Magus_52

I loaded up an old game to see if the new patch improved the performance issues I was seeing (looks good). I ran a fight near the endgame to test. Only to discover that my character refused to attack at all during the fight. I can work around a bit by turning the AI to basic attacks only. Then sometimes I get attacks. Otherwise, no attacks. I can still use abilities, just not basic attacks. I've will email the autosave as it's too large to post. Walk down the path, start the fight, and click on an enemy to observe behavior. DxDiag.txt

I bought the game on release and played a few hours that night. Everything ran smoothly at that time. But time was short so I didn't launch the game again in May. When I started up again, I ran into frequent performance stutters where the game would simply freeze for a full second or more. This mostly happened in combat but could also happen while simply walking around. In combat the freezes seem to be tied to ability usage and hit most frequently in the early stages of combat. When walking around the freezes seem completely random, although there may be some correlation to voice clips playing from NPCs that I am passing by. I updated my graphics drivers and have tried toggling off various graphics settings individually and in combinations, without much luck. The only thing that seemed to have any impact at all was disabling dynamic lights with the latest patch. This dropped the frequency of freezes noticeably but they are still very common. This may be in part due to the fact that the disable flag may not be 100% effective. Xoti's lantern and street lights no longer illuminate the environment, but some abilities still do when they are used in combat, and the game tends to freeze around these events. I've attached requested diagnostic files.

I could gain light-side points from the encounter by siding with Kreia, but then Kreia would never de-spawn after the fight, and I couldn't proceed to the next room. I could only talk to Kreia again, and start the whole encounter over from the beginning. I tried a number of combinations, and never found a light-side path that let me proceed, but I didn't try all the paths, so I certianly could have missed something.

I'm sure if you're a regular on these boards, you've already seen this identical post a thousand times, so you should probably just move on, because I feel like putting down my impressions after having completed KOTOR2 last week. Oh, and there are probably spoilers, so watch out. First of all, I liked KOTOR. It was a great game, but I didn't think it was as great as all the hype it recieved. It wasn't as good as Torment, and I would have put it behind the two Baldur's Gate games as well. I thought the three biggest issues with the original KOTOR (excluding Carth's constant whining) were: --Mediocre to poor interface: This is an artifact of most games that ship on both PC and console, and I didn't expect much to be done about it. --Combat didn't feel Star Wars-esque: I assumed at the time that this was a symptom of trying to force a scene from a movie into a series of D20 combat turns, and I didn't expect any improvement in this department. However, I found that the animation work that Obsidian did really helped. The game is still, essentially, Luke and Vader standing face to face and taking turns battering down each others health bars, but the variety and quality of combat animations kept me from noticing. Excellent work here. --Oversimplified handling of the Dark Side: I never liked the way Bastilla's transitions were handled in KOTOR. It was too much like flipping a switch. Jolee's take on light/dark, and even Juhani's, were more interesting, but they weren't the focus of the game. I found KOTOR 2 much more satisfying in this regard. I loved the constant arguments with Kreia, particularly since my character didn't always when those arguments. I think the first encounter with Atris is probably my favorite dialogue sequence of any game I've played. Terrific writing there, and throughout the entire game. At the point of leaving Telos, despite being seriously pissed that I STILL didn't have a lightsaber, and would have said that KOTOR2 was far and away better than its predecessor. I no longer think that. Here's why: --Technical issues: The game was highly unstable. To be fair, I loaded up some old KOTOR save games over the weekend, to replay some key sequences and make sure I was remembering things correctly, and KOTOR was just as unstable, so the problem may be due to an inherit incompatibility between my new graphics card and the KOTOR game engine, and not anything Obsidian introduced, but there were plenty of broken dialogs and other missed details really got on my nerves. In Particular, in the Korriban caves, I was forced to take a Dark Side hit because the game script was broken and would not allow me to proceed without killing the image of Kreia. I completed the game without ever regaining the Light Side points I lost to that encounter. I write software for a living, and I know how hard good software is, but I don't want to see Obsidian die the same death as Troika, and that means that something desperately needs to fixed somewhere. --The Ending: I'm not going to rant on this too much. I read the Resident Cynic column over at Gamespy just before I reached the endgame, and I mostly watched with a feeling of horror as a great game just fell apart. Enough said. More than the missing content at the end, however, I was rather disappointed that Atris was just another Dark Jedi. After the depth of the original encounter, I was anticipating an encounter with someone who was not opposing me from the Dark Side, but rather from the Light, and the challenge of resolving such a conflict while still keeping my character on the Light Side path. Instead, we got the old RPG cliche of "oh, I'm really evil, let's fight", which was just hugely disappointing. Even if the rest of the endgame content was in place, I'd probably still be ranting about that on these boards. --Lack of Focus: I think this is mostly a complaint about Nar Shadda, which was unfortunately the first place I went after Telos. A little wandering around, trying to figure out what to do next is good, but Nar Shadda felt like a little too much of that, and, although I thought Dantooine and Onderon were fun, and Korriban was a nice, short little side-trip, I felt the whole mid-game lacked focus. Yeah, I was trying to find some Jedi Masters, but it never felt that urgent, since it never seemed like the masked guy was doing anything but staring out the window while I was running everywhere looking for Jedi. This wasn't a big issue, and with a solid endgame I probably would have forgotten about it, but it was in the back of my mind while I was going through the game. Some other Minor Gripes: --Horrible Manual: This is an RPG. If you're not going to put the class progressions in the manual (and average, slow, etc. doesn't count), either make this information available in-game (Troika's in-game help for the White Wolf system in Bloodlines should be an example to anyone making an RPG), or stick it on the CD somewhere so I can print it out myself. --Combat is Too Easy: KOTOR was consistently challenging. I seldom felt threatened in this game. The constant, amateur ambushes by bounty hunters were almost comical. --Lightsaber Forms: I could never figure out if the lightsaber forms were having an effect. Partly, this was caused by the complete lack of documentation about the actual effect of the form, and partly because combat was usually too easy to make switching forms worthwhile. --Upgrades: I liked the new upgrade system, but the clumsy interface system (which was still beter than KOTOR), made managing my upgrades too much of a chore. I needed a better system for figuring out equipment was assigned to whom (including weapons in a character's secondary weapon slot), and what upgrades I had and where they were being used. Heck, just allowing me to switch between upgrades and construction without exiting back to the game world would have been a 100% improvement over the system that was in place. Ok, I've probably rambled on long enough. The game had its problems. On the other hand, I had a blast running a Dark-side leaning character through Peragus last night, and, as soon as a patch is available, I'll be playing through the game at least one more time, so ti can't be all bad. --Magus

Sorry, double post. If this forum has a delete function, I can't find it.