SteveThaiBinh

Playing through Telos Academy again, and again the same glitch. Atton hasn't been transported to his cell after we're captured, so Kreia has this long, disturbing conversation with ... an empty force cell. What makes me laugh is that nonexistent Atton's first line is "Why is it that everywhere we go I end up in a cell?" Is there anything you can do to avoid this happening? He's only been in the cell properly once, out of about five times I've played.

Oops.

The best advice I can give you is not to come to the spoiler's forum until you've finished your first play through. Believe me, it will go fast enough as it is... Unless you get stuck, of course, in which case, very happy to help!

It might work, but it won't make a profit unless a significant number of people are buying at the full $50 price. Kotor 2 sold really well, so it might have exhausted its potential market. Was the original Thief also a big seller when it first came out? If so, then I guess there's no reason the same idea couldn't work for Kotor 2.

It depends how you use the word 'patch'. For me, it implies fixing something that's broken - so you get a 'bug fix' patch to resolve technical problems. But the content of Kotor 2 isn't broken, it's just not as good as it could have been. Referring to a content 'patch' might be taken as an admission that there was something defective about the original, which could have repercussions for Obsidian's reputation. Better to talk about an 'add-on' with 'alternative pathways', and 'additional endings', and so on.

Many of these dialogue options look like nasty DS insults, if you skim them too quickly and don't think about how they might be said. If you always choose the most goody-goody LS milksop option, you can miss the flirting altogether.

"A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwhich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots into the air. "Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. "I'm a panda," he says , at the door. "Look it up." The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation. "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves." (Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach To Punctuation ) You can hear the radio series that inspired the book, 'Cutting a Dash', with the Listen Again function at the BBC 7 website.

I think I got handmaiden's Wisdom bonus thing when I was playing DS. It was a little tricky to get enough influence with her, though. I had to leave her on the ship a lot - she really wasn't happy with what I was doing.

i think they did that to allow you to be able to turn either way, light or dark even later into the game. playing darkside i noticed how many times some of the other characters are trying to convince the exile not to fall to the darkside and was tempted to back to being lightside. i only stuck with being a sith because i had already finished the game as a lightside character. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> That's a fair point, and I'll rephrase what I said. I didn't like the fact that I was constantly having to tell the game what kind of person the Exile had been at Malachor 5. I would have liked to fix his past motivations and behaviour earlier on, in order to develop a better understanding of the character, while keeping his future path completely open.

It was an issue, I agree. When the Exile's attitude to the past was being discussed, I could choose one option (agressive, regretful, ambivalent etc.), and begin to construct an image of the Exile, as I saw him, in my head. But then another dialogue would take place which didn't fit with either my own image of the Exile or my earlier dialogue choices. This was fine for a while, but continuing it throughout the game may have been too much. I didn't really like the fact that I was constantly having to tell the game what kind of person the Exile was. You could tell one person "I went to Malachor 5 to butcher all my enemies", and the next time say "I feel so sorry for all the deaths", and this was fine. Some people will value this as being very open-ended, but for me it meant that the game wasn't responding to my choices, and therefore my choices didn't mean that much. So what's the alternative? You could have a single conversation at the beginning that fixes one of three/four possible backstories, then allow the game to reveal details of chosen backstory slowly over the course of the game (similar to the Revan DS/LS/M/F conversation with Atton). All possible dialogue options could remain, just some of them would have [lie] in front. This method adds to replay value, but isn't very 'non-linear' in spirit. Some sort of balance between the two extremes might be better, where you have several chances to decide and alter the Exile's backstory in the first third of the game, and then the game will flesh it out in more detail later. As I don't play games so much, I don't know a lot of the classic RPGs that are referred to on this forum, so my suggestions may already have been tried and failed. I really did appreciate the fact that Kotor 2 handled my character's backstory in a way that seemed very new and original to me.

Atton, but only right at the start of the game when you first meet him. This sets Revan's sex/alignment for the rest of the game.

Oooh, it's gone all quiet. Echo.... Shh! Did you hear that?

Why, though? Did I miss a reference to this in the game? Who's to say that destroying the Force will have any negative effects at all, beyond a handful of Jedis and force sensitives losing their special abilities? The Force may link all life, but it doesn't necessarily sustain it. And the exile proves that life can exist without the force.

I printed a letter off and snail-mailed it to LucasArts, asking for an expansion pack. At least I know then that someone at LucasArts will read it. There was a petition thread on this forum to restore the cut ending, but it was deleted suddenly and without explanation. Some people have speculated that this was the result of LucasArts' complaining to Obsidian, though no-one seems to know for sure. That, and the announcement that these forums could close, may have caused some people to 'self-censor' their posts, avoiding topics that might be objectionable. Or people may simply be reconciling themselves to the imperfections of the game after the initial anger has worn off.

Of course Obsidian should, and will, produce a technical patch. I'd love to see a Kotor 2 expansion pack, too. But to all the potential problems that have been mentoned here, I'll add two: My experience of expansion packs is that they're good at adding new weapons, items, monsters, combat areas etc; not so strong in adding depth to the story. Many of the people on this forum who are calling for an expansion pack are really hoping for more story, particularly a revised ending. The expense (and perhaps scheduling difficulty) of recalling the entire voice-acting cast could be a big problem. The expansion pack will only be good if Obsidian really want to do it. Kotor 2 was clearly a 'labour of love' for many of those involved, or at least that's the impression I get when I play it. But these people have moved on to other projects, presumably with equal commitment. And if they've been getting abusive emails from so-called 'Kotor 2 fans', and maybe flak from LucasArts about their forums, their enthusiasm for doing an expansion pack may be limited.

It's difficult to agree objective criteria for defining 'good' and 'bad' writing, even though most people believe that good and bad writing do exist. Like many people on these boards, I found the ending of Kotor 2 unsatisfying, and like many people, I'm struggling to pinpoint exactly why that was, in the hope that Obsidian might be able to take away something useful from our comments. I think there is a tendency to compare Kotor 2, more than other computer games, with movies. That's unfair, because a computer game has a non-linear structure, and the writer cannot control how you progress through the story. But it's also understandable, for two reasons. Firstly, the game takes place in the Star Wars universe, a universe that was defined by movies, and we always have the movies in the back of our minds when we play. Secondly, the game itself sets out to create the 'feel' of a movie, by having strong character development, using voice actors for all of the dialogue, using small 'scene-setting' movies in the game, and so on. All of these are designed to enhance the gaming experience, and succeed very well, but they may have the unintended consequence that players judge the experience on movie terms. I remember the movie 'Little Shop of Horrors' also had a famous 'cut ending'. In the original stage musical, the main characters were killed near the end, the alien plants conquered the world and the audiences loved it. When they made it into a film and tested it on focus groups, people hated the fact that these characters they loved just died: the cinema gives a more intimate experience than the theatre. The director and actors were recalled to shoot an alternative, 'happy' ending. So audience expectations can vary according to genre, and as some computer games move into a grey area between two genres, this can become a problem for writers. Obsidian have said that they don't have any dedicated writers: all their designers need to have this skill. Even if a company of Obsidian's size had the resources to hire such a writer, do specialists in non-linear writing exist? The art of constructing a non-linear plot is a relatively new one, and when conventional writers turn their hand to it, the results can be very hit and miss (think of Syberias 1 and 2). Incidentally, my first experience of reading non-linear literature was struggling through Cortazar's Rayuela at university, and it was not the most satisfying or enjoyable experience of my life. Specifically about Kotor 2's ending, for me they just changed the style of the game too much. Too combat-centred, without the interaction between characters or the humour that were real strengths of the game until then. I felt something similar playing Gabriel Knight 3: the game proper was based around a group of interesting characters, then suddenly at the end you have these bizarre, out-of-place puzzles (giant chessboards, pulling secret levers etc.) that just didn't fit the overall atmosphere of the game. If there is a convention that the last section of an RPG should involve hacking through wave after wave of opponents to reach and kill the 'final boss', then maybe that's a convention that could be challenged.

Ermm, yes. And impressive! It reminded me of some DS Carth fanfic I read ages ago on kotorfanfic.com

I vote for 17th poor NPC commoner as the main character in Kotor 3. He's now my official personal hero. I think his response to the above would be: Reward? Actually, the money was for you to get me some Juma Juice from the cantina. But if you're offering to pay yourself ...

Hmmm. What I was trying to say was that it's good that George Lucas, LucasArts and the 'canon' haven't given a precise, 'official' definition of what the force is. Because the effect of that would be to stifle debate and controversy. And it's also good that characters in the Star Wars universe don't have such a 'precise definition' either, because that leads them to struggle to understand it and create conflicting interpretations and religions. It's dangerously easy for an author to over-explain, and diminish the ideas he has created. I'm glad this hasn't happened here.

I think keeping the idea of 'The Force' vague adds to the realism of Star Wars. I don't know anything about EU either, but it would make sense that people in the Star Wars universe wouldn't have a full understanding of the nature of the force. That allows at least two competing interpretations, Jedi and Sith, to co-exist. Carth has an interesting take on the force in Kotor 1. He says he used to think the Dark Side was just another name for commonplace corruption and evil, but travelling with Revan, he came to believe that there was more, that there was 'something out there' waiting to prey on Jedi and turn them to the dark side. That implies that the Dark Side is capable of 'action', which in turn implies some level of consciousness or 'will'. Or the 'something out there' might refer to the True Threat that Revan has gone to face, not the Dark Side itself. I want to separate Kreia's attitude to the Force (anti) from her morality (evil), but I'm not sure how well this works in practice. I can see that you can be pro-force and evil, like Malak and any other Dark Jedi. Can you be anti-Force and good? I think I wrote on another topic once, if you really believe that the Force is manipulating people and inhibiting their freedom, then destroying the force might be seen as a noble aim, 'liberating' the galaxy. This is NOT Kreia's motivation, of course, but I can imagine Jolee Bindo thinking along these lines. It depends on what the practical effects of 'killing' the Force would be. Would there be mass deaths, or just a few Jedi losing some fancy abilities?

Excellent! Another thing to do when I eventually replay. I'm waiting for the patch, though.

A point-and-click adventure. No, seriously. OK, I know it's not feasible, as only I and three other people would buy it. This is why I like the Kotor games - the combat is fairly unobtrusive (easy), so I can just sit back and enjoy it like watching an action movie. It fills the spaces between the really good stuff, the story and dialogue. And because it does have combat, it sells enough for them to keep making more (hopefully).

I read somewhere that you can access the secret compartments in the X-Box version, but not the PC version. I have a PC, and I've never found them.

The light-side/dark-side alignment system may itself be a barrier to making the handling of morality more interesting. If you're really going to leave it up to the player to decide whether action A is good or evil, then the game has no business rewarding it with LS or DS points: this is 'giving the correct answer' to a problem which may have no correct answer. There are important choices in the game where the writers deliberately avoid giving DS/LS points, but this is not applied consistently. For players interested in this morality aspect, it might be better to have the DS/LS system disabled, and have the characters you meet in the game react to specific things you have done, rather than to your overall alignment. On the other hand, the DS/LS points provide instant and satisfying feedback for those players (likely the majority) to whom this is an interesting aspect of the game, but not central to their experience. You can't satisfy everone completely. But whether Obsidian's experiment in morality succeeded or failed matters less than the fact that they did experiment - there's no 'dumbing down' here! I hope that NWN2 is just as ambitious.

I agree. Too obviously evil. For purposes of camouflage, to confuse the enemy, I suggest: Darth Snuggles Darth BiiigHuuug Darth Hello Kitty