibly the whole there-can-only-be-one thing is just Uthar's personal approach. There's probably other academies and the masters of those might run things differently. But Uthar's kind of a dick.
    • No matter what the dynamics were with the different Dark Jedi and the Academy, even if the Sith being trained there were to be the very elite of the whole Sith Empire, there's no way Uthar could have reasonably expected any student-wannabe to pass the final test he set. As part of it, you had to deal with two Terentateks at once. I'd be surprised if Uthar himself could have killed one. The only way it makes sense is if they didn't know about them at the Academy, but this isn't made at all clear.
    • The Korriban Academy was set up to train potential Sith Masters, not the low-level grunt Sith trainee-trash you run into on the Star Forge. The standard is probably higher on Korriban than at other Sith academies.
  • It's understandable that "contact nerve toxin" can bypass rebreathers (the type the party uses to become immune to the poison status) by infiltrating the skin, but that's still no excuse for having the freakin' two possible droid party members in your party suddenly "short-circuit" when Jorak Uln releases the gas trap that knocks out the PC's party, just wtf...?
  • How is it that on Manaan, if you leave the Sith embassy, you get arrested by 3 Selkath with handguns? I kind of thought that Revan would be able to kill 3 little fish with dinky pistols... or maybe he/she was just very obedient of the laws.
    • There's a dialogue option you can choose, where you try to resist arrest. It's not the three measly Selkath that Revan would be afraid of, it's the fact he/she would have to fight his/her way through the entire facility, plus turrets that tend to kill you in one hit. It'd basically be the entire planet versus you.
      • This troper honestly believes that getting to fight your way through the entire Selkath army to get back to your ship would not only have been feasible, but probably been a Moment of Awesome, letting you get revenge on the annoying fish.
      • And what happens when they lock down the Ebon Hawk's hangar before you get there, cutting off your escape route? Revan may be strong, but come on, everyone has their limits, s/he's not going to be able to fight every single guard in the entire city at once.
      • Considering you killed half the population of the Star Forge by yourself, I humbly disagree. Besides, those bloody Selkath need to die.
      • So Revan's just a Invincible Hero then? Yay...
      • How did you get Invincible Hero from One-Man Army?
      • Sure, great, wipe out all the Selkath. Now the Republic can't get Kolto. And so Roland Wann won't send you to the underwater base. So you can't find the Star Map. So you can't complete the game. Moment of Awesome, sure. But completly fucking up the story, both Light and Dark.
      • Except Revan could have just cut his/her way down there for him/herself. He/she was enough of a badass to do it. Vader could cut his way through an entire army on a bad day, and he was nothing to Revan. Revan isn't an Invincible Hero, he/she's just a massive badass - and the Selkath aren't very strong militarily, despite their flaunted neutrality. They wouldn't be able to do shit to stop him/her from doing exactly as he/she liked, at least once you're later into the game, so if you visited Manaan later in the story there's absolutely no reason you couldn't just kill every Selkath that got in your way, Destroy Droid every turret and war machine that tried to stop you, force Wann to tell you what he knows, go down there, get the Star Map however you choose to do it, and leave the planet smoking while you fly away cackling and sipping a Dark-side Martini. It's quite possible, it's just too much to ask from an old-school RPG like this.
      • And then you get down to "Well why doesn't Revan just One-Man Army his/her way into the Sith Academy on Korriban (or just fly into the Valley of the Dark Lords and blast open the door to the Star Map)?" or "Why doesn't Revan just take over the Leviathan?" or "Why doesn't Revan just Mind Rape the Sand People into taking him/her to Tatooine's Star Map?" or "Why doesn't Revan just cut through Czerka's barrier on Kashyyyk?" or "Why couldn't Revan just Force-jump up to the landing platform on the Rakatan temple?" (or anywhere, for that matter) C'mon. It wouldn't've been much of a game if we could just *ahem* Force our way to the things we wanted.
  • No aliens are allowed on the top level of Taris. So, how can I walk around with Mission and Zaalbar in my party without getting bothered?
    • Several inaccuracies: aliens are legally allowed, or have you forgotten the aliens who live in the same apartment building as you, or the one you help rescue from those kids on the street? Now, aliens are normally discriminated against and harassed in the Upper City, but given that you're a very formidable person (who depending on what point in the game you're in is publicly known as a master duelist, a badass swoop rider, a top-end bounty hunter, or all of the above) most Tarisians are probably not going to want to hassle your friends. The part where Zaalbar's a freakin' Wookiee and both him and Mission are visibly packing heat would also serve to deter casual bigots, given that most Upper City residents aren't armed.
      • Even then, there are a few people in the Upper City who will speak poorly about Mission and Zaalbar if your bring them with you. Like that man who hangs out near the elevator, talking about the "evil of aliens".
    • The protocol droids in the Upper Taris streets explain it all. Aliens need a licence in order to visit the Upper City. The Sith promised to uphold this law. Most importantly though, the Sith aren't enforcing this law; the protocol droid notes he hasn't seen anybody arrested for it.
  • Furthermore, after getting Bastila, how do none of the Sith on Taris recognize her? Other planets I can kind of get, but on Taris, she's the only one carrying a lightsaber, and the Sith are looking specifically for her.
    • Given that even the Sith Governor (who is a Force-Sensitive Sith Acolyte) didn't recognize Bastila even while looking straight at her, apparently Malak didn't pass out a good description of her to his troops... which is ridiculous, as him and Bastila were students together at the Dantooine Jedi Academy. I guess we're supposed to believe that Bastila is taking care to keep herself disguised or with a bag over her head as long as she's on Taris, even if the graphics and equipment selection totally don't support this. Ah, gameplay vs. story, the eternal battle...
      • Then again, judging from the slackness of Lieutenant Party Girl (or Party Guy) and how easy it was to steal their uniform, the Sith ground troops on Taris are obviously not their best and brightest.
      • Neither were those in charge of defending the planet in the first place considered "grand military stratigists".
    • Taris is a ecumenopolis, a city covering an entire world. It has tens of billions of people living on its surface, and the average Sith soldier patrolling the streets would lose interest in checking every single citizen's face somewhere between a hundred people and twenty thousand, which would be somewhere in the first hour, and they've been fruitlessly searching for her for weeks. Sith soldiers would probably pass within five feet of Bastila and not even notice her presence, let alone recognize her.
    • Speaking of the Governor, why do you put someone who hasn't even gotten a lightsaber yet in charge? I mean, why not Bandon?
      • Bandon's got more important things to do than play governor of a planet under temporary occupation with the Dark Lord himself already on-site.
      • And it could also be a "test of competence"— perhaps even the equivalent of the final test you go through at Korriban — for him: can he handle the occupation of a planet and find Bastila?
  • On Taris, I personally thought that siding with the Black Vulkars should have gotten you at least a net zero alignment gain in the end. Now, Gadon Thek is certainly a more benevolent figure than Brejik could hope to be, but beneath the leaders, even where the Hidden Beks are concerned, they're still criminal organizations. They're defined as 'swoop gangs,' the SW equivalent to biker gangs, which are engaged in a turf war over the Lower City. In the first few seconds of entering the Lower City, you're witness to a brawl between Vulkars and Beks, and the Beks are shown to be just as willing to kill the Vulkars as the Vulkars were willing to kill them. On top of that, it's made clear that the two gangs essentially have the same goal: win the swoop race, eliminate the rival gang, absorb the lesser gangs, and take over the Lower City. Both the Vulkars and the Beks were willing to use illegal engine parts to tip the odds of winning in their favor. The Beks sent you into the base knowing that you would have to kill the other gang's members to get at the prototype accelerator. However, no matter who you sided with in the Vulkar Base break-in, you end up having to kill Brejik. Which outcome is most favorable? The one where sided with the lesser of two evils, which ended with them becoming the dominating criminal force in the Lower City, or the one that required you to side with a less ethical party in order to wipe out the hierarchy of both gangs, clearing the Lower City of its dominant criminal presence? You decide.
    • If you side with the Vulkars, you do so with the clear intention of assassinating the Beks leader with no provocation. As Yoda says, a Jedi never attacks, only defends. You do technically end up wiping out both leaders, but Revan never intended to deliberately take out Brejik, he attacked, Revan defended him/herself.
      • That holds true for Brejik, but what about the rest of the Vulkars? You basically waltz into their base like you own the place and then slaughter everyone who attempts to resist this invasion of their territory. Yeah, a light-sided Revan didn't go there specifically intending to kill anyone, but it had to be somewhat clear that that was where things were heading. True, the Vulkars don't give Revan much of a chance for diplomacy, but would you want to wait to see if the guy who just killed your guard Rancor just wants to talk things out?
      • The Vulkars were openly dealing in slave trading. That puts them pretty high up on the Jedi's list of "people whose faces need to be lightsaber'd."
      • Not to mention how it is stated that the Vulkars attack people on sight in the street, without caring who they are. Besides that, you do not even kill all the Vulkars in the base, at least if you’re fully Light Side anyway, as the one Vulkar who was from the gang back before Brejik took over surrenders to you when you start fighting him.
    • Crime is a sociological factor. You can't simply stop it. You wipe out one crime group, you get another one moving into its place, or another one forming in its place - one you don't control. Wiping out both the Vulkars and the Beks leaves a power vacuum, and anyone can come in and take over. Better you have your Neighbourhood-Friendly Gangsters in charge than an unknown.
      • Killing the leaders of the gangs may be removing criminal leadership, but in the end, it will destabilize the area. Furthermore, the Beks are a relatively benign and "good" organization (for criminals). Removing them means someone more ruthless will rise to power.
      • The spin-off comics offer some meta that helps; during the Mandalorian occupation of Taris, the Beks were La Résistance, actively supporting the Republic in a guerilla war while the Vulkars were taking advantage of the mess for fun and profit. The Beks are the closest thing the Lower City has to a citizen's militia and the only "law" down there other than Davik's racketeering.
  • What's the deal with swoop racing? It seems more dangerous than podracing; the times you have to beat are Olympian in challenge, and the tracks seem to scream "death trap" especially in KOTOR II.
    • The biggest danger in Podracing is the unknown. For one thing, there's 18 compeitors at once instead of individuals going for time. Secondly, the tracks are usually outside, and thus prone to external hazards (like Tusken Raiders).
    • Some people just like dangerous sports. Although in all fairness, podracing definitely seems more dangerous to me. True, there are traps in swoop racing, but too much damage and you simply drop out of the race (unless you're using a prototype accelerator which will explode after too many times, but that's technically illegal anyway). In podracing...well look at The Phantom Menace. Eighteen racers started, only four survived.
      • And one of those survived only because his pod failed on the starting line.
  • If the bombing is going to take such a long time to set up, why not get as many troops as possible out in that time? Malak I could get, but Karath is a different story.
    • Were you paying attention when Malak gave the order? Karath was clearly disturbed about the order, but Malak essentially threatened to kill him if he didn't follow his orders.
    • Because Bastila might escape in the interval. Which she did anyway. And Malak is a jerk but is also Supreme Commander of the Sith Fleet.
    • They were trying to get as many troops out as possible. However, having an army large enough to occupy a eucemnopolis just pick up and leave inside an hour is slightly difficult.
      • If you check on YouTube, there's a cut scene with Dead Eye Duncan on Manaan describing how he escaped from Taris by hitching a ride on a transport meant for Sith troopers escaping the planet. So yeah, they were trying to get them out, but if you have to sacrifice an army of your own henchmen (and an entire planet of civilians) in order to win the war, then that's what you've gotta do.
      • ^ Ok, so they do attempt to minimize casualties according to cut content. Question answered.
  • So, KOTOR 3 is going to be a MMORPG? (Or better: there won't be a KOTOR 3, and the closest thing we'll get will be a MMORPG?) Anyone else wonders why? The first game was quite simply a triumph, and even the second, although released too soon while still incomplete, was far from a bomb and was generally well-received. I think it's pretty safe to say that a KOTOR 3 RPG would sell well, so... why?
    • First of all, the upcoming MMO is not technically KotOR 3. It's called Star Wars: The Old Republic. No mention of knights anywhere. Secondly, it's set three hundred years later, so you can't really see it as a sequel in terms of plot. That being said, one of the guys at Bioware considers this to be "as good as KotOR 3 right up to KotOR 12", based on the amount of content. It's possible that Lucasarts does want to bring KotOR back, but are reluctant to start a new sequel so long after the previous one. My guess, or at least my hope, is that the MMO is meant to test the waters and see if the majority of people are still interested in the Old Republic saga. Right now, it's a wait and see kind of thing.
    • Once you buy a single-player RPG, it's yours and you don't have to pay anything else. A MMORPG allows to charge the players a monthly fee.
    • The Revan novel is essentially KotoR 3, wrapping up the loose ends from KotoR 1 and 2 (where did Revan and the Exile go), and leads into SWTOR. The development of SWTOR started right around the time Star Wars: Galaxies was really going downhill, and LucasArts yanked Sony's license shortly thereafter and gave it to Bioware. It may have been a case of Executive Meddling: "Make us an MMO because the old Star Wars MMO is tanking, and we want to keep that market open."
  • Saul Karath. When Malak tells him to nuke Taris, he seems hesitant, if not outright horrified at the prospect of murdering billions (many of his fellow Sith, especially), yet when he's interrogating you on the Leviathan, he gleefully talks about how awesome it was to kill everyone on Taris and Dantooine. What gives?
    • I'll need to replay that scene again, but from my memory he barely even mentions Taris. Not to mention that he's interrogating you; he's deliberately pushing your emotional buttons.
      • The only possibility I can think of is that it's a sign of him being corrupted by the Dark Side. At one point he tells Malak how the Star Forge is operating, perhaps he's been on the station itself and was tainted by its Dark Force energy.
      • His initial hesitation about bombarding Taris makes little sense anyway, given that he had already bombarded Telos two years ago. Perhaps actually devastating not one but two planets made him snap and finally made him easier to cope with it, discarding his Even Evil Has Standards hesitations.
      • We DON'T really know what his response to the order to blast Telos was, but even if he was OK with it there is a quantifiable difference between Telos and Taris: namely the latter as hundreds of thousands (at LEAST) of his men on it. And in addition to the likely corruption over time, keep in mind that (again) he was in interrogation trying to break you, so it is likely he was doing it. It also helps that he definitively is not a man renowned for strong wllpower or standing up to Malak's bullying (and god knows what the punishment for a "disappointing" interrogation would have been).
    • Fridge Brilliance: He's already in a spot of hot water with Malak over objecting to Taris's bombing, sending out Calo Nord, and the party's progress so far. Now, he's got two pain in the butt Jedi and his ex-lieutenant who openly wants to kick his ass (the feeling is likely mutual). The whole thing is being recorded and sent to Malak, so why not play being a complete Jerkass right to the hilt? (For this reason, Troper prefers the female playthrough. Karath would get skewered on a lightsaber if he does any permanent harm to Bastila, but to the Republic grunt who hates his guts? Fry, baby, fry!)
  • Where the heck are all those Dark Jedi coming from? In both games, you fight hordes upon hordes of them... despite being told repeatedly that Force users are exceedingly rare. WTF!?
    • This is the Old Republic. Jedi are a lot more common. That being said, exactly how many do you fight? There's a total of a dozen on Manaan, who were part of the critical Sith garrison/embassy there. There's three on Tatooine, three on Kashyyyk, and three if you include Bandon and his two homeboys, but those are simply hunter teams pursuing you in particular. Korriban has several dozen, but as it is a Sith world where only Sith go to, a high population of Dark Jedi is to be expected. The Leviathan is the flagship of the entire Sith fleet, so seeing a couple dozen Dark Jedi there isn't unusual. There are, at most, a hundred or so Dark Jedi that you fight on the Star Forge and Rakatan Prime. That totals up to, at most, about two-fifty to three hundred Dark Jedi you fight across the entire game. The Jedi Order consisted of tens of thousands of Jedi, not including the many hundreds of thousands of potential Force users they've never found, and not including the Sith. You're also deliberately stomping through locations that are either strategically important to Malak's war effort or locations where Dark Jedi would naturally congegate, which explains why you're putting your lightsaber through so many Dark Jedi faces.
    • TL;DR: There're a lot of Dark Jedi, and you're headbutting your way through specific places where they're commonplace.
      • Just going to point out that the game is set pre-Rusaan Reformation, so the Jedi’s entry requirements were much looser.
    • Master Dorak explains that the majority of the dark Force users in Revan's Sith Empire are former Jedi who had previously followed Revan and Malak in the Mandalorian Wars and continued to serve them after they found the Star Forge. The minority of them are Jedi who, as Kreia explains in KotOR II, were captured over the course of the war and purposely corrupted by Revan through dark teachings and energies from the Trayus Academy on Malachor V, which Revan was using as a secret training facility for his forces.
    • Extremely rare can be extremely relative. One in a million or one in a thousand or one in a billion doesn’t really matter all that much in a galaxy with a million inhabited planets, each with uncountable sentients living on them.
  • The pressurized environmental suits bug me a lot, because they have no logical reasoning behind them. In a civilization with laser guns, starships, and faster than light travel, one would think they'd have a better method of travelling around in the vacuum of space or underwater. We have more mobility underwater and in space with current technology that those clunky peices of crap. And it clearly wasn't for gameplay reasons as it was about as fun as a punch in the face. So, why were those suits so outdated?
    • They were being cheap. Really. The simplest and most realistic reason why they would have such crappy suits is that the Sith and the Republic are cheap.
      • You ever see the vaccuum suits the stormtroopers had in the Thrawn Trilogy? They're huge, but like Dark Troopers, they use a jetpack to get around swiftly.
      • While it's a very lazy Hand Wave, the "Cheap" explanation does have its good points. Think about it: where DO you use those hulking pieces of tripe anyway? On Saul Karath's flagship (where boosters would probably tip somebody off outside so they would take you out while you were effectively imobilized), in the underwater Kolto facility (where they are rarely used by all accounts and protection trumps manueverability, plus we don't know how far down the facility is, so the water pressure may in fact be several times greater than possible on Earth), and the Peragus mining facility (which is strategically located but also very run down and where spacewalks are almost certainly very unusual). In short, most of the places you use them, the people in charge (both in game and meta) probably didn't put a lot of thought into actually going out in them, or there were valid reasons for their inconvenience (either avoiding detection on Karath's flagship or preventing you from getting squashed like a bug potentially on Manaan). Yes, it's not the best explanation, but it IS one.
      • Another thing to mention, since it’s very relevant. We seem to be using the same suit for both, which is VERY amazing. As Futurama points out, a suit that can both withstand the vacuum of space AND the pressure of the ocean for as long and as well as the one we use in game does is actually pretty amazing. So what if it’s bulky and hard to move in, that’s some pretty advanced tech there.
  • Why does fighting Starkiller net Dark Side points? He is willingly making a choice to risk his life for what he finds to be "fun" with another person (you) aware and agreeing that one of you will die. What is so evil? Yes, you are breaking the law, but one dialogue explicitly says the banning of death matches was done under the current Sith martial law, and you don't get Dark Side points for all the many crimes you commit against them the rest of the game.
    • Because you're taking a life for no reason besides sport.
      • And for credits.
      • And because Starkiller has literally killed over a hundred people in his death matches. He's a criminal and the Dark Side points for taking him down when there is no other way to capture him are a bit silly.
      • Again: you are killing Starkiller for personal profit. You aren't defending yourself. Starkiller isn't trying to kill anybody. Hell, everyone he's killed was in a legal, consentual deathmatch. Killing someone for credits is wrong.
      • Actually, if you talk to Zax, he says that Bendak continued fighting on an illegal underground circuit after the ban, which is what earned him his bounty. The man's got a thirst for blood, and he'd probably continue killing if you didn't stop him. Chalk it up to the first game's Black-and-White Morality.
      • Starkiller is hardly a victim: he steps into the arena not just willingly, but enthusiastically.
    • Actually, death matches were banned years previously. There's no specific Sith law banning it.
      • There is a mention of new authorities doing it, Sith are a few weeks old.
      • Incorrect. It is explicitly stated by a few people that the Sith * CONTINUED* the old law, which means it was there before them.
      • Deathmatches had been banned for nearly ten years. That predates the Sith occupation.
  • The military strategy used by both the Republic and the Sith Empire is particularly bad (even by the First World War standards). Firstly, Bastila's Battle Meditation can affect the morale of troops on the battlefield, so the Republic stuffs her on one warship and sends it off to Taris, a world crawling with Sith troops and the main Sith fleet. Malak decides to stay in orbit around Taris while looking for Bastila (without using the local cops or bounty hunters) instead of simply jumping into hyperspace for Coruscant and seizing power, which would be easy given how bad the Republic military is at defending planets.
    • Taris was a part of the Republic, but was invaded and conquered by the Sith at roughly the same time they were ambushing Bastila's ship. Malak doesn't go rushing off to attack Coruscant because jumping headlong into the heart of your enemy's territory in the middle of his forces and smashing headlong into his strongest point is an act of monumental idiocy. Even if the Republic is losing, they've still got a massive fleet, and there's no way in hell he's going to be able to hold Coruscant from thousands of nearby worlds who will all be sending reinforcements.
    • Also, there were no local police, as they had probably been killed or relieved by the Sith during the invasion. Malak did have the local bounty hunters looking for Bastila - note the number of Davik Kang's men searching the area where the pods went down.
    • Haig, Plumer, Monash, Foch, Diaz, Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and Brusilov demand an apology for the insult because they didn't exactly HAVE the luxury of mobile warfare and had to build modern military strategy more or less from the ground up. And so does Malak, Revan, and the Republican bigwigs because you overlooked matters. For one, you are forgetting that the Jedi Council didn't SEND Bastila off to Taris when it was under occuption, and the pre-release website specifically noted that Taris was a Republican planet but VERY strategically isolated. The tutorial you play is the Sith Fleet's attack on the Republic Navy's forces arraigned to defend Taris, in which they thoroughly crush the defenders and land and occupy the planet AFTER you all have been forced to bail out. This is roughly comparable to VIPs being trapped behind enemy lines after a sudden and violent shift in the battle lines, so they certainly didn't plan to have her on a planet occupied by the Sith. From what little we DO see of Taris (with it being a massive city-planet with billions of people and a strict caste system) the Sith ARE trying to organize the locals to track down Bastila, mainly though criminal contacts. It's just that Taris is really, REALLY large and your party are the EXCEPTION in being able to access all three layers of the planet. And Star Wars — from the original series to the Knights of the Old Republic legacy and beyond — have shown that you cannot hope to topple the ruling galactic power by going straight for the heart and driving on Coruscant. Because even if you DID manage to take it, the surviving loyalists in the countless systems and planets and fleets around it will promptly cut you off from reinforcements and crush you. That is what happened to the Original Sith Empire during the Great Hyperspace War, Exar Kun's Empire in the Great Sith War, by all accounts the Tionese war back then, the Yinchorri, and PLENTY of others. The campaigns against the sitting government we HAVE seen turn out even remotely successfully — the Rebellion, the True Sith invasion of Republican space, etc. — have pretty much ALL been won by slowly chewing away at the power of the sitting government. Which means going for pretty much everything BUT Coruscant and the Core until you have conquered more or less the rest, at which point you can more or less do whatever the hell you want with Coruscant and the Core, as the True Sith and then the Rebels showed. Since Malak HAS to know that a direct drive on Coruscant would be unwise if not outright suicidal, he’s probably taking advantage of the advantageous position of his fleet to blockade Taris and search for Bastila, who is believed to be the ONLY thing preventing the Republic from dying outright, and solidify the occupation, regroup after the battle to smash the Taris defense fleet, monitor subordinates in other sectors, and generally wait and plan his next move.

  • Does it bother anyone else that your all-powerful Jedi warrior can miss while striking a door?
    • At first glance, yeah, it does look kinda dumb, but I guess what's really happening is that the character missed the lock, not the door. The lock would be a lot smaller after. Of course that does beg the question: why swing your swords around so wildly when you're aiming for such a small target.
      • Because you have to look awesome and deadly, no matter what your target is!
    • The reason this happens is because of the attack mechanics brought over from the d20 system, where a defence value doesn't always indicate how hard something is to hit, but how hard it is to actually damage it. It says you miss, but technically you're hitting, just in such a way that you don't damage the door.
    • And in case it needs to be pointed out, the reused animation is, of course, due to tech limitations and/or lazy programming.
  • So, you have to slay Bendak Starkiller in order to cash in on a government bounty. He won't fight you in the arena unless you beat everyone else and challenge him to a deathmatch. You can't Just Shoot Him because the cantina he stays in is full of autoturrets that will cut you apart. He specifically says that he doesn't leave the cantina because without the protection of the autoturrets someone might try for the bounty. All well and good, a nice Strictly Formula questline. So, you slice-and-dice the competition, challenge Bendak, he accepts, tells you it'll take time to set it up... and then walks out the freaking door. So tell me, why can't I follow him and shoot him in the head?
    • You can walk out after him, but he's gone by then. I suppose once he leaves the protection of the cantina, he runs away really fast.
    • He's a Mandalorian. Maybe he's got a jetpack and flew away.
    • If he had the jetpack, and could get away from the cantina with it, why didn't he do that in the first place?
    • He's a former death match champion and, since he's a Mandalorian, presumably a veteran of several wars. He could probably take a couple of guys who try to attack him when he leaves the cantina, but the more time he spends unprotected by the autoturrets, the more time for the people who want him dead to come after him in numbers too big for him to handle.
    • If I recall correctly, you get Dark Side points for killing him. Why is that? He's a wanted criminal, and has consented to a death match.
    • You don't get them for killing him, you get them for breaking the law — before the fight even starts.
  • The hologram pop-quiz in the Shadowlands of Kashyyyk. Giving the "evil" answers (accusing Zaalbar, leaving a city full of civilians to die) nets you Dark Side points. Now, that'd be fine and dandy if the fact that you answered the questions that way actually meant that you would do those things, but why can't I just be a Light Side character who is telling the hologram what it obviously wants to hear so it doesn't shut down on me? I suppose you could argue that lying is a Dark Side action, but none of the Jedi council have a problem with lying to you about your identity, and I don't think lying earns you any Dark Side points on any other occasion, unless the lie actually causes harm to the person. Here, it doesn't. In fact, it's not even a person you're talking to; it's just an information terminal. You're getting Dark Side points for tricking a MACHINE.
    • When you access the computer, it says stuff like "neural scanning" and "neural recognition complete". I don't think the machine is just talking to you, it seems to be actually reading your mind to find out whether you match what's in its memory banks. It would probably be able to tell if you're lying. So, in other words, you can't trick it, if you say it you really have to mean it.
      • That would beg the question of why the quiz is even necessary in the first place. That, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to get Dark Side points for saying you would do something. If you actually do it, sure, but if you just say you would and are telling the truth...well, that would mean you were Dark-sided to begin with. But it doesn't actually affect anything until you say it out loud? So really you're getting retroactive Dark Side points? I don't know. Karma Meters suck.
      • The quiz is necessary because the computer doesn't completely recognize you. It was programmed to recognize Darth Revan, but since you are Darth Revan with amnesia, it gets confused and decides to see whether or not you think like Darth Revan. If you give Dark Side answers, then you are thinking like Darth Revan and it acknowledges you. If you don't, it tries to kill you, you fight a couple of droids, and during battle you start thinking like Darth Revan which the computer detects and it acknowledges you anyway. As for why you get Dark Side points, the computer is basically giving you choices. Even a dark-sider can still choose to do something different, and every evil choice someone makes corrupts them further. It's worth noting that the choices the computer gives you haven't really come up before, like deciding whether or not you would turn on one of your most loyal followers, or allow one of your cities get wiped out to ensure victory. It isn't something your character would have thought about before, so it makes sense that deciding that you would act like a bastard would make you more of a bastard.
      • Wait, are you saying a good guy would be likely to lie? Light Revan holds onto his beliefs completely and utterly, without ever letting them go in the face of anything. Including a quiz machine. Dark Revan loves showing off how evil he is, so he does.
      • The game biases your choices as little as it can; you can play light-sided however you want as long as you get enough points. Agreeing about the machine detecting lies, though.
  • Dustil, Carth's son. "I don't believe the Sith are evil! Prove it!", followed by a search for some incriminating evidence. Here's a thought: why not just take Dustil down the corridor a bit and show him the room where the other Sith trainees are using living, unarmed prisoners of war for lightsaber and Force Lightning practice? How completely blind can someone be that they could spend any time at all on Korriban, much less do the things they're expected to do to enter and train in the Sith Academy, and not realize the Sith aren't entirely on the moral up-and-up? I could understand a bit more if Dustil was rejecting the idea of Good and Evil, but in-game he comes across as pretty insanely stupid.
    • Gameplay and Story Segregation again. Imagine those old adventure games where you had to go to impossible lengths and resolve tedious subquests just to get some Commonplace Rare item? That's one of these - the dev team did not think of everything here, bust just gave you one solution for a seemingly easy feat and you have to stick with it (but they learned, Bioware was a lot better in at the very least convincingly handwaving these issues away in Mass Effect).
    • Isn't he just acting like a brat to spite his father? That was the impression I got from it.
      • I figured he was being corrupted by the Dark Side of the Force. He was already justifying the Sith's actions quite a lot even going as far as justifying the Sith killing his mother. When you show him evidence that a friend of his was killed and he was lied to, he just couldn't keep the justifications up. Plus there is a dialouge option where you tell him to accompany you so you can show him what's going on, but he refuses because he doesn't want the Sith to see him with you.
  • The Sand People have one base at a clearly marked location with no anti-air defence. Why doesn't Czerka just glass them from the air? Hiring a few bombers seems more cost effective than the money you are given for killing single Sand People (who wouldn't last long with their homes destroyed).
    • The Sand People are stealing Czerka equipment. It stands to reason they stole Czerka anti-air weaponry too.
      • Why would Czerka have anti-air weapons? Are they going to be attacked by flying Banthas?
    • Or, alternatively, Czerka wants to recover their stolen equipment after the Sand People are wiped out enough to make it possible. Maybe they don't want to blow it all to smithereens.
  • How the hell do Mandalorians fight effectively with those helmets? Their helmets have preposterously long necks that gradually thicken as it goes down to meet the shoulders. Anyone wearing such a ridiculous, painful-looking helmet would be completely unable to bend their necks or turn their heads, only exacerbating the obvious peripheral vision issues they would presumably suffer from due to having T-visors. Apparently during the Old Republic era, only Mandalore himself was granted the privilege of having a comfortable and practical helmet.
    • They probably like to think they look hella cool in that armour.
    • Elastic material for the neck part? I'm pretty sure it already looks like they can move their necks at least a little when they're talking, though of course that could just be a game graphics thing.
    • They're Mandalorians.
    • One of the books says that Mandalorian helmets somehow have 360-degree vision, and the T-shaped visor is to make people believe that they can't see much. So that's not an issue. Batman's cowl in Batman Begins had an immovable neckpiece too, but he did just fine. S'long as you can see and fight in it, it doesn't matter how comfortable the armor is — and being Mandalorians, they care even less about comfort than other people.
      • Pretty much this. Using the old Magic VS Technology thing, Mandalorians are effectively the equivalent of Sith or Jedi, just on the technological end of the scale.
  • Why is the Scout class the one who gets the clothing that resembles Han Solo's outfit? Wouldn't it make more sense for the Scoundrel?
  • The effect on your bodily appearance I can accept, but why does going fully Dark Side give you evil underwear?
    • Going fully Dark Side gives you a 40% off coupon at Evil-Underwear-Mart, obviously.
      • It's so the game designers don't have to texture the Dark Side sickly appearance for your whole body.
  • Why does Saul even need to interrogate the PC on the location of the Jedi Enclave? It's no big secret. Malak knows it's on Dantooine — he was trained there, and he entered the nearby ruins with Revan in search for the Star Map.
    • He tells you immediately: He just wanted to see if you are willing to cooperate, and show you what happens when you lie to him. In fact, knowing him, it's not entirely unlikely he just wanted an excuse to electrocute Carth/Bastila.
      • Karath is holding you prisoner and Malak won't arrive for quite awhile. Why does he need an excuse to torture you all? Even if you tell him everything immediately he still tortures you all into unconsciousness afterwards.

  • Why does all the Light Side dialogue for the post-Leviathan having Revan and others referring to him/her as 'formerly being Revan'? Revan's new identity is just a cover and simply isn't real. His/her memories are coming back and, like it or not, he/she is Revan. Choosing to reject everything about the Sith and Revan's plans for the past few years doesn't make him/her no longer Revan. If anything, it just sends him/her back to the pre-Mandalorian War days when he/she was a Jedi. This Becoming the Mask aspect of the Light Side is really disturbing.
    • His/her new identity is real, From a Certain Point of View. All the lessons and experiences he/she had in the first part of the game were formed without his/her knowledge of who he/she was. Once his/her old memories returned he/she could recall who he/she was and what he/she did as both Jedi Revan and Darth Revan, but the game treats these more like memories from a past life rather than suppressed memories. So yes, he/she is physically still Revan, but his/her new self was never erased when his/her memories were restored and is still, for lack of a better term, the dominant personality. It's not a cover, at least not on his/her part, and he/she Became The Mask because he/she didn't know he/she was wearing one at all.
    • Also remember that "Revan" is not the person he/she was as a Jedi - "Revan" is his/her title as a Sith: the Revanchist. There are several places in which actively choosing to embrace or reject the name of Revan will affect your companions. The Jedi who -became- Revan had their own name and identity, which for gameplay purposes has to be kept secret.

  • Okay, a massive Fridge Logic moment here, but if most aliens like Wookiees and Rodians and so on all have subtitles because Revan and Exile can understand them, why doesn't T3 have subtiles when it's stated that the Exile learned how to understand astrodroids?
    • Because he's an R2 expy and it's funnier that way.
    • The player character understands the meaning, but not the words.

  • This is more about the out-of-game universe than an in-universe headscratcher, but.... Why does everyone make such a big deal about Revan being reprogrammed by the Jedi Council, when he was in fact reprogrammed BY THE EMPEROR of the true Sith previous to his rampage in the Republic (and subsequent Jedi-reprogramming)? In a way, it actually makes Kreia's statement that the Jedi Council simply "stripped away the surface and allowed the true Revan to emerge again" make sense. Especially if you buy into the idea that a Light-sided Revan in-game is canonical. So, in my mind, they weren't doing the right thing by what they knew, but in the grand scheme of things, they were.
    • Out of universe, Revan being reprogrammed by the emperor was something decided years later. In universe, it's mentioned that Revan didn't remember what the emperor did to him till after the events of Knights of the Old Republic, and if he didn't know that, then how would anybody else?

  • Why is that when you rescue Bastila after the swoop race on Taris, she initially doesn't recognize you? How is it possible, considering that a) you are Force-bonded to her, and b) she knows you are really Revan? Even if she of course doesn't want to tell you those things, why doesn't she just immediately say, "Oh, you're that person I deliberately selected for this mission right before we left"?
    • She does recognize you pretty much instantly. Watch the scene again. First she mutters about the Vulcars being idiots for trying to keep a Jedi prisoner, then rounds on you and stops herself mid-threat to go "You're - you're one of the Republic soldiers from the Endar Spire!" She almost didn't stop herself from saying Revan.

  • What was the purpose of the mission to Taris at the beginning of the first game? Whatever it was, it didn't go according to plan, but after that, when you make it to Dantooine, no further mention is made of what you and Bastila had been sent there to accomplish in any case. Instead, the Jedi council sends you to go looking for the maps to the Starforge, one of which, conveniently enough, is located a short walk from the Jedi enclave on Dantooine. Why didn't they just send you on that mission in the first place? What was the in-story purpose of the mission to Taris?
    • I think at that point, the Council was still hoping that the Republic could fight Malak conventionally. Bastila was sent to Taris to reinforce the Republic side of the battle with her Battle Meditation, and you were assigned to her ship under the guise of a lowly grunt so she could monitor you. Only when it became clear that a) Malak was getting massive fleets somewhere that would soon overwhelm the Republic, not to mention have just bombarded Taris into smithereens, and b) your memories and connection to the Force were resurfacing, they had no choice but to reluctantly reinstate you into the Jedi Order anyway, then send you — and Bastila to monitor you — on a covert mission to investigate the origin of Malak's newfound armada.
      • That still doesn't make sense. The war had been going on for two-and-a-half years by that point. It had to have already been clear that Malak, and Revan before him, had been getting huge fleets seemingly out of nowhere. Also, what Republic side of the battle at Taris? There was no Republic fleet, just one ship, the Endar Spire. And it certainly doesn't look there was a ground war of any seriousness, since there's no visible damage anywhere on Taris.
      • When Revan was running the war, he didn't attack any manufacturing planets, which would lead the Republic to think he plans on capturing them. Revan didn't use the Starforge to its full power, so the Republic wouldn't be dealing with a full onslaught of a never ending supply of ships.
    • I think that there was not supposed to be any real mission to Taris. The Endar Spire was either just passing through or was supposed to be on-station there but ran into some very unexpected trouble: Malak's personal fleet. End result: a very one-sided massacre.
      • Okay, but then where was the Endar Spire going, and for what purpose? When you get to Dantooine, they send you on the quest for the Star Maps without ever telling you why they had sent you to wherever you were going on the Endar Spire. What was the purpose of that mission?
    • I'm sure the player character knows what the mission was, but it's probably irrelevant now, what with the massacre. As for the Star Maps: the Jedi didn't know about those until the PC and Bastila have their vision. They knew about those weird old ruins, but the Jedi who had explored it had never come back (and I think the ruins aren’t actually that close to the temple).
    • I'm pretty sure that the Endar Spire was there to battle the Sith fleet directly. Bastila was there to use her Battle Meditation, and you were there because you shared a Force Bond that the Jedi wanted to exploit. From the opening crawl:
    In the skies above the Outer Rim world of Taris, a Jedi battle fleet engages the forces of Darth Malak in a desperate effort to halt the Sith's galactic domination…

  • At the end of KOTOR I, you find out as a Dark Side character that Darth Revan's Robes were created by using the Star Forge. However, in an early cutscene, you see Revan in finding the Dantooine Star Map already dressed in his robes in the process of still looking for the Star Forge. Is that an oversight?
    • That was probably a different robe. When Revan found the Star Forge, he realized that he could use it to create really powerful robes, but he purposefully designed the new robe to look just like the old robe, because that particular look was how his followers were used to seeing him, and it was politically useful for him to retain that iconic appearance.

  • Why is it that the Rakatan computer on Kashyyyk misapplies Prisoner's Dilemma? The actual numbers are supposed to be 0, 1, 2 or 3 years, not 5.
    • No, there aren't set values for the prisoner dilemma. However, part of the underlying conflict of this variant is that the penalty for being betrayed is out of proportion compared to the other outcomes.

  • If the galaxy is in the middle of this enormous war, why aren't there more visible signs of the conflict? The Czerka corporation seems to be conducting business as usual in the middle of this enormous war. There seem to be plenty of military-aged men on Dantooine and Tatooine who have not been drafted. There seems to be no shortage of weaponry available in ordinary stores, as if there were no particular demand for weaponry in the rest of the galaxy. In fact, there don't seem to be any of the shortages that normally occur in wartime. How come every time you land at a new planet, you don't see troops boarding ships, or munitions and other supplies being loaded onto transports, and so forth? Why no ads posted anywhere for war bonds? Why is it that Bastila and her mother seem to think that it will be pretty simple for Mrs. Shan to travel from Tatooine to Coruscant in the middle of this war? For that matter, how come there never seems to be any concern in the game that some of the Star Map worlds might be overrun by Sith forces before Revan's party can reach them? After all, Malak knows where they are and has every incentive to capture or destroy them.
    • Simple: The galaxy is a big place. Even as a galactic government is fighting a galactic war, the Republic's reach only extends so far (Remember how in Episode 1 Tatooine has slaves despite the Republic's anti slavery laws?). Chances are on planets like Coruscant propaganda, shortages, troop presence, and maybe drafting are common. But if a planet is in a remote location, has a low population, and isn't considered important or part of the "civilized galaxy", it's likely the war has little impact on daily life. Of the planets you visit (and keep in mind you only see a small part of them):
      • Tatooine: Outer Rim and "sparsely populated". Has little law besides criminals and Czerka. As for Mrs. Shan traveling to Coruscant from there, she'll probably face little more than increased security at the space port.
      • Dantooine: Outer Rim and so remote in ANH Tarkin didn't think it was worth blowing up. Nothing there but some farmers and Jedi, and if it weren't for the Jedi Enclave it would probably escape all notice.
      • Kashyyyk: Newly discovered, most of the population is Wookies who don't yet have space ships and are kept under thumb by Czerka.
      • Manaan: Only has one city for non aquatic species, and the Selkath are neutral.
      • Korriban: Sith training center, but an almost non existent civilian population.
      • Rakata Homeworld: Very few knew it existed.
    • As for concerns about the Star Map being on an overrun world, they DO go to planets with a heavy Sith presence (Korriban and Manaan), they just try to draw little attention. And most importantly, MALAK DOESN'T KNOW REVAN IS ALIVE. He doesn't find out until after Revan kills Calo Nord, and in fact his knowledge of the Star Maps may be why Darth Bandon and later Malak are able to track Revan down.
      • Malak finds out Revan is alive long before Calo Nord dies. Calo Nord survives Revan's first battle with him on Taris and gives a description of the people he fought to Malak and Admiral Karath. That's when Malak finds out Revan is alive. So why doesn't he immediately send a large force to Korriban to intercept Revan there and launch offensives toward Tatooine and Kashyyyk?
      • Malak is fighting a war; he doesn't have enough forces to engage the Republic on a galactic scale, secure the Star Forge, and secure the Star Maps. I figure he assumed Korriban was safe due to the sheer amount of Sith, but he could only afford to send Calo Nord and Darth Bandon to hunt down Revan. Alternately, he didn't bother because he knew his only real chance at beating Revan was to let him reach the Star Forge and fight him there, where Malak could control the fight. Everything he did was to delay that fight until he had the Star Forge's defenses working.
      • Alternately: Malak knows Revan is alive, but at least initially has no way of knowing how much Revan remembers. At first, he may simply assume Revan hasn't lost his memory at all, so destroying the Star Maps (or overtly protecting them) would do no good whatsoever. After discovering that Revan is indeed going to the worlds with Star Maps on them (and, perhaps, hearing something from a spy or elsewhere detailing the entire Jedi plot), Malak seems to piece enough together, though even in his confrontation with Revan, he starts off assuming that Revan already remembers who he was before the Jedi reprogrammed his mind. He's noticeably taken aback when Revan has no idea of the truth at first. After their escape from the Leviathan, Revan and the crew of the Ebon Hawk only have one Star Map to find. Perhaps Malak figured there wasn't enough time to foil their plans (or that Revan had already found the final Map), continued on his way to Lehon and proceeded to turn Bastila to the Dark Side, waiting for Revan with the full power of the Star Forge at his command.
  • How? How are Taris's laws allowed to exist in the Republic? Their Fantastic Racism is sickening by Republic standards and yet they're (until the occupation) part of a multi-species democracy that embraces the unity of the galaxy's races. How are their laws even allowed to be in the books, never mind eagerly enforced? Even moreso, how does the Republic even allow the treatment of the Outcasts to continue? It's explicitly stated that the only two punishments for crime on Taris are either death or exile to the Undercity, and that the convicted's children aren't allowed to return to the surface despite having nothing to do with the crimes of their ancestors. Why hasn't the Republic ever come in and put a moratorium on any of these before the Sith occupation?
    • The Knights of the Old Republic comics explain that Taris' Republic membership is something very recent which was obtained through corruption. Taris is full of Republic business interests, and when the Mandalorians came a little bit too close to it, the Senate gave the planet Republic membership, a Jedi presence and a huge fleet to protect the sector. Also, the Senator was crooked and gained his Senate seat in exchange for tax cuts for some businesses.
  • Why do you have to destroy Elise's droid to help her mental health? Why not just take it off-planet with you to give it a new life and simply tell her that it was destroyed?
    • Sounds a bit convoluted. In-universe, droids are treated like furniture, really, despite the fact that we the consumers see them in the same light as organic meatba- I mean, living characters.
    • Also, Elise is hanging out right outside the only entrance to the Jedi Enclave from the Dantooine plains - how, exactly, would you get the droid into the spaceport without being spotted?
    • Simple. After the way Elise has treated him, the droid wants to die. Why do you think he ran out and picked a fight with Kath Hounds in the first place? Even if you took him somewhere else, you'd have to memory wipe him to remove the traumatic memories. Destroying him is really a Mercy Kill at this point.
  • How did Calo find out that the PC is Revan? It's made quite clear when Karath tells Malak that Calo has "something interesting" to say, that's when Malak is informed that Revan survived and was reprogrammed, but how did a random bounty hunter who encountered the PC all of once or twice somehow manage to figure out they're not only the presumed-dead Sith Lord, but Revan with a personality makeover?
    • It's a bit WMG, but my theory is that you were stuck on Davik's estate longer than shown. Long enough for Davik to get the background check done, have it intercepted and read by Calo, but not reach Davik's hands.
    • It's highly unlikely Nord knew Revan's personality had been replaced given that Saul Karath and Malak both react with surprise when they hear Revan doesn't have his memories. It may be Wild Mass Guessing but perhaps he gave Karath a description of Revan and his companions, and Karath recognised Revan. Granted that would suggest Karath knew Revan's appearance before Revan donned his mask. Given that Nord doesn't mention Revan's true identity when he confronts him later in the game, it would also imply that Malak did not tell him who he was hunting.
  • About the Star Map on Kashyyyk - what's with the whole "programmed only to open for Revan" thing? The map is thousands of years old. You're telling me Revan and Malak were the first ones to find the damn thing, and, despite having 90% of questions asked result in a data error, Revan was able to program the computer to only respond to him? Furthermore, why is it a hologram of a Rakata speaking Basic? Revan didn't learn the Rakatan language until he went to the planet with Malak and ripped it from their minds using the Force. The whole thing just feels like one enormous plothole.
    • Revan installed the interface and locked it down. Presumably if you had the time you could dismantle it and access the database directly. I have no idea how the interface translates a dead language to Basic however.
      • Let's not forget that the computers in the ruins on Dantooine could interpret Basic and adjust accordingly. Perhaps Revan managed to achieve something similar with the Kashyyyk computer?
  • The Selkath are overt pacifists who will fine and possibly arrest you for merely making a threat of violence. And yet the very first Selkath you meet sells plasma grenades and thermal detonators along with medpacks. Logic? Is there any?
    • The Selkath aren't pacifists, they're politically neutral. It's not that they won't get involved in a fight, it's that they won’t get involved in this fight. They strictly enforce peace because their planet is not at war and they'd like to keep it that way.
  • What's the point of the final duel with Malak? Yeah, I guess we need our final boss fight, but if you think about it, the fight isn't necessary. Bastila has either been turned away from the Dark Side or killed, and the Republic is about to rain holy hell down on the Star Forge (in the Light Side ending, anyway), so just let Malak sit in his room while everything explodes. Malak says he can drain all those Jedi corpses to gain the upper hand against Revan, so why take the chance of fighting him directly? Okay, so Malak obviously won't just sit there and let himself get blown up...he'll escape before that happens, and the game mentions that. But who cares? Without the Star Forge his war effort is crippled, and the next time Revan meets up with him he'll have no Jedi bodies to drain.
    • Light-Side Revan feels responsible for Malak's fall to the Dark Side and subsequent war against the Republic. Revan stopping Malak is his way to atone for that. Dark-Side Revan just wants both to take revenge on Malak and reclaim his place as the true Sith Lord.
  • In the underwater research station on Manaan, among the bodies you find is that of a Sith acolyte, complete with a recoverable crystal and robe. That implies that the Sith are aware of the station. But that acolyte alone is the only Sith body that you find there, so what could he have been trying to achieve going there and how would he have gotten down there?

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