Abbadon74

KOTOR I, by far.

I couldn't agree more. I don't know, but after investing 40+ hours on KOTOR I, I was very disappointed to learn nothing I did really mattered, all I strived for was of little or no consquence in KOTOR II. I mean, not only in trying to play the good jedi role and save the universe, but in the relationships I built. It's kind of like The Empire Stikes Back being about Jack the Sometimes Jedi and his three nerf-herding cousins, rather than the cast I loved from A New Hope. I just don't think I would have enjoyed that as much. I want Revan back. I want Carth and Bastilla back. Basically, I want the first incarnation to be continued. I was so disappointed with KOTOR II's lack of real inclusion of the main characters from the first game, I've gone back and played it again. Hey, it says we may be called back to defend the universe again. Well, isn't it about time? -B

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. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Truly couldn't agree more. I think this would have vastly improved my abilty to "access " the game and the PC. -B

Of course it could have been done. But it would have made the workload even heavier! To really "get" the ending of Kotor 1, you would have to ask for more variables than "light/dark" - "male/female". And it is hard enough to design a branching future without having to worry about a branching past. Personally, I liked the in-game questions as a measure to define Revan a little bit. And it also made possible that new players with no idea of game one's content could make a choice, even if they didn't really understand what it referred to. Better than being confronted with it at the beginning: "Welcome, new player:" "1) Should your 'Revan' be : a) male b) female "2) Would you like him/her to be a) light side b) dark side" "3) If you don't know what a 'Revan' is, then LA strongly suggests buying KOTOR 1 (available through mail order) And now, enjoy the show! <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Use some imagination. It doesn't have to be a barrage of questions at the beginning. Geeze, just off the top of my head, I think it could have very easily been the T3-M4 mission., or at least his prequel to the Ebon Hawk repairs. The game could have opend as he comes on-line, severely damaged, memory with huge gaps. He would have to run an, I don't know, self-repair system to fill in the gaps, to learn who he was, and what he was to do. This is just something off the top of my head, but I still think it would have worked. And, personally, I don't think it would have been too daunting to fill in those gaps. And if it made the workload heavier, well, to an extent, again that's their job. Ultimately, as a consumer, I am concnerned more about the quality of the end product, rather than the workload of the developers. I know that may seem uncaring of me, but I'm willing to pay my hard-earned money to buy their product. I certainly don't believe in pirating it, so they get their payment, and I'll get to appreciate their efforts. -B

Why don't you all just kind of cool down. I'd really be interested in discussing the writing of this game and how we felt about it. Personally, I'd like to discuss the whole PC as a character with a past, particularly as that past is not clearly defined at the onset. I've seen it mentioned in this thread before that even when reading novels, you don't know an entire character's past. Well, that's true, but you typically get to know the character, which I never felt I did in this game. Again, I feel it had a great deal to do with the writers going either too far or not far enough in determining who your character was. And it isn't entirely accurate that your character in KOTOR I had amnesia. He was programmed. You see, when you start the game, you character doesn't realize who he is, and that's fine because your character post-reprogramming past isn't relevant. You know he's of the class you selected when you built him and you go in to it expecting to learn the rest of the pertinent details (as in a good novel). However, in KOTOR 2 your past is very significant to who you are and the eventual threat to the universe. But when that past isn't made immediately available to the reader, it becomes something that must be solved over the course of the game. But all this does is prevent us from truly connecting withthe character. In other words, that illusion that the character and I are the same person, that I'm Role Playing in the game is lost. It becomes more like Splinter Cell. I dont' know everything about Sam Fisher, but what Ido need to know will likely be revealed to me, while the rest won't. And I guess that's my point. Maybe I was detecting a subtle genre blending. Maybe this had a number of RPG conventions on the surface (building and naming your character), but was deceptively action-oriented under the surface. Actually, the more I think about it, the more this makes sense. But myargument still stands. Again, you're stuck in the middle. You're not really this character, but you kind of are. This isn't really a Star Wars character you're playing (a la Sam Fisher), but one you've created. I don't like the gray area. And, futhermore, to say it's difficult to write a story to bridge the gap between the myriad ways of ending the first game is an understatment. But at the risk of sounding glib, that's the writers' jobs. That's what their paid to do. And it can be done. I mean, sixty years of sequential comics are a good indicator of that. Geeze, if they really worried about making a game match the ending of KOTOR I, they could have just asked what happened when I was building my character. So, I don't really buy the argument it was too difficult to mesh the end of the first with the start of the second. It could have been done. -B

You know, it wasn't until actually reading this forum (after all the trolls vacated) that more of the game actually started making sense. Thanks to the OP. I played for over fiftty-three hours and, after a point, I couldn't get ANY of the characters to say anything new to me. I mean, I tried to mix it up, get different people to go over and over the same levels, just trying to get someone to talk to me. I even got a guide to tell me how to talk to the differnet characters and STILL, I couldn't get past a certain level. I got Bao-Dur really early in the game. After I got him, I never got any other speech option than, "Never mind". Ugh. Fifty-three hours and I had no idea about WHAT was in Atton's past. The influence system REALLY didn't work for me, it seems. But that's not REALLY a story criticsm, I guess, but it does have bearing on the story and my lack of enjoyment for it. But I think it would have been better if the opening for the PC would have been handled in such a way as to clear up certain issues in the past. I realize it's been said before, but when I started playing the game, I was actually under the impression for the first several hours that I'd missed something, maybe a cutscene somewhere. I can appreciate the writers were allowing us to fill in our own history, but I almost think this would have worked better if it was handled in the character set-up beore the game begins and then have a few slight variations on the opening, or NPC interactions with the PC to kind of start the story rolling. As such, I was rifling through the manual, looking through my guide, anything, just to get an idea of what, exactly, had gone on in the past and what I had done during my years of exile. For instance, what if we had four or five history selections to choose from? We could maybe choose to have spent our time in exile meditating, serving as a mercenary, really anything, just to then give more weight to how the NPCs reacted to us. I went through a large portion of the game thinking maybe I was a clone, maybe I had amnesia, anything, as a means of trying to explain what came across as gaps in the story. Maybe that was why the end was so disappointing for me. I had expected it all to be explained, only to discover it already was, just not in a way I was left feeling satisfied with. It was almost like I didn't have complete control over who my character was (which I can understand and is perfectly fine when done well), but also that the writing left too many gaps and didn't define the character well enough to make up for my lack of input. Wow, I would have killed for just a few cut scenes maybe showing my character on the bridge of a ship, commanding soldiers, doing SOMETHING to show me who had been, what he had done. I think the general idea of the search for redemption was great and VERY deep, but again was lacking for me, as none of the characters actually chose to speak to me (come on, I was a nice guy...I don't think you could get more LS than I was) and then the fact that Kreia (my favorite character) had no possiblity of redemption was a little disappointing to me. I understand she served as the foil for the PC. That's obvious. But maybe actually redeeming, or even partially redeeming her in the end would have a been a nicer way of driving the LS ending (in which the character -hopefully- finds redemption) home. And I still think I would have liked the game to pick up a bit better after the original. I played Kotor I again after beating Kotor II and, wow, I really felt something after the LS end of the first game. Which is the heart of RPGs (and to say a video game, a RPG video game, cannot be compared to a book is to really strip away the RPG heart, which has its origins in print. ), to feel something about the characters, about the story, to--for a time--play that ROLE. No, I think actually a RPG (videogame, or otherwise) can and should be compared to print. The story's there, we just make the choises to get us to the potential endings, whereas a novel has completely layed it out for the reader, there should still be a personal investment , connection with the characters and story--otherwise, what would be the point of reading/playing? I could never connect with my character and that left me feeling a little disappointed with the overall game. -B