ultimate_ed

I dare say that Lucas Arts has Wing Commander to thank for making it possible for the great games like X-wing and Tie Fighter to come to be. I remember buying a Sound Blaster card (8 bit ISA, baby!) because that first Wing Commander had digital audio sound effects and music. Man, I'd love to have a TIE Fighter 2.0 come to pass.

Just finished watching the gameplay demo video (all 90 something MB's of it), and it seems like that ought to give us some things to talk about. Since the other thread was mostly people talking about how long the download time is at Fileplanet (took me about 1.5 hours in line, myself) I figured we should start fresh. So here we go: Likes 1. Moving the action choices from above the character to the bottom of the screen. Definitely an annoyance in KOTOR in that the overhead display would often block opponents or cinematic elements of the game. 2. Looks like there are six choices for action instead of the three of the first game. Although, through all the combat I saw, pretty much the only one used was the second one with all the flurry, critical strike,etc. I never saw any action with the three added choices, so I'm not sure what they're for. It would be nice if you could use them for other combat actions that could then be tied to a hot key (so you could do 1 for critical strike, 2 for flurry, 3 for normal attack, etc, instead of having to scroll the second column to change the attack type all the time). 3. Looks very familiar to those who have played KOTOR. On the one hand, I appreciate it as the KOTOR engine made for a pretty immersive gameplay feeling. But, on the other hand, I had hoped things would be kicked up a little higher. I've been playing UT2004 for the last few weeks and been quite impressed by the graphics of the environments. It definitely exposes a weakness for KOTOR and KOTOR 2 in been limited by what the Xbox can do. Dislikes 1. Those info boxes took up way too much screen real estate. Talking about the description/health box for enemies, the attack selection menu, and the head icons. Hopefully, this is just for the Xbox and us PC users running 1024x768 and higher will be able to scale those boxes down so we can actually see the game. 2. The character models and animations were stilted, choppy, and cheap looking. The laser bolt deflections looked particularly bad. But, I'm expecting that these are pretty early versions of the models as they didn't appear as good as what we had in KOTOR. 3. Party memebers are still too stupid to avoid walking through mines when there is a clear path around them. I hope they are planning to improve the NPC pathfinding abilities. 4. What's up with the bun on the player character? I guess that's what I think so far. After seeing the video, I'm still looking forward to the next game, but I don't expect to be caught up in it like I was with the first one. From what I can see in the video, I think this one is closer to a version 1.5 rather than a full 2.0 type of improvement. What do you guys think?