How Bioware Controls Player Agency in ‘Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic’
‘Knights of the Old Republic’ has a valuable lesson that many could still afford to learn.
This piece contains major end game spoilers for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic begins as many role playing games do, with a character creator. You pick a class, set some stats, and choose from a number of pre-generated models. Then you select a name that can either be entirely custom or pulled from a very good random generator. Knights of the Old Republic’s protagonist is yours.
Or so you think.
The Jedi tell a tale. Darth Revan, the fallen Jedi responsible for kicking off the war between the Republic and the newly formed Sith Empire was betrayed and killed by his apprentice Darth Malak, in the midst of a Jedi strike force attacking Revan’s capital ship.
The character you create awakens to the Sith Empire attacking a Republic battle cruiser they’re aboard. Another soldier comes in to the room speaking to you in the typical way of early 2000’s tutorialization, while also answering a few basic questions about the situation aboard the Endar Spire. Whether you choose to be a soldier, scoundrel, or scout, you work for the Republic and right now, you’ve got to get to the Jedi, Bastila, and then escape the soon to be doomed ship.
What spins out from there is a 30 hour journey across the Star Wars universe nearly 4,000 years before A New Hope. It’s filled with what you would expect from a Bioware title set in this fiction. You travel across the galaxy to a number of planets solving big problems all in order to solve a galactic problem. There are companions to befriend or romance, and tons of dialogue choices, some of which branch the story in different directions. You are the player and you are in control of this story.
Or so you think.
Around 80% of the way through, the now Jedi protagonist, Bastila, and Carth are captured by Darth Malak. In a revelation so clearly styled as an attempt to recapture the shock of The Empire Strikes Back’s big reveal about Darth Vader and Luke’s familial ties, Malak reveals a reality shattering secret. The reason you’ve been having dreams about Bastila fighting Revan is because YOU, the character, are Darth Revan. This revelation is met with all sorts of flashbacks to the breadcrumbs the story left along the way, culminating in unsettling betrayal. You are not who you believe yourself to be. You are in fact, a tool of the Jedi, who didn’t kill you, but instead took your near dead body, wiped your mind of all memories as best they could, implanted a new identity, and turned you towards their enemy like a heat seeking missile. Your agency has been a lie.
Bioware themselves have also lied. You, the player, didn’t create a character of your own. You created your version of Revan, who had already been designed by a Jedi plot. Your agency has, from the jump, been limited and controlled. The incredibly clever thing here is, this is the case with any Bioware game despite what marketing or fan discussion may suggest. No matter what Commander Shepard is always going to be a career soldier who joins the space CIA. No matter your origin in Dragon Age: Origins, the protagonist’s life is magnetized to the fate of becoming a Grey Warden and fighting the Darkspawn. Even in the original Baldur’s Gate, you can only stray so far from the story of being a Bahwlspawn destined to face their half-brother who has thrown the Sword Coast into upheaval.
Such defined boundaries of the possibility space, whether through a twist or not, complicates the narrative of the video game power fantasy. These fantasies have always been conditional. Bioware invites the player to lean into the childhood dream of every Star Wars fan. It deploys the simple moral binaries of a morality meter, and says be the altruistic hero of the galaxy or be the sadistic conqueror. It presents very uncomplex and naïve ideas about the morality of Star Wars, of Jedi and Sith, and then clever — if imperfectly — undercuts them and the player’s expectations of their power to change the game.
Knights of the Old Republic is Bioware teaching a core reality of their design philosophy. A truth we cannot escape and should not look away from. That no matter how we attempt to define our digital beings, we, like those caught up in the conflict between the ideologies of the Jedi and Sith, will be defined by the possibility space designed and laid out before us by its creators.
