There is one thing to keep in mind about the KotOR games.
They had cinematics for arrival on a planet, departure from it, and blast to hyperspace.
While this is a very simple thing to implement, it did wonders for those games.
Hubs in KotOR are incredibly small and confined. When they implemented these animations, it gave the strong impression that you were travelling through many worlds through large distances and long periods of time. It made a small game seem giant in size.
Fact is that just for this, many people were talking somewhat silly things like, "When you play KotOR, you really feel like you are in a large galactic adventure. You feel like you live another life, of a privateer in space." And for this, both the games received unanimously positive reviews.
So if the KotOR games, prove anything, it is "Do a few things right, and you get away with getting many things wrong." The above use of cinematics, as well as simple banter between and during missions, apart from the big explosive beginning of the game and the crash onto the planet, were enough to garner strong positive reactions from the gaming community.
Even though those things have nothing to do with actual gameplay at all. Hell, it is not like the KotOR games deserve any praise for presentation either. They were ugly as fuck in 2003, they are ugly now, they have bad music, they have awful looking levels, they have terrible facial animations, but even as mainstream games, they get away with it.
Compare these to Betrayal At Krondor, which was giant enough to actually give you a long stretching adventure, rather than just give the feel of it. Even Arena, with its simplistic 3D technology, is an absolute giant of a game, and in some ways, it has even better presentation and story, let alone gameplay.
Mainstream games don't even have to even LOOK pretty to get high sales.
