foobario

That's beautiful, Liz. I thought Visas could have been the most engaging character in the story... but *cough* it was not to be. It's a damn shame to create such a compelling character and then put her on tape-loop for the whole rest of the game...

Because when Lucas does it we get ewoks and Jar Jar Binks. Do not call up that which you cannot put down...

This is a good point. I thought about this a bit after first playing KOTORII, and finally wrote some dialogue management code to see how scalable it could be. I think that the saving grace of a nominally more complex system is that it would not be strictly necessary to have unique responses for M/F/DS/LS/etc... in many cases dialogue responses would be identical, but the (non-conversational) *side effects* of the player's choices would be different. So instead of increasing complexity of the dialogue tree, the additional complexity gets offloaded to the force/influence/status maintenance code, which already exists and is (or should be) always running anyway. Aside from such side effects, much of the dialogue has a limited scope (conversation, quest, planet), and if proper bookkeeping (with respect to force/influence/etc) is done the amount of information that must carry over from one scope to another is minimal. This keeps the state-machine complexity that would otherwise arise down to a much more manageable level... the 'next action' table becomes a (very) sparse matrix and the number of states that must be tracked drops from n^p (n = number of independent dialogues, p for m/f/LS/DS/etc options) to something less than or equal to n*p... the point being that the complexity can grow as a linear function rather than a power function, resulting in much more scalable code. It seems to me that an NPC that reacts to you based on your actual stats (all simple numbers that are already tracked: the NPC already knows your gender, there are already numbers assigned to force and player level etc) rather than on what your response was to a specific question in a specific conversation on some other planet would seem much more 'intelligent'... the information still gets carried over, in the form of the effect it had on your stats. For quests and plotlines that are more global in scope, more rigorous accounting can be done, but this represents a small fraction of the interactions you have throughout the game. There is also a reasonably compact fuzzy-logic representation of this type of data that is already used for AI; applying this to management of the PC's state would result in a system that, while not explicitly guaranteeing a specific NPC response, would base NPC's reactions on any number of qualifiers (history, alignment, gender etc) in a contextual manner without excess baggage. It basically provides each NPC with a personality that reacts to your state of being rather than giving them each a list of responses that may or may not be in context. Much of this is academic in the context of KOTORII, however, since in this game NPCs often forget what you are talking about or what alignment you are right in the middle of a conversation. If the NPC's are just going to wing it regardless of your actions, you don't have to do a lot of state tracking. :/

I find your lack of faith... disturbing.

Yeah... as opposed to the current situation, where they ripped off both Xbox AND PC users.

Found it here. Perhaps someone with the UK or German version could post the readme from this?

I thought KotOR was one of the best games I'd ever played... I probably played every possible path through that game. The storyline and character development were almost cinematic... and the gameplay was totally immersive. Decisions mattered - honor and dishonor, truth and lie, loyalty and betrayal... each led to distinct changes in the NPCs, distinct advancements in the storyline, and all of it contributed to an overall sense of *purpose*. KotORII is the 'Matrix Trilogy' of video games. It starts out strong, draws you in deeper for a while... and then suddenly wraps up everything with a non-contextual ending that leaves numerous major plotlines hanging and leaves you feeling like 'wha???'. As the game progressed I had hoped that the ambiguity was intentional, that the game designers were trying to show that everything isn't just black and white... the story lends itself well to this concept, and takes a few tentative steps in this direction, but then non sequiturs abound. The character development was, for the most part, either linear and nonbinding (i.e. you could go back through the same dialog and make different choices without permanent repurcussions) or essentially non-existent (Visas, for instance.) Building a team, getting to know the characters (even if it meant killing them, like the Juhani choices in KotOR), the usually inevitable romantic interests, all of these were weak. The vast evil hunger that threatens to destroy the universe? You find out 90% of what you need to know about him right before the 15-second fight that destroys him. All of that careful interrogation of HK-47 about the other HK droids? Part of a quest that was lopped off of the end of the game. 90% of the back-story you learn in this game has nothing to do with the way the story ends. Even more disappointing than the actual gameplay was the discovery that a few of the unresolved plotlines were actually made - the files are on the CD, but the scripts that would tie them into the game have sections commented out. I suspect that time/money pressures led Obsidian to lop off 20% of the game, hoping we wouldn't notice the hastily-bandaged bloody stumps that remained. KotOR read like a novel. KotOR2 reads like Mad Magazine. The only other reason I can think of for them to put out such an obviously hacked up game is that they intend to use the lack of plotline resolution as a hook into KotOR3. "Want to find out what really happened? Give us another $50." No thanks. Anyway, I've spent my last dollar on Obsidian games. Gothic has numerous quirky bugs but at least they remained true to the storyline. Deus Ex is complex and engaging and it too doesn't try to pull a fast one on the players. Why bother with substandard games when there are other options out there from companies that respect their fanbase?