Akari

No comment. NPC characters and details about them are the type of things that are more likely to be revealed through press coverage of the game than here on the forums. Sorry! -Akari

Interesting idea, but no. There will definitely not be any multi-player support. The client/server structure of the Aurora engine was broken during the development of KotOR1 (since it didn't need multiplayer support either). It would be a major overhaul to make the engine capable of multiplayer again. It's just not going to happen. -Akari

That hasn't been decided yet. That would be up to Lucas Arts. Yes. No one likes the slowdown, including us. While such levels may appear, you won't be getting outpaced by sea cucumbers. Probably not. I think that's all I can address at the moment. -Akari

my point is this: does the number of possible recruitable npcs exceed the number of "party member slots"? Yes. Or, rather, the total number of NPCs you can get going through a particular path of the game is 10. But there are more than 10 total potential NPCs in the game. You will never reach a situation where you are forced to chose what NPC to get rid of because you've run out of party slots. -Akari

We had a demo of the game playable at E3 in the Microsoft Booth. It was also the demo that was shown to the press in the Press-Only Lucas Arts booth. The demo was just 3 levels we put together to showcase some stuff. It in no way relates to the full game in terms of story, characters shown, etc. -Akari

Ack! No romances! Yikes. While the rest of the interactions sound great, no romances is a bad, bad idea. His wording was 'aren't tied solely to romance'. He wasn't saying that there isn't going to be any, but that the NPC interactions are going to be based on more than just romance. -Akari

I still glance at it, but it's become pretty big. It's easy to miss stuff among all those pages, though I think I've caught many of the ones I can respond to. -Akari

It's way too early to list specifics as to what will be happening for post-release content. Internally, we're focused on getting the release content done right now. Content beyond that may or may not require a new contract and so on. We should have a much better idea of what would be happening with regards to post-release updates later in the year. -Akari

Loading screens should be basically the same. The only change is that in KotOR2 the story hints that appear will be more specific to whatever particular area you're in. -Akari

Right now it's just alternating. Player goes first for the first set, AI goes first for the next set, etc. -Akari

does this mean that your teamates can actually die? ...if this is so i would consider this a huge improvement. Not really. They still drop at 0 HP or less, and then will get back up after the battle. -Akari

That's quite a long list there. Just so people know, it's really time consuming to go through posts that long and respond/think-about/account for everything on them. I have to at least look like I'm programming most of the time, so I can't invest the time it'd take to go through that entire list. So I picked out one thing to mention. That's been taken out. As long as your party members are all alive (i.e., have more than 1 HP), you'll be able to 'venture forth' as it were through area transitions. -Akari

It really just depends on the idea. I know a lot of the developers are glancing over what's posted here, and I'm sure some of the better ideas that people are coming up with must stick out to them in some way. But we have to weigh where we're at in the development cycle verses the time it would take to make the changes. Interface changes generally don't take much time, so I am making a couple notes based on some of what I've seen. I'm handling the interface programming, though the actual layouts and design of the interface rest with someone else. So when I see a good idea, I make a note to mention it to the person doing layout and design, and leave it at that. If he wants to integrate it, I'll do the coding for it. It's hard to explain what constitutes a major change or what can be integrated fairly easily. Something that may seem like it'd only take a short while to the players may actually take weeks or months on our end to implement because of how many areas of the game it would impact. -Akari

Maybe it could be added as an option... I really don't know at this point. The PC interface has yet to under go significant revisions. We've been busy getting the X-Box interfaces ready for E3. -Akari

The swoop track isn't outside the scope of the engine. There's a lot of smoke and mirrors being used there to make it look like something it isn't. But even so, mini-games are a special case. It's not impossible to add them to the game as long as they still fit into a level and can be rendered using the graphics engine. The rest is just camera positioning, and a lot of special case handling. They can still be a time consuming addition, however. -Akari

First off we may never figure out the model format in time for anything we make to be available durring the life of the game! I can understand not wanting a bunch of broken mods, don't download them(or an even better idea, research the mod)! I'm not a programer, the idea that I'd have to reverse engineer a file format and create a exporter just to share my ideas, just so you don't download a few bad mods (which you may do anyway)is ridiculous! You don't want any mods? Go waste some money on an xbox! Stop trying to make modding harder for the rest of us! I believe we have a different model format than KotOR1 had, so I can't help you with that. If we're allowed to release the model file format after KotOR2 is out, I'll be happy to help if I can. It's way too early for me to ask about it now though. -Akari

Just for the demo. It was hard coded to say Sith Marauder. The demo characters were actually just custom made for the demo, with no respect for any real class. -Akari

Not much I can say about any of this, other than to point out that the footage was almost definitely taken from the X-Box version. I haven't seen it for myself, but the PC version hasn't been shown to anyone so far, I don't think. From your comments, I get the feeling that you played KotOR1 on the PC (the way you described the change in action bar placement and the size of various displays, which actually have not changed in the X-Box version). If my guess is correct, then yeah, the footage just isn't going to look as good compared to what you saw in KotOR1. The PC version will always be a more visually impressive version of the game. -Akari

but isn't that the same thing as cheating? who'd want to play black jack if the dealer had his own deck with better cards in it... It's not exactly the same thing. The side decks are a personal item, something that the player and his/her opponent have put together before coming into the game. When I say side deck, I'm referring to the 10 cards that you pick from which your actual 'hand' of cards is drawn when the match starts. The computer opponents have side decks assigned to them depending on how 'good' they're supposed to be. Never is your side deck checked to make sure that it builds a better one to beat you. It just might have a better one because it was intended to be a tougher opponent. Once the game starts, both you and the computer get your hands randomly drawn from your side decks. The computer doens't get to manually pick its hand just like you don't. The cards drawn at the start of each player's turn come from a common deck that isn't biased for or against either player. The reason that the computer might've seemed hard to some is because the player always has to go first, and that's actually a pretty significant disadvantage. That won't be the case in KotOR2. -Akari

The player won't be forced to always go first anymore. Laws of chance though? Contrary to what many may think, the computer isn't coded to cheat. It may be given a way better side deck than you, but once the game starts, it follows the same rules you do. I had to read the code to convince myself, because it sure seemed like it came up with Just The Right Card way too often. But it really is just running off an AI working within the same rules as the player. -Akari

It's handled internally by Lucas Arts. -Akari

I think Lucas Arts really wants to host the KotOR2 site. This is good for us because it saves us having to pay the bandwidth costs associated with a page likely to receive so many hits. I'm not sure when/if we plan on having our own KotOR2 site. -Akari

Other than new Party NPC specific faces, character faces have only recently been started on. I think the first new male and female heads were done just in time for the E3 demo. There'll be more though. -Akari

We're not evading the question. I've already answered this. KotOR2 will be no more or less moddable than KotOR1. That is to say, we are not releasing toolsets or anything of the sort. I have no idea about Lucas Art's policy on fan-created content. I do know that making user-end tools is outside the scope of our contract with them. -Akari

There'll be more faces, though I don't know the number. -Akari