Trom

[Note: None of the following should be construed as a reason not to sign the petition, what I consider the most effective way of getting Obsidian's attention.] I found links to interviews on IGN listed below in which are contained answers to almost ALL the issues floating on the board. I'm not going to list them all, but here are the answers to what seems to me are the four biggest issues: 1. Why was the Droid Planet M4-78 cut? Chris Parker: From a production perspective, the best thing we did was to cut M4-78, the Droid Planet. I won't go into details, but we had this incredible design for a planet of droids. We actually did the first pass on art and built the character models for the location. But we had to look at the schedule and make a big cut after E3. We cut the entire planet. At the time, we were afraid it would make the game too short - but fortunately, there is so much other content, that wasn't the case. And we used a lot of elements from that planet elsewhere in the game. Ultimately, I think it made the game better, but it really hurt at the time, especially for the designer who had almost finished the planet, Kevin Saunders. [Maybe if we each send Kevin a few bucks he'll put it back in for us.] 2. Why was the endgame changed? Chris Avellone: As far as the story goes, I think maybe we were trying too hard for an Empire Strikes Back feel especially in terms of the revelations toward the end game and the resolutions - we just wanted the player to feel like there was something more going on, something greater, and it may not have seemed to tie together as well as it should. We could have made more of an effort to keep the game more self-contained, but the more that option was discussed toward the end, the less appealing it seemed - we wanted more of a sense that the saga would continue, that what was happening was only symptomatic of something occurring on an even greater scale. I think this is something that sat well with some gamers, but not others. 3. Was timeframe a factor? Chris Avellone: I think it's been received favorably by gamers and the media, and maybe we're being too hard on ourselves (as well as being too close to what we're working on), but it's actually been better received than we thought it would be. There was a lot of pressure and expectations from the first game, and our ability to even come close to that level of quality in roughly a third of the time was a pretty backbreaking amount of work. I wish we'd had two more years to work on it, but it wasn't in the cards. Chris Parker: We had an extremely aggressive schedule on The Sith Lords. We first started talking with LucasArts about the title in June of 2003, but at that time, we had never seen the game except for information that was available to the general public. We signed up for the project in August and entered production, while still working on many pre-production tasks, in October of 2003. At the time, the ship date for all versions, PC and Xbox for all languages was November of 2004. Of course, it was only by that time that we really understood we were making a sequel to the game of the year for 2003 - and that really upped the pressure on us to deliver. It was around then that LucasArts decided we'd probably want to ship some of the versions in early 2005. In May of 2004, we had a great E3, and that solidified our need to ship the Xbox for Christmas [Once they locked into the XBox version delivery date, all else was secondary.] 4. Will Obsidian do K3? Chris Parker: I can't speak of what LucasArts wants or if we've had discussions with them, but if we were to do a KOTOR III, I think it would be a large divergence from the first two. We'd need to create a completely new engine, redo the rules system, and take care of a host of other 'things'. Of course, we'd stick to the Star Wars feel and story-driven gameplay. But that's outside of anything we should talk about here. [Amen] ------ So there you have it. If I didn't hit on your current hot button, then I encourage you to read all of the following, particulary the Wrap Reports, the source of the quotes. Funny, but I feel that my involvement here on the forums may have been the real endgame for K2! The GameSpy Interviews Thread: http://forums.obsidianent.com/index.php?sh...ndpost&p=276541 ------ July 2, 2004 Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords Interview, Part 1 Link http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/527/527990p1.html July 9, 2004 Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords Interview, Part 2 Link July 16, 2004 LucasArts Press Day Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords Report Link http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/530/530855p1.html October 12, 2004 Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords Sequel Interview Link http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/556/556465p1.html November 1, 2004 Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords First View Link http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/562/562364p1.html December 23, 2004 Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords Wrap Report, Part 1 Link http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/575/575166p1.html December 27, 2004 Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords Wrap Report, Part 2 Link http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/575/575798p1.html

You can download Bink Video from this location and play all the movies: Bink Download the Miles Studio to be able to listen to all the VO.

Um... Disciple and Hanharr *are* party members. Though you have to be DS and female respectively to get them... (How can you be considering working on an ending-resotoration mod, and not know this? ) <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Midnight Hawk (thanks!) is correct but let me answer your very good question. 1. Since I discovered that there were free tools available and I'm experienced with C and scripting I thought I'd give it a whack. I was very surprised at this availability. 2. I know it's a *long shot* but since they left at least some of the original files on the disk it may mean they are all there somewhere. My fervent hope is that I'll discover either commented out code or a GOTO jump that would be easy to reinstate. I wouldn't have to know every nuance about the game to do that. 3. If there are files missing or I don't find the negated code loop, then I doubt I could do anything as it would take knowledge of the complete game in all its permutations to fix it which took a lot of progammers to do in the first place. I couldn't hope to duplicate their work. 4. I ask stupid questions all the time but unfortunately it seems to be the only way to learn quickly. 5. After visiting holowan, I'm a little daunted. There are a lot of people over there with tremendous skill, so, in the end, I might not accomplish much. Once they get involved with it, and I have no doubt they will, if it is at all possible they'll fix it. 6. In the meantime, I'm noodling around in the code to see what I can find.

According to Chris Parker, they had over 500,000 words in the game. Actually when you think about it, dealing with all that dialogue and a huge number of other variables every second of the game is unimaginable. The dialogue trees for all those words must have been incredibly complex. I really admire Obsidian's vision and courage to commit to that cycle. Wisdom would be another matter.

I've downloaded KOTOR Tools and the compiler. In my preliminary search, it does look as if the resources for the cut endgame are there but not the Droid planet (in the Mod folder). My method so far is to scan the code looking for deviations. That would be either commented out code or a GOTO statement in the Main loop. Also looking for Programmer's comments. Or any other anomaly. A very cursory look at the Mod folder shows that the mods all seem to be self-referential or refer to the mod immediately preceding it. 907MAL.rim doesn't do that. Instead it refers back to 904MAL. This is exactly the sort of recursive jump I'd expect to find. I still think there is a very good chance that the original ending is there, but I've found nothing remotely certain yet. At any rate, it's all very preliminary. One big problem is that KOTOR Tools won't recognize the chitin.key for K2. Does anyone know how to fix this? In particular, where exactly is the holowan forum on LA?

That's the problem. I'll go out on a limb and say every last person on these forums loved K1. So much so that at least in my case, I'm willing to devote a lot of time in trying to get it fixed and risk all the flames and trolling which is never very pleasant. However, I don't want to spoil the game for you. There are a number on here vociferously defending it with all sorts of justifications. I'm open-minded enough I hope to accept I could be wrong, but I haven't seen any compelling evidence to the contrary yet. Obsidian is a new company but the founders are respected veterans from other houses.

No, it wouldn't be hard, but I wouldn't be surprised if they can't say anything due to contracts. There's no way any publisher would allow a developer to blame them for a failed/incomplete game without legal retaliation. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I'm still convinced that they ran into an XBox version major problem late in the development cycle. Feagus himself alludes to this in November just before it shipped. So I imagine it happened something like this: Obsidian is sitting in a room with George and Bill. Obsidian: "Great news, George! We've got a great game with a really great storyline. The problem is that it doesn't work so hot on the XBox unless we truncate the endgame." Bill looks at George. . . .

Shadow, I wondered about that if playing the DS, which I've never done in either game would give you different team members. I also saw Disciple as a team member in the code. Does he also show up on the DS team? It doesn't seem to make sense.

I think they originally intended this. While at Trayus a few times I saw a HotDot for a Meditation Chamber I couldn't get to. You might find it interesting, but in reading through the code, apparently at one time Hanharr was actually a member of the team.

Feargus (11/10/04): GameSpy: Will you have more variety in the building appearance and NPC heads? Feargus Urquhart: We've really tried to put in all that we can into each of the areas and we are paying for some of that right now. However, were using every trick in the book that we've learned through the years to keep all of those cool things in the levels and not have the Xbox start smoking. I would say that we've increased the number of heads in most of the areas by at least half and hopefully doubled it in others. I think you'll also notice that the areas in KotOR II are a fair amount larger as well. GameSpy Review (2/8/05) The same kind of "half-baked" feel applies to the graphics. One of the few issues I had with the original game was the lack of graphic variety in both the environment and the character models. If anything, this problem is even worse in KotOR II. First, now that a year has slipped by, the graphics, which were really only "good" back in 2003, are showing their age. That being said, there's a lot that a talented team of artists can do with design that can overcome behind-the-times technology (see World of Warcraft for a great example of this). None of that is evident in KotOR II. Every interior location seems to be the same collection of sterile, boring, corridors and rooms without any apparent indication that these are places people actually live. There's a distinct lack of signage, artwork, or any of the ancillary details that could bring the world to life. ---------- I'm convinced that they had to reduce resources so it would run on XBox.

I'd like to offer my assistance, Whitemithrandir. I'm an English major and I've programmed in C and used TADS. I've come to prefer Dark Basic Professional to program with so I don't have to mess with pointers and memalloc so much. PLus it has a lot of built in routines. At any rate, the primary files for the game engine seem to be driven by the Script files that have blocks of clear code alternated with compiled code. I don't see how any modding can be done without access to BioWare's script compiler, something called NWC.

I've had programming and scripting experience so I gave the K2 files a looksee and was fascinated by what I found. It's a good news/bad news thing. I looked for the program files and think I found them in the Data folder. Scripts.bif was very interesting. It contains all the code functions presented in strangely alternating blocks of uncompiled/compiled code. What I was looking for were coments from the dev team and/or commented out code to indicate what happened. I found nothing there save one curious reference to XBox. The good news is that all the variables and functions for PLANET_M4_78 are still there. Also, apparently at one time Hanharr and Disciple were team members. Also, since I had one blank team slot to the end of the game, maybe one of them fit there, but I never did get HK47 working and always assumed that slot was for it. I also looked in the module folders and found that the modules, which I think set up the characters in each "scene," are there for the original endgame on Malachor as it contained this: [GP: Sion stands his ground as Nihilus sends a blast outwards, leveling Kreia, sending her smashing her into one of the 904 "teeth." Use SFX to make the attack seem vicious.] However, the modules for PLANET_M4_78 are not there. Given what other people have said, I'd say there's at least a chance that all the assets are there for the original ending. Even so, I'd think you'd need access to the game compiler to get it working again. I had hoped that I'd find some "switch" inside to turn it on, but didn't find it. Maybe I'll compare the code from K1 with K2 to see if I can find anything. Another thing, after looking that code over, I was in awe of the amount of data that has to be handled. If you think about it, they had to keep track of a ton of variables and then act appropriately on those variables. For example, the PC and teammates enter a room for combat and each characters powers and modifiers have to be evaluated against the henchmen who all have to have variables calculated instantly: where the characters are, what they can see, what powers they have, FP, VP, what armor, what weapon, etc, etc. all must be calculated on the fly. In this header file also are all the functions from K1, many of which are commented out. Lastly, most of the code added was completed by in 11/03. They must have spent the rest of the time developing artwork, music, and of course the final script.

That's hilarious! If you look on the advisory board for the awards you find LucasArts and BioWare. The writing also had a nomination for Half-Life 2. At least K2 had 500,000 words. HalflLife 2 had three: "Shoot and shoot again!" But it's also frightening. Are they *that* insulated from the fans? Geeze, I thought the Soviet Union had disappeared but it's apparently found another home in the gaming industry.

To get back to the original thread of what can be done I have a *radical* solution. E3 is scheduled for Los Angeles May 17-20. LucasArts and Bioware will be there but I didn't see anything for Obsidian. Of course, only industry workers are allowed to attend. Believe me, if a hundred or so ticked off gameplayers showed up and picketed, it would have a marvelous effect. Anyone from the LA area willing to take this on?

Excellent analysis Sir Cedric. K1 hit upon the perfect plot device with the amnesia theme. It provided a logical and plausible reason for revealing the game in steps. Of course, to repeat that in K2 would be less than ideal and your idea of flashbacks is a great idea. I think they tried that a bit with the Test at the Sith Academy. However, then the weight fell on Kreia to do the rest of the revealing of something, as you point out, I should already know. As far as what went wrong, I made a post earlier in this thread about that. I traced the development history and found several smoking guns. You talk about all the other games they've done, but Obsidian is a new company. Do you mean the work they've done for other companies? Or am I missing something?

I agree, Steve. But my purpose for criticizing the game is hopefully whoever develops K3 might see all this controversy and avoid the big mistake that was made with this game, namely in order to get the XBox game out by Christmas and confronted with a last minute technical glitch they had to decide missing the ship date or truncating the endgame. I can't believe after all the work the programmers put into that endgame that they were happy in truncating it which also had the side-effect in them having to leave in all those inexplicable routines.

I too suspected I was Revan again. Also, I thought Kreia was Bastila transformed or disguised by the DF!

It's a graphic glitch the remote actually slides into the floor if you look closely. What happened is that GOTO ionised the remote and had a dig around inside it. Then he either found its armageddon program and changed it , or did that later. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I don't think it is a glitch. When they decided to truncate the endgame, they were able to have Kreia do her exposition to settle most things. However, they couldn't go back and change everything without major programming. The whole Goto incident would have had to been excised. That they had to leave Goto and Remote in the inexplicable ending is one of the more glaring examples of some catastrphic event that occurred just prior to shipping.

Very good points Matt! I agree with you 100% I've done a lot of research on this and it is clear to me that Obsidian had another endgame but for compelling reasons I've detailed elsewhere on this board, chose to truncate the endgame in favor of Kreia's exposition. When they truncated the endgame, they didn't have time to go back and make the rest of the plot consistent therefore left in all the foreshadowing that came to nought. Sorry, Hundred Companions, I can't follow your logic. First of all, the dialogue contains many contradictions. Secondly, I think you might have hit on one of the problems. They did read all that stuff. I haven't and I'd guess the vast majority of players haven't either. If they developed the game dependent on that, then it was a mistake and should have incorporated that prerequisite by transparently integrating it into the plot. Otherwise, it would be like Tolkien requiring you to read Beowulf as a condition to understanding LOTR. One of the reaons I feel so strongly about this game is that it allows me to fullfill a fantasy of being a member of the SW universe. K1, despite its flaws, did just that. K2 did that also for about the first 80% of the game. At this point I'm criticizing the game on the forums for the sole purpose of alerting the K3 team about the big mistake that was made on this game. If you read all the interviews and announcements about the game in GameSpy, you can see that LA wanted the XBox version out by Christmas and Obsidian promised to do that. However, they ran into a technical problem with the XBox build just before shipping and that's when they must have been confronted with either truncating the endgame or shipping on time. LA must have chosen the latter.

Well, I still don't know why Malachor blew. It seems to me that Remote was sent to save Malachor by Bao-Dur, at least I think that's what the hologram of Bao-Dur said to Remote. Bao-Dur says something about doing that because he was responsible for its destruction.

Excellent discussion folks. After reading most of this, I'm impressed with your reasoning abilities; ya'll sound like lawyers or have PhD's in comparitive literature. The thing is, I still don't understand Kreia's motiviation. Ultimately, is she trying to do something good for the universe or something evil? I think in the end she says she's done all this so that Exile would be able to help Revan against the True Sith. However, if she has done all this conniving for an ultimate good, then it's the most extreme case of the end justifying the means. It seems to me she engaged in a lot of unnecessary brutality. In reality, I think the plot just got away from Obsidian, although I'm sure Lucas would have had to approve it beforehand. Of course, he's not well-known for consistency himself. In the end, I think they boxed themselves into a corner, especially since they truncated the endgame. Kreia could have been a great enigmatic character, which is what I think they were shooting for, instead she is implausible. I also wonder if they got some word of how K3 is going to be plotted out and had to make some last minute changes to segue to K3. I don't know if this will help or not, but this is what Feargus, CEO of Obsidian had to say in a GameSpy Interview shortly before the XBox version shipped: ----- GameSpy: Will there be a plot twist, and if so, how do you plan on topping the plot twist of the first game? Feargus Urquhart: We have never set out to make a newer, better, and more improved plot twist. Our goal has always been to craft a story that the player loves and enjoys playing. There will be all sorts of different twists and turns in the story, but we never set out to craft an entire story around making a bigger twist than KotOR, we set about making a story that stood on its own and was as deep and intriguing as KotOR. We think we've done that and hope all the people out there will dig it. ----- It sounds to me that he was trying to reduce expectations on the plot and I further read into that that they were not happy with it either. I'd just like one of the devs to tell me with a straight face that he/she has a clear understanding of Kreia.

I did the research above and found a number of interesting tidbits. I now propose this scenario of what went wrong: 1. In May, marketers were concerned about the timeline and it seems that the devs considered two games. 2. By June, however, LA is already declaring an early release. 3. In September, LA says it was "hoping" to get it out by Christmas. Clearly the pressure was on Obsidian. Parker calls this an "opportunity." 4. In November, however, Urquhart alludes to "paying" now for trying to get too much into the game. This is just a week or so before shipping! This I believe is the smoking gun. Something happened to the build at this point. I'm guessing that whatever they had in mind for an endgame would not play on the XBox or played poorly. Given that it was about to ship, the decision was made to truncate the endgame. I further surmise they couldn't just cut a little as the original endgame was interconnected. Thus we end with Kreia reciting to us. So there it is. Either Obsidian or LA when confronted with a major problem at the end decided to truncate the game, after all, it is 80% great, and meet its shipping date. I believe they were very very concerned about having both versions miss Christmas.

I've just completed A LOT of research and I hope you find this as interesting as I did. Release Dates: KOTOR I: XBox July 2003, PC Version November 2003 KOTOR II: XBox December 2004, PC Version February 2005 May 13, 2004 announcement in Gamespy http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/star-wars-knights...2/515336p2.html According to LucasArts, the fact that the PC version of KotOR was released six months after the Xbox version presented a huge problem for the marketing team. Apparently, many of the articles written about it, including reviews, actually revealed the game's big twist. That won't be a problem this time, though, as both versions are being released simultaneously. One interesting thing is that the team is considering making both versions slightly different. The original game, of course, had a number of special weapons, a space station and a couple of extra missions that were eventually available as Xbox Live downloads. Assuming that they actually do that this time, though, both versions would get some unique content not available in the other. It wouldn't be substantial enough to change the experience, but it might be enough to make a player want to play both versions. Expect Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords to hit your PCs in early 2005. June 14, 2004 announcement in Gamespy http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/star-wars-knights....html?fromint=1 Fans of Star Wars and RPGs were given some extraordinarily good news when LucasArts officially changed the release date of the highly anticipated sequel to Knights of the Old Republic. While the game was initially supposed to release in February of 2005, the date has now been moved up to "winter." The new date was confirmed for GameSpy by a LucasArts spokesperson. September 10, 2004 announcement in Gamespy http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/star-wars-knights...2/546820p1.html LucasArts today confirmed that the Xbox version of Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, developed by Obsidian Entertainment Inc., is scheduled for a December 2004 release date "We were hoping we could bring the Xbox platform into December but didn't want to make the formal announcement until we knew an earlier ship date would not compromise the quality of The Sith Lords," says Producer Mike Gallo. "We recently completed a very important milestone which confirmed we can confidently do this." November 10, 2004 Interview in Gamespy, Feargus Urquhart, CEO of Obsidian Entertainment http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/star-wars-knights...2/565247p1.html Feargus Urquhart: Both the PC and Xbox version will be the same in the end; however, we have put in a lot of work on the PC interface. It will now work in multiple resolutions in full screen. That not only includes the menus, but the in-game buttons and graphics as well. So, when you take the resolution all the way up, the interface won't just be smaller in the middle of the screen with a nice border. GameSpy: Will you have more variety in the building appearance and NPC heads? Feargus Urquhart: We've really tried to put in all that we can into each of the areas and we are paying for some of that right now. However, were using every trick in the book that we've learned through the years to keep all of those cool things in the levels and not have the Xbox start smoking. I would say that we've increased the number of heads in most of the areas by at least half and hopefully doubled it in others. I think you'll also notice that the areas in KotOR II are a fair amount larger as well. GameSpy: Will there be a plot twist, and if so, how do you plan on topping the plot twist of the first game? Feargus Urquhart: We have never set out to make a newer, better, and more improved plot twist. Our goal has always been to craft a story that the player loves and enjoys playing. There will be all sorts of different twists and turns in the story, but we never set out to craft an entire story around making a bigger twist than KotOR, we set about making a story that stood on its own and was as deep and intriguing as KotOR. We think we've done that and hope all the people out there will dig it. Feargus Urquhart: We're not talking about all of them yet, however, each of the companions is not only going to have very distinctly different personalities and roles to play in the story, they also each have special abilities that no other character can get. February 4, 2005 Gamespy Developer Notes: Chris Parker, producer at Obsidian http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/star-wars-knights...2/584907p1.html We all worked hard to get the Xbox version out in time for the holidays, but the important part is that the vast majority of folks are enjoying it, and we've even been nominated for several awards. That's not the topic on the table, however. This diary is about the last days of the project and the completion of the PC version. The Windows version was essentially developed in conjunction with the Xbox version. We spent a good chunk of time at the beginning of the project syncing up assets and figuring out a build process that produced a new Xbox and PC version of the game every morning. We had the opportunity to ship the Xbox version in December (but keep the PC release until February as we originally announced), so we focused our efforts on the Xbox. The fellas who made this game used the PC version to test changes, so in many ways as we debugged the Xbox version, we were also fixing most of the bugs in the PC version which made the PC completion process post-December much easier. When we finally finished up the Xbox version in November, we needed a short break. (break) By the end of December the PC version was working pretty well, but we had to shift focus to the international versions. Somewhere in our localization loop, there was a hole, and a number of strings (chunks of text) weren't translated -- that's bad news. KotOR II has over 500,000 words and thousands and thousands of strings. We had to go about finding hundreds of these 'lost strings' by hand, a job that primarily fell to me and John Morgan, the assistant producer. On one hand it was good, since we figured out the problem so it'll never happen to us again, but on the other hand, it caused issues all the way up to the end and removed any hope of my own time off over the holiday. (break) We finished fixing stuff in the second week of January and began finalizing the project. There were more late nights, a couple of manageable disasters, but overall completing the PC version went smoothly. It's seems like it's been a long road, but it wasn't too long. And Obsidian had a lot of fun developing KotOR II along the way -- build a company and build a project at the same time. Fun! The project would never have been finished without the extremely dedicated efforts of everybody working on the team and the support and hard work of the folks at LucasArts. I'm heading off for vacation, this is literally the last bit of work I'm doing before a little R&R. I hope you all like this game. I'm already looking forward to the next project.

About Goto and Remote on Malachor. The problem for me is that shortly after he arrives on the Ebon Hawk, Goto corrals Remote, seems to interrogate him, then destroys him. Immediately afterwards, I go to Bao Dur and sure enough no Remote floating around. When I talk to Bao-Dur trying to get him to comment on this development I get the "never mind" option as if he's completely unaware at the loss of his constant companion. Did I imagine this or does anyone else remember this happening? I've thought of another possibility as to why the endgame was changed. Maybe when they were nearing completion and thinking about K3 they didn't want K2 to end the way it was outlined. Or maybe they saw Kreia's foretelling as an opportunity to put in a teaser for K3. Of course, they could bring back to life any characters they want. I was surprised to find Bastila appear near the end of the game. I thought I killed her in K1, much to my sorrow. I also was preparing for another hip hip hooray ending so one of the big surprises was to find myself on my way to Malachor. Here are two predictions: 1. Perhaps a year or so from now, someone from Obsidian during an interview will tell us what went wrong. 2. Prior to the release of K3, we'll hear a lot about how the developers (whoever it turns out to be) listened to all the complaints about K2 and vows to release a stupendous K3.

"So either reviewers are not honest, or have not played through the game." I hate to contribute to rumors, but there is a third alternative. Some have said that the preview game contained the cut scenes. "I mean, if the voiceacting is there, the dialogues are there, maybe some really ambitious and talented individuals might do something with it, put it together?" I'm going to further speculate that Obsidian has the completed game with the original ending. I suspect something happened with the XBox version which locked them into truncating the endgame. I don't think anything will be done (vis expansion packs) as if they would do anything it would be an admission of failure. As you point out, it would be irritating to play the game over and to me the sense of immersion has already been destroyed. However, I'm glad that for the first 75% of the game I was immersed. "But I think I am slowly coming to terms with this" That's why this board is here. They hope people will come here, vent, and then go on about their business. My timeframe of gaming is about as long as yours. I guess I feel so strongly about this is that K1 was the first game in a "long" time that recaptured the sense of wonder and adventure those very early games did. K2, had it fullfilled its promise, could have been a landmark game. That they so arbitrarily and with impunity wrecked the endgame creates a fear in me that adventure gaming will return to the shadows wherein all games are merely twitch and shoot ala Half Life 2 without regard to plot.