Beautifully scripted are the background stories for many of its organizations, but the intent is never to completely inform the player, but open up further questions. The Morag Tong, a guild of legally sanctioned assassins, split in half many years ago, resulting in an offshoot group, the Dark Brotherhood, after the latter clan’s killings became less reliant on legality and more on funding. The Dark Brotherhood, later a faction able to be joined in the sequel, Oblivion, is headed by the Night Mother. In Morrowind, the final question is left unsolved; who is she? What is she? The closer you get to information about the Morag Tong and Dark Brotherhood’s past together and subsequent falling out, the more wild the speculation becomes about the true explanation behind the present state of the guilds.

And so it was for the majority of the game. How did Nerevar really die? What actually happened that made the Dwarves disappear? Are the living gods really gods at all? Where did all these fucking cliff racers come from? The first time my cousin warned me about swimming too far, lest the Dreugh come after me, I thought he was making it up. There was no way this game was that crazy. A man with the lower body of an octopus and claws for hands? One moment it was unbelievable, and the next I was swimming for shore for all I was worth. Half the game is spent like that, uncovering new questions to answer, and the other half is spent rifling through the multitude of tomes in a personal quest to discern the truth behind the mysteries of Vvardenfell.

The game as a whole is so intricately foreign that it made for a better world to explore and experience than any I’ve ever seen since. The developers cited Egyptian, early Japanese, and Middle Eastern cultures as influence, and it really shows not just in all of the architecture, but the very civilization and all of its issues. The antagonist’s main goal is actually just to rule Morrowind, free of Imperial rule, as it was long ago. The process of stopping him involves interfering in regional politics, winning the hearts and minds of the most foreign groups, the nomadic tribesmen of Vvardenfell, and uniting the island under your leadership in the role of Nerevarine, hero reborn.

Arena, Daggerfall, and Oblivion all took place in the traditional RPG setting, with knights and green grass and dragons, and Morrowind is the place nobody from those other lands ever wants to visit. Its largest landmass is a volcanic island covered in ash, and its dark elf denizens hate foreign influence as much as the foreigners hate them. Where the dungeons of earlier Elder Scrolls titles were randomly generated, every hole in Morrowind was laid out according to carefully detailed plans. The intricacy of the world was more real than any other, and the depth only served to make Vvardenfell a more believable setting than Oblivion’s. If you want to know how deep the game actually went, here’s a good example: in Morrowind, there were over 300 books for the player to read, not including scrolls, letters, notes, and things of that nature. On standard sized paper, a collection of the books in this game spans over 1,200 pages. Damn.

The game starts small at the very tip of the iceberg - the shallow end of the pool - but from the very beginning, you’re free to wander absolutely anywhere with no guide whatsoever. Get involved in those regional politics, join one of the many guilds, gather wild ingredients and mix potions, explore dark caves, ruins and dungeons full of creatures beyond your wildest imagination, and get to know the people and problems of Morrowind. Before you realize it, you’re in a deeper world than any you’ve ever known. That complete freedom and depth is the true beauty of the game, and it’s largely due to fantastic design and more extensive in-game writing than I’ve ever come across. Once you’ve come to appreciate the world in Morrowind, you can return to that central storyline from so very long ago. You are free to ignore it, sure, but I found that the longer I spent away from it, the more I found motivation to return, knowing that my actions there would save the land I’d fallen in love with. That is actually the most fantastic thing about the game; there is nothing forcing you to defend the island of Vvardenfell except for your own conscience, and the wonderfully developed world away from that main quest only aids the development of your feelings toward it.

Many fantastic role-playing games have come out over the years, but Morrowind really helped pull itself head and shoulders above the crowd by developing a realistically complicated world in such an unfamiliar setting that its players can’t help but explore every nook and cranny, finding new reasons to love it every time they play. If you’ve never experienced the land of Vvardenfell, do yourself a favor and get with the times. Two weeks from now, I’ll be writing a follow-up piece on Oblivion, so come back on the Tuesday to read about that mainstream betrayal.

Anyway, Jade Empire is what I feel like writing about this time. I wanted to pick a game that, for a change of pace, had a truly awful storyline. It’s something that, when reduced down to its basic premise, is so stereotypical and unsurprising that one of my ambitions when writing for a development team is never to have my plots compared to Jade Empire’s. Here goes nothing.

You play some guy or girl who is so unique, they’re the last of their kind, and you are the only remaining person in ancient China with the ability to perform the secret power of whatever. When you were a baby, the black and red-armored agent of doom himself came to your tiny peaceful place of birth and burned the mother down, to the surprise of none. He busted everyone up, and some old monk escaped with you in his clutches, bringing you to the safety of his martial arts school. Uh oh. There, you developed a close friendship with and, if you were playing as a boy, a crush on your fellow classmate, girl number one. Long story short, some douche kidnaps her or something, you run to fetch her from the cave of scary, and your school burns down as the bad guys bust in and tear ass. From here, lots of stuff goes down, but it basically boils down to ‘we tried to get to the bad guys for like ever but we kept getting detoured and shit happened in every place we visited.’ Eventually, it turns out your schoolteacher is actually the main bad guy himself, and was betrayed by bad guy number two way back when, which is why, when you defeat bad guy number two, your old prof. runs in and wrecks your shit, requiring your use of that sacred ability, allowing you to return to life and totally dominate him in the throne room.

The girl ninja is the princess, sneaking off to perform sweet aerial flips, the big hulk fighter man has a sad story in his past, and just about every other RPG cliché that ever existed comes to be in the story of Jade Empire. Fortunately for us, going by the formula is not always a bad thing to do. In this instance, the main storyline is as generic as it can possibly get, but this allowed the writers to focus on different areas. From my perspective, it’s almost as if someone at BioWare convinced everyone to take part in a very expensive experiment in order to answer a question of theirs; if we write a half-assed main story, but write everything else fantastically, will it still be a good game?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. Actually, the answer is yes. Jade Empire is a good game despite this horribly uninteresting storyline. The secondary characters are, for the most part, fantastic, rich creations. There are a few that don’t go too deep, like the vengeful father of the kidnapped little girl, or the aforementioned princess in disguise, but the conversations with them throughout the game are so natural and believable that I have a hard time not spending 1200 Microsoft Points to permanently add this game to my collection via the Xbox Live Marketplace.

One of the very best parts of the game, again to do with the secondary characters, is the credit sequence, in which party members break the fourth wall and talk about their roles in Jade Empire and other games. Here BioWare’s staff shines, with some of the best-written banter I’ve ever witnessed occurring between the characters you grew to love over the hours spent in the game. They joke about failed auditions for other titles, about how they felt portraying the characters you met through the course of the game, and the quality of the writing staff from BioWare they had to deal with during the development. For example, Dawn Star, after explaining that she plays “the childhood friend,” goes on to tell us that “the writers at BioWare didn’t know [her] early work, which is odd, because [she] thought you could find anything on that interweb thing.” Or Sagacious Zu, who describes his part as “the conflicted anti-hero” tells us during these credits about how get got the job. “I was set to be the bad guy in a kids movie about a dog that rides a champion racehorse, uh, Air Biscuit I think it was called. But the guy who plays Zhong the Ox Carrier told me BioWare was auditioning. Well, I decided to take the pay cut to broaden my horizons.” My absolute favorite moment, though, actually comes from and near to the climax of the main storyline I’ve spent so much time lambasting in this article. I would prefer that you play the game and experience the shivers in your spine when you see it untainted, but just so that I don’t leave those who have played the game wondering what I’m talking about, suffice it to say that I’d never been so sympathetic toward a giant blue snake.

On that note, if you haven’t played the game, I’ve definitely ruined the main story for you. Still, I think you ought to play it, because the writing elsewhere is worth your time. The game as a whole is solid, and I remember it fondly regardless of the obvious draw. If some brave employee really did conduct this strange experiment, it was an overall success, because I hate stereotypes far more than the average bear, but I still love this game for the strengths that far overpower any disappointments.

It had one great moment that sprang to mind as soon as I thought about beginning this article. The beginning of the game opens with a few minutes of cut scenes, with the player’s car (a boner-inspiring BMW M3 GTR) zipping about the fictional city. You, from the driver’s seat of the car, meet a cute girl who also likes the race (sigh), a crooked cop bent on taking down street racing, and your soon-to-be arch-nemesis, some douche calling himself Razor who fucks with your car before a race, resulting in your concession of the oh-so-sweet vehicle and arrest shortly thereafter. At the beginning of the race, however, is this great moment I mentioned. In this particular cut scene, you are chasing after Razor in your BMW, and the game merges from the cut scenes you’ve been watching to the gameplay you’ll be experiencing without a split second of hesitation.

I think of two specific games when I try to come up with examples of seamless mixtures of gameplay and exposition. At least, those with more moments like the one I just mentioned. Many of them strive to pull off at least a few, but which games spring to mind when I think bigger than ‘moments’ and start considering ‘total game experience?’

Portal is an obvious choice. It’s a particularly unique title already, as an FPS puzzle game, but it has something else special, which I will get to after this brief message. I don’t know if Portal fans hate it being called an FPS, but I’m not sure I care. It’s in first person, and there is a gun in my hands which I shoot. That something special I just mentioned has to do with the game’s choice of perspective, too. Portal is low on story, but heavy on exposition and narrative gameplay, and the immersion inherently involved when placing the player in a first person perspective is a massive help when trying to achieve this mixture.

GLaDOS purrs and roars at you while you hop around, firing tears into the fabric of space and time, and the game’s narrative is nearly perfect, despite the story essentially being ‘We don’t know why or how, but you are an expendable part of an experiment and if you want to live, escape this building while the AI overseer tries to stop you.’ That, truthfully, is pretty much all you ever find out during the game. Oh, the cake is a lie, sure, and the player character is a clone, but as far as plot foundations go, the first part of my sentence, ‘we don’t know why or how‘ is the most significant. It means the storyline is basically sweet fuck all; the entire narrative is spent finding clues to the rest of your situation, but never truly reaching an explanation for it.

The only thing keeping Portal from ascending into the video game equivalent of Nirvana, Valhalla and Heaven combined is its load times. Next to a game like Mass Effect, Portal’s load times seem like something only a budget development team would agree to. They are especially glaring and a seemingly unpolished draw on the game’s immersion because of its achievements elsewhere. The gameplay is solid, the narrative is surprisingly well written despite (or because of) its missing storyline, and the seams between the two are nearly nonexistent until you come across a load screen. What the fuck was even happening in the minds of the people that said yes to loading screens? If Portal had done with elevators exactly what Mass Effect did, the game would be the stuff of legends, as its last remaining discs were ground into a fine powder, sold on the black market, and eventually snorted by Asian businessmen seeking to imbue their body with the power of fucking incredible.

My colleagues were quick in the early stages of this article to pose a few questions about load times, and here are the two most important for me to answer: “Isn’t it silly to expect something like that of every game that is considered to be great? And don’t Mass Effect’s elevator sequences still limit immersion somewhat?” The man deserves some credit for bringing these things up, because without addressing them, I think I’d have left my point of view in a weak state. I’ll answer them in order.

For those of you missing the whole picture, here goes nothing. About forty years before Revan hit his prime, there was a dude named Exar Kun who basically wrecked so much shit it’s not even funny. His list of battles during the Great Sith War (also known as the Exar Kun War for God’s sake) is so long on Wookieepedia, it rivals some of the better known character pages, like Han Solo.

Here are some fun facts about Exar Kun: He was the first guy to make a double bladed lightsaber (so he’s already pretty awesome). He was better with a lightsaber than anyone that ever lived, including all the Jedi and Sith up to and after the days of Darth Vader and all that nonsense. He invented the tarentatek, one of the most deadly encounters in either of the KotOR games, in his spare time. He was turned to the dark side by the spirit of another of the ancient Sith, Freedon Nadd, and when he fully embraced his potential and grew strong enough, Nadd asked him to use his new powers to create him a body to inhabit. However, growing tired of Nadd’s constant bullshit, Exar Kun used his new powers to instead destroy the nagging spirit forever. In what was probably a show of his superior skills, Kun, when finally defeated, sealed his spirit away in a temple for four thousand years (much longer than Nadd was able to keep his sustained). When he tried to do the same thing to Luke Skywalker that Freedon Nadd had done to him, he was too powerful to be destroyed. Instead, the Jedi of that time merely succeeded in banishing him from his tomb. Nice work, guys.

What a man. And as I said, the first KotOR game takes place about forty years after Exar Kun’s (original) threat was ended. The whole premise of the game relies on this factor. Revan, as a young and promising Jedi, went to war against the Mandalorian raiders despite the protestations of the Jedi Council. One of the reasons given for the Council’s reluctance to join the Republic’s battle against the Mandalorians was their fear of some unknown threat lurking beyond their sight. What they don’t tell you is that as Exar Kun’s most ridiculously awesome years were only four decades in their past, there was definitely another source of their shakiness at the prospect of another galactic civil war.

Revan took with him Malak, obviously, and the unnamed Jedi Exile (the main character of KotOR 2) as his top generals during the Mandalorian Wars. In his explorations, Revan discovered that the Mandalorians were basically petrified in the presence of the planet Malachor V, and sought to discern the real reason behind this. When he descended on the planet, he discovered powerful dark side energies and the Trayus Academy, which would end up hosting the climactic showdown between the Exile and Revan’s former master, Kreia. This academy, once upon a time, was built by a long-hidden danger known as the “True Sith,” and all of Revan’s schemes from that point forward were in an effort to save the galaxy from this threat.

All of the information I just put forward is available in subtext, background stories, dialogue branches, item descriptions, and all sorts of random blurbs of text within both KotOR and KotOR 2. Unfortunately for many, the full picture is so difficult to piece together, because of KotOR 2’s presentation, that everything after the battle of the Star Forge at the end of the first game is dismissed without hesitation.

Revan discovered this immense threat lurking in the Unknown Regions during the Mandalorian Wars, and from that point forward, the greatest tactician of the time set forth with a new plan. At the same time Revan dueled and killed the leader of his opposition, Mandalore the Ultimate, he lured the majority of their fleet to the space above Malachor V. The forces he sent to do battle with the enemy were actually his least loyal followers. The Exile was the one woman Revan trusted to order the detonation of a super weapon that destroyed almost everybody present. Revan had ended the Mandalorian threat and ensured that his [remaining] forces were all willing to follow him to the depths of hell.

He embraced Sith teachings to gain more power, and engaged the Star Forge in the creation of his immense army, but did not linger in that place. Malak, in the end of the first game, criticized Revan for being too weak to endure the dark energies of the Star Forge. Before he died, however, he realized that Revan truly was the cleverer of the two all along; he did not want any more darkness in him than was necessary for the task at hand. During the Jedi Civil War, Revan had bypassed several strategic systems, and sought to convert as many as he killed in an attempt to end the war as quickly as possible, assuming complete control over the galaxy as soon as he could.

Unlike his unfortunate successor, this was not a greedy bid for power, but a desperate effort to solidify all available forces under his command in order to present a united front against the True Sith. Revan was a man committing evil acts not out of blood lust or any of the base passions the Sith teach, but the need to protect the innocents of the galaxy from a more dangerous enemy than he could ever become. He was doing very bad things for the very best reasons. Does this make him good or evil? If you answered either a) good or b) evil, go fuck yourself.

Before KotOR was released, I stumbled across BioWare’s related website, which posted character biographies every so often. I still remember this because I originally thought Calo Nord was someone I might induct into my merry band, when really he was my dastardly foil; a nasty little man with low morals and high prices. I should have realized that all of the posted biographies were not those of my future party members when they included fucking Malak. BioWare later corrected this mistake in Jade Empire by making one of the main antagonists a possible future teammate, and yet I continue to receive no royalties for this stroke of genius.

Mission Vao, if I recall correctly, is around fourteen years old when she meets Revan. I remember, back when I first played the game, the collective grumbles of the Internet populace as her happy-go-lucky street-smart form dashed across our full screen displays and demanded to be treated as an adult. Mission and Carth, for those of you that remember or, if you’re not a moron, still play the game from time to time, are the two characters most closely associated with the notorious game-killing glitch responsible for so many of the original Xbox’s restarts. What I remember them for, though, is the well written father-daughter dynamic.

Based on the circumstances Revan finds himself in at the beginning of the game, Carth is the only companion he has with him when he meets this spry little hoodlum. Carth is a war vet, a decorated hero, and in a perfect world, an upstanding citizen of high regard. He’s based his entire life on his disciplined reliance on ethics and a code of honor. Of course Mission, the smart-mouthed hacker thief with affiliations to gangs and slaver-killing Wookiees, needs a little bit of Carth in her life. Beyond this first forced interaction and a few interactive cut scenes with all of your party assembled, though, the only way you’ll see the extent of their relationship is by dragging them along with you everywhere you go.

When you do bring each of your party members off the ship, they will, given the right dialogue selections, open up to you and reveal some side story to pursue regarding their past. Mission’s is about her long lost older brother Griff. Griff used to look out for Mission, before he found some hussy that supposedly convinced him to diss the little sprite and run off to some exotic locale to be rich and beautiful together. What really happened is that Griff convinced his girlfriend to ignore Mission, and Mission that his girlfriend was the reason he was leaving. The disreputable little twerp double-crossed his own sister and the object of his [current] affection in one fell swoop before hiking off to his next get-rich-quick scheme.

When Mission confronts him, she finally gets over her idolization of her big brother, admitting that his flaws are not something she is willing to try to change. Holy shit, did I just write that? A secondary character in a video game admitting that a tertiary character has flaws? The writing in KotOR is such that we can not only witness things like this, but fall head over heels into the engrossing universe developed by greater minds than those behind the original Star Wars trilogy. Here we have a blue skinned little scamp with tentacles growing from the top of her head telling the most powerful Sith Lord of the time that her brother is generally disappointing, but she can live with that.

Carth too has some daddy issues. His mentor and personal hero, Saul Karath, was Malak’s right hand man when he defected to the Sith. He bombed Carth’s home world, and killed his wife. When Carth arrived, his son was missing, later to be confronted on the Sith planet Korriban. Dustil, the son, is canonically redeemed and sent back to their home world to await his father’s return and reconciliation. Saul isn’t quite so lucky, as Carth’s morals dictate that this particular betrayal is beyond forgiveness. He stands beside Revan as his own father figure breathes his last.

Due to these particulars, Carth finds himself at odds with Mission’s lack of a decent role model. The two are constantly bickering if you bring them along in your party, and the subtleties and subtext of their dialogue reveal Carth’s paternal instincts and Mission’s youthful defiance of such tendencies. That is, before she encounters and gets over her Griff complex.

Mission and Carth are definitely not minor characters, as they are two of nine that join Revan in his quest for the Star Forge, but their traits are unnecessary for the completion of the game. Given the player’s will to discover more about these particular individuals, their intricacies and complexities are revealed, and the true gems of BioWare’s writings shine through.

Plot twists and background stories are one thing, but to demonstrate realities in fantastic characters living in a universe where lightsabers are less interesting than politics?

If there were three main characters on the “good” side of KotOR, they would easily be Revan, Bastila, and Carth. Mission is an extra, and as I mentioned before, disliked nearly unanimously. To have just detailed such an intertwined, realistic relationship between her and only one of the main three characters pays tribute to the skills of the minds behind the game’s design.