SteveThaiBinh

I liked Gothic 2. At the time I played it, I hadn't been playing games for a few years, and it was by far the most beautiful game I'd ever seen. I liked the fact that I could just about manage the combat, even though I seriously do not do action games. I also thought the fact that you can't just stop in the middle of a battle and drink a potion was very realistic, and it made me think before lunging into battle. Of course, it also made me save my game a lot. My overriding memory was of luring the orcs one by one into a narrow passage and killing them, because two together was too much for my character. It took hours, but the sense of achievement when finishing it was very nice. I also remember that it was buggy as hell and when it crashed, it didn't just crash to desktop, it actually restarted the computer.

Obsidian have said 'soon', so I would guess that LucasArts told Obsidian 'soon'. If the patch doesn't come out until after Episode III (May?), that will hit Obsidian's credibility with fans of Kotor 2, and suggest that relations between the two companies are very bad. I don't think this is the case - they've got through the bad publicity over the cut ending without any cracks appearing between their positions, so they're probably on good terms. As for what's delaying the patch, first it was GDC, now it's Easter (I assume that's a holiday in the US?). Plus I think LucasArts is trying to do what they failed to do before the game was released, which is to make it stable on a range of common PC configurations. This isn't something that Obsidian would be able to do, as they don't have the resources. LucasArts is taking its time and getting it right. Stop laughing. It does suggest that this will be the final patch, though.

What do you mean? I haven't noticed anything happening to crystals at that meeting. What have I missed?

This happened to me once, too. It was... unsettling. But I guess that cannok just swallowed a random medpack, and when you wounded it, you broke the seal and the kolto leaked out. Or something. I've got grenades off the corpses of cannoks before. By the same reasoning, they really should have exploded during combat. This might have made me respect the cannoks more, although they will always be gizka-wannabes.

If you study the history of the Second World War in a British school, the decisive battles were El Alamein and the Battle of Britain. If you study in a Russian school, probably Stalingrad is presented as decisive' and the US probably focuses more on Okinawa and the war in the east, which was barely mentioned in my (UK) textbooks. Every country teaches its children a biased version of history, though some are more guilty of open propagandising than others. They don't lie; they don't need to. They just give prominence to facts that support their version. Historians are (or should be) wary of speculating on what would have happened if X hadn't happened and so on. We don't know for sure if Germany could have won on either the Western or Eastern fronts alone, if Hitler hadn't chosen to have two fronts simultaneously. Russia certainly wasn't winning the war easily - Stalin was desperate for the Allies to invade France, and furious with Churchill and Roosevelt for delaying. I'm not well informed about Russia's part in the war, so I don't know how big an impact Stalin's viciousness had on strategies and casualties. But I know that there were massive casualties in the D-Day landings, for example. People shouldn't just assume that losses on our side were due to 'unavoidable circumstance, the realities of war' etc., while losses on the other side were because 'the leaders were vicious, they don't respect life the way we do.'

Are you trying to win favour with the Exchange, or upset them? You probably just need to do a bit more, one way or the other. What kinds of things have you done already?

It's a bug. You weren't supposed to be transported back to Telos; you should just have seen a cut scene with Atris. Load a saved game from before you jedified Handmaiden and try again.

I had exactly the same set of problems as well. Hopefully it means that, like me, you'll be lucky and not encounter any of the really serious problems that others on these forums have found. The jerky screen resolution switch to FMV and the timing problems with the door were annoying, yes, because I didn't get anything like that in Kotor 1 and you don't really expect the sequel to be a step back. But they're the result of lack of time to polish the game in order to meet the publisher's release date, and the patch might fix them. Behind the glitches, the game itself remains really good.

No trouble at all. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2757067.stm

Hmmm. So Goto programs his droids to blurt out the password to his security system when they're destroyed, i.e. when they're in the presence of an enemy. It's certainly an original approach to security. The Telosians should be grateful he never took over their restoration project: GO-TO: Let's see. What this place needs is Krayt dragons. And sandworms from Dune. And exploding cannock!

It might be a transport sim.

I liked Virgil falling to the dark side in Arcanum, after you slaughtered an entire town (still the most evil thing I've ever done in a computer game). He had a great back story, and his fall back into evil was completely in character. It also shows how influencing your NPCs' alignment can be a natural thing, and doesn't require an explanation like 'force bonds'.

Ultima 6, and it was fantastic. I'd only really played adventure games until then. Alas, the floppies stopped working years ago, and I never bought the CD compilation because they'd made no effort to make Ultima 7 work in Windows, so it just seemed like a con. The Quest for Glory games are probably my favourite - and by far the RPG I've spent most time replaying. I'm a sucker for epic journeys.

Taris didn't work for me after the first time. Running around doing quests and helping people knowing that they're all going to die is just depressing. It affects me more when I play LS than DS, of course. Still, at least it wasn't as bad as Ultima VII: Serpent Isle, where nearly every living NPC was wiped out.

When you arrived on Telos, did you have trouble with the TSF guy and the Ithorian coming and going through the door when you were under house arrest? They always got stuck for me, except the second time I played through. And that same game was the only time when Atton got put correctly in his cell after being captured by Atris. Every other time he was outside in the hall, same as happened to you. I wondered if something in the game's timing gets fixed (correctly or incorrectly) early on, and this carries through until you start a new game.

What defines the Mandalorians is their willingness to slaughter millions of innocents in order to provoke a response from their enemy. I doubt any of the more modern military organisations listed above would be flattered by the comparison.

My feeling is that there may be some important differences between the industry you describe and my own understanding of how the game development process works. All of this is based on some assumptions of my own, as I appreciate that you can't say directly who you work for, but my knowledge of the US defense industry is little or nothing. It depends on how far along in the development process this takes place, but LucasArts may have more options in this scenario, i.e. to take the game to a different developer. The power relations that exist between your company and the customer/publisher may be substantially different from those between LucasArts and Obsidian. If your customer demands something unreasonable from an employee or team, there is the option of getting support from your supervisor's supervisor's supervisor, as you said. At this higher level, your company's size offers some protection. The customer very likely has several long-term projects with your company, and both parties have a strong interest in maintaining good relations. Obsidian's size and newness put it at a disadvantage both in the original negotiations and in any subsequent discussions. Obsidian needed LucasArts much more than LucasArts needed Obsidian, and also needed to avoid getting a bad reputation with publishers for being 'difficult'. It's also true that judging whether a product is of acceptable quality or not is much more subjective in the media/entertainment industry. Officially, LucasArts and Obsidian can take the position that the content of the game is fine as it is, and many gamers agree.

Guardian. It makes combat easier. And because you don't have computer/repair etc., there will still be a lot of the game that's new when you play second time with a Sentinel.

Gamefaqs has a lightsaber crystals faq which will tell you where some of the exotic colour crystals can be bought.

I usually get one from the first opponent I kill at the entrance to the Trayus Academy, though I don't know why you would need one at this stage.

It sounds like a step in the wrong direction to me. The voice acting is a real strength of the Kotor series, and it's important to play to your strengths. Problem of space are more an issue on the X-Box, and will hopefully be reduced by the arrival of the new X-Box. PCs can just have more discs or switch to DVD-ROM. Money, yes I agree, it's difficult for LucasArts to justify recording many many hours of spoken dialogue knowing that most gamers will experience less than half the total. But they will, if it's necessary to keep up with the competition. What I mean is that I think Kotor 1 set a new standard in this regard, and if other game developers match or exceed that, then the bar will be pushed ever upwards. But as I don't play that many games, I don't know if this is happening or not. There are times when, whatever you say to a particular character, you get the same response. Most of the time it was because the character had something to say and was determined to say it regardless. People do that from time to time, just follow their own train of thought without paying too much attention to the others in the 'conversation'. The character Atris is a good example of someone who would probably do that most of the time. But I don't think every occurence of this in the game can be explained in this way - there were some times when it didn't fit, and seemed more to do with saving space but preserving the illusion of multiple paths. I've played games where that happened and it worked fine. But maybe playing Kotor has spoiled me. Not sure if I can go back.

Another question is, which came first? Did the developers start out with the character of the Exile who makes force bonds and has an unnatural power over others, and design the influence system to suit that character? Or did they start with the influence system, making it as realistic as was feasible given the constraints of complexity and disk space, and then invent a 'cover story', an explanation for why the Exile would influence people in precisely this way? I have to say I suspect the latter. I hope that the experience gained is allowing Obsidian to attempt the former with NWN2; the potential is huge.

The influence system is not terribly realistic, because it's superficially too powerful. While I can accept that Atton can be twisted to the Dark Side, it's less plausible for Disciple or Mira, given the life choices they've made until now. Or at least, the alignment screen makes influence appear too powerful. Perhaps the problem is that we're looking at an alignment screen with the Disciple as a glowering figure framed in red and black, and expecting something of that to be reflected in his behaviour and speech. In any case, they made an in-game explanation for having influence this way, that the Exile makes force bonds and people follow him blindly because of his force-enhanced leadership abilities. Counter-intuitive, but useful for understanding why influence works the way it does. I suppose realism isn't the only factor in game quality, you also want to manipulate characters as you wish, even though that wouldn't happen quite so smoothly in real life.

Yes, it makes no sense to choose option A, which is why it seems likely that there was something else going on. As a software developer, who plays the equivalent role of 'publisher' for you? Who or what is 'the customer' you mentioned, and how do you interact? Do you know of any cases where that relationship has had problems which might shed light on what happened here? I'd be interested to read about that. I find it difficult to believe that the defense industry is without its fair share of flawed software. For the people whose games were severely disrupted by bugs, Kotor wasn't such a great experience initially, I think. However, the game was patched and became stable and playable for nearly everyone. Many of the PC players will be happy when the bug-fix patch for Kotor 2 comes out, and some of the dissatisfaction with the game will subside. What I think is strange is that they released the game on the X-Box first, but the X-Box version can't be patched, it seems. Surely the sensible thing to do would have been to release the game on the PC, get the bugs fixed in a patch, and then put it out on X-Box. I wonder what Microsoft's reaction has been to the unhappiness of X-Box gamers, or perhaps that's not something they would get involved in. This doesn't take into account that many people here have written about how much they enjoyed the game, and even those with criticisms have often replayed the game several times, myself included. I can accept that certain aspects of the game failed to live up to their full potential, but to say the game as a whole was a failure doesn't match my experience. I refer you to several 'Why I liked this game' threads, which detail the good features of the game, many of which are hard to find in other comparable products.

Goto. Now all we need is Anne Robinson...