Akari

I'm taking off for today. But I'll probably be in tomorrow. If so, I'll start with the questions already posted that I didn't get to today. Hope everyone's having good weekend. -Akari

Not in this game. The main player character is going to be human. -Akari

I'm not a paid PR Representative. I'm paid to program. I offer to answer questions because I like talking about as much as I can get away with. Now and then I have told new things without being prompted, but in general it's easier if people ask things and I weigh whether or not I can speak on them. At least that way I know what's on everyone's minds and sometimes I do go and ask the designers later for information relating to good questions I didn't know the answer to. I'm going to prune some of the redundant posts in the thread to keep it as clean as possible. -Akari

It has to be. The Morgan Man has promised such. -Akari

On the swoop tracks there are now obsticals to avoid as well as the speedup ramps that you want to hit. In Pazaak, one of the new cards is a Doubles card. It basically doubles the value of the last card that you received. If you start out with a 10, then playing the Doubles card will take you straight to 20. When it comes to breaking stuff down, the higher your repair skill, the more you get back for breaking the items down. Except for chemical-based items, like medpacks and stims. You need higher Treat Injury to get more out of breaking those down. There's some info for you. -Akari

A lot of effort has gone into making all of the skills worth investing points into. Which ones are MOST worth investing points into will probably vary depending on player perspective. For example, your treat injury skill not only improves your results with healing kits (like in KotOR1), but it also directly impacts your own innate regeneration rate. The higher your level in this skill, the faster that character regenerates health. Unless it's a droid character, in which case it's their Repair skill that affects how fast they regenerate. Repair also plays an important role in the item creation system. -Akari

Sorry. The main character has to start the game as one of the three Jedi classes that existed in KotOR1. Much to Hades_One's chagrin. It's essential for the story of this particular game. That's more of a designer question. I'm not really sure what the overall level of freedom will be. I do know that various areas are drastically different depending on the alignment-related decisions your character has made. Right now it's not looking like it. -Akari

You will see at least one of those in KotOR2. I'm not sure about the other two. I don't know of any specific reason why the Prequel Trilogy aliens didn't make much of an appearance in KotOR1. I'm not aware of any 'knight-looking' armor being added to the game. I guess Sith Armor in general kinda looks like that, but not really. -Akari

Animations will change as the level of your character progresses. This is done in stages, BTW. Like, once you hit a certain level, more complex animations will be used. And then again later at some other level, and so on. -Akari

I'd love to reveal more about party members, but I need to leave something for the magazines to report. I hope that the one with the 'pet' gets information released soon so that we can more freely discuss these things. -Akari

C++ for 99% of it. As far as how many lines, I'd been thinking of figuring that out someday. But let it just be said that there's several files that are over 50k lines long. -Akari

I'm not really sure. I'm wondering the same thing. We have a designer who is handling a lot of the balance issues and trying to make things more sensible. But I don't know what his thoughts are on the single saber combat. -Akari

Did you read that in a magazine or website or is that just a rumor going around? B) -Akari

At the time that was the truth. I've since been gotten to be somewhat more informed. -Akari

You can't kill random NPCs by default, no. It will be the same as KotOR1 in that regard. -Akari

While I haven't heard anything official on this front, I believe that it is the same, yeah. Well, we certainly hope so. We have gotten some frame rate improvements over KotOR1 and we're looking at some other areas that could stand to be optimized as well. -Akari

Nothing has been done about this yet, but I'm hoping there will be something I can do in this regard when I get to the NPC party scripting in the near future. Hm. Well, for all the NPCs you get in your party, they each have unique feats and abilities specific to their character that sets them apart. Since the player character will never be a soldier, I don't believe there have been any 'generic to every soldier' changes made to the game. It doesn't currently. I don't know if that is the final design decision on that or not. Nope. It's still around. Outside of combat it happens immediately. Within combat, if you do it while you have no actions on your action queue, it also happens immediately. If you do have actions on your action queue the Switch Weapons action will get placed in the combat queue like any other action and execute when it falls due. It doesn't take a complete combat round to perform no matter what though. Weapon swapping will never happen automatically. It will always be a player's action that triggers it. -Akari

Hm. I'm not totally sure how much back and forth travelling will be involved. Designers would know the answer to that much better than I. For those wondering, we do have the transition movies between areas just like in KotOR1. I personally think they're a lot more interesting this time though. The artists did a good job of putting unique twists into many of them. But I could just be biased. -Akari

Yeah. You will see cutscenes of things going on that your character is not immediately there to witness. I don't know if it happens more or less than in KotOR1. -Akari

Yeah. I can't say what though. -Akari

I'm going to hold off on that question. First of all, I don't know off the top of my head so I'd have to spend some time looking into it. And secondly, that's probably bordering on 'Press Release' material for some magazine spread or other so it should probably be reserved for that. Sorry about that. -Akari

I want to tread lightly here... I could say how it works NOW, but due to animation taking up so much space I don't know how it will actually be in the released game. There are feats related to unarmed combat. I don't think there's specific stances though. I believe the stances stuff is for lightsaber use only. I can't really speak on the animations part, because that's an Unknown right now. I may be more certain on that one way or another in a few weeks. -Akari

I don't really know the answer to that. Since I'm not the Producer, I don't really have a Big Picture view of how far things are along and I haven't heard any estimates tossed around yet. There's still lots of work to get done. Nothing technical that I can think of. They are doing the music, the sound effects, sound placement in areas, marketing, voice acting... And this is all ongoing now as well, it's just that they will continue to work on those things even after our part is done. We've had the sound guy dowin here with us the last week or so, so music is getting worked on now, I think. -Akari

I tried looking at the tables to figure the answer out to this question, but I can't really make heads or tails of them right now. Feats and Skills weren't really my department. I could figure them out with more time, but I have tons of work to do too. Sorry. -Akari I hope not. -Akari

I'm not sure how many there are in total. I think I've heard of at least three unique ones mentioned, though I haven't toyed around with them a lot myself. There are different animations involved with the different stances, but I don't know to what extent. They will vary combat related parameters and other statistics as well. Don't know. I don't think there's anything that affects your default pose for the sake of just looking different. I believe combat stances do affect your default pose, however. Combat stances aren't an area I've had anything to do with yet, though I will be tying them into the interface soon which means I'll probably be a lot more familiar with them before long. -Akari