AgainstOne

putting money above your reputation as a software developer is just long-term suicide. where does the money come from in the future when the disgruntled fans shun their subsequent products? you'd think they don't want their new company to suffer the same fate as the old one, but i can't tell from their current practices.

hey, i have an idea! why don't you focus on 1 word from my 1,242 word argument, then try to discredit me by insinuating that i haven't made any games so i must not know what i'm talking about. oh, that's already what you did! luckily for me, any intelligent person will see right through that weak attempt. i have numerous valid points and if you don't care to discuss any of those, or anything else intelligent for that matter, then i don't really care to waste any more of my time on you. regardless of who released the game to the public, OE had to have "released" the game to LA before they could ever think about publishing it.

first of all, i never said i was a game developer. i said that i was a software developer. the fact is that i am a software engineer for the world's largest defense contractor (if you don't know who that is, try your favorite search engine). that is far too naive and far too easy an out for them and that's just what they want you to believe, i'm sure. the fact is that obsidian is made up of the folks from black isle (black = obsidian, get it?). if you knew anything about black isle, you would know that they primarily worked on sequels to bioware games. bioware creates the original games and the engines, black isle creates the sequels using those engines. from this knowledge, you can see that this contract was practically handed to them by bioware (KotOR was indeed a bioware game and it is customary for bioware to hand it's sequels off to black isle, which is now obsidian). furthermore, they have enough clout in that they are made up of folks who have had major roles in creating some of the greatest PC games ever. they also have the clout of bioware on their side, as bioware had no small part in getting obsidian the contract to do this sequel. you say, "Once they have established themselves..."? how's a 6300 signature petition against their company's first product doing for establishing themselves? you think that is helping establish themselves? i tend to think quite the opposite. you are quite correct in that if anything is to be done to fix this game, LA is the one to put pressure on. hopefully, as this news and petition grows and grows, LA will see how many people are saying they will not be buying KotOR3 if KotOR2 is not fixed. hopefully they will start to see this as little dollar signs floating away and they will start to care. none of that, however, takes the blame off of obsidian for releasing this game unfinished.

while that may be true to an extent, consider this. would you rather: A) take the easy money now and damage your reputation and any sales of your future products. B) take a loss now, but in doing so, make a great name for yourself by doing a great job and having throngs of satisfied customers coming back for your products again and again. i know i for one have read countless people posting on this forum, on lucasarts' forum, and in the petition saying they will never buy another game developed by obsidian. if it were me, and lucasarts was as demanding as you people seem to think, i would have either: A) hired more people to ensure i could get the job done to my standards and on time B) passed on it. and don't say they didn't have the luxury to pass on it because, from what i've read, they've been working on neverwinter nights 2 for over a year, which puts them starting on that at about the same time they started on KotOR2, so they were getting the rent paid. i have to admit, the software development environment that i work in is different in that if the customer needs a release by a certain date and we have to cut back on some features, they know that those features can be added in the next release. now if they MUST HAVE certain features and including those features is going to push the release out, then that's just tough for them. we tell them point blank, if you want these features, it will take this long. if you need it sooner, you'll have to figure out which features you want cut and if you can't live with any of the features being cut, then you won't get it by when you are wanting it. i don't know how many people are seeing red flags going up over a situation like this, but to me there flying all over the place. i WOULD NEVER agree to something like that. if my name is on the product, i will be testing it to make damn sure there is no backlash against me for any bugs or problems that should have been caught. OE really dropped the ball in that arena. this is why i am not forgiving of OE on this one. they KNOW better. they are not just some small startup company that doesn't know any better about how the whole process works. OE is made up of people who have had their collective hands in creating some of the greatest PC games in the world. there is no excuse whatsoever they can give for this extreme lack of judgement. first of all, everyone knows KotOR was buggy. everybody knows that. the beauty of KotOR was that the story was so excellent that we could all look past the bugs. any smart developer knows that you cannot take a buggy engine, mix it up and throw it around and NOT test the result! there aren't enough words to describe how irresponsible that was. i am extremely disappointed in OE in this respect. they knew better. not a situation i would have put myself in. and i that, i mean that if those were the terms, i'd have to pass. that is just blatantly making excuses for their utter incompetence. i do not agree with you at all on this point. if i know anything, i know that it is a whole helluvalot easier to take existing code and modify it than it is to write it from scratch. i believe it took at least half of you might be right about that, but, you see, it doesn't even apply in this case. why? because the story was there. the story was written and the story is awesome. the travesty is that they did not implement more than half of that wonderful story into the game. you are not taking into account that it took a good year and a half to develop the game engine. what it all boils down to is that they failed. they failed to implement their vision for the game. they had a vision, and it was a grand one, and for whatever reasons, they failed to implement it. no matter how you want to look at it, they failed. either they failed at negotiating a contract that could see their vision come to fruition or they failed in hiring enough people to get the job done. likewise, they failed in overseeing the QA portion to ensure that the bugs were worked out and that the story came together. if the time constraint was the problem, then they should have either pushed the release out or hired more people to get the job done. if lucasarts was being too rigid with the contract and forcing them into unrealistic constraints, fine, pass on it and let them give the contract to someone else. in that case, atleast OE's name wouldn't be the one getting dragged through the mud right now. no matter how you slice it, they failed and failed miserably. when i finished this game i was like, "Huh?" i had lost track of the incoherent story long before the ending. when i found aurora's 45 page thread here and read the whole thing through, there were so incredibly many people that said the exact same thing, "Huh?". "What happened to all the time i spent gaining influence over my party?" "What happened to my party?" "Why are there so many subplots in the game that never get resolved?" "Why does G0-T0 stop T3-M4 from stabilizing Malachor and then nothing whatsoever comes from that subplot?" "Why does my totally demolished ship fly up at the end (now completely unscathed) to rescue me?" the list goes on and on and on. this is not just an opinion that i have. thousands of people feel the same way i do. i am still having a hard time understanding just how a this group of very respected developers dropped the ball so hard that an unprecedented movement is taking place against their product. for Christ's sake they have a petition against them to finish this game. the petition is less than a month old and already it has garnered 6285 signatures! if that doesn't tell you they released an unfinished game, i don't know what will!!! i am 31 years old; i have been gaming since the atari 2600 and i have never heard of such an outcry from the user community. but whatever, go on pretending that they did a good job and that this is a great game. the fact is that it is a sloppily thrown together piece of incoherent babble that does not deserve the honor of being the sequel to one of the greatest RPGs of all time. shame on you obsidian, SHAME ON YOU. you knew better. what did you do Feargus? did MicroSoft or LucasArts come to you after the grand reception KotOR2 received at E3 and bribe you? did they offer you a sizeable bonus if you could get it released for the holiday season (while the buzz around it was still strong)? did you sacrifice all of us in the process? i hope you can live with your decisions, but better yet, i hope those decisions come back to haunt you (and force you to live with them).

if they do not release a "finished" version of this game, i would prefer there never be another KotOR. what good is the end of the trilogy when there never really was a middle?

so you are saying that you'd rather hire someone who will stick to the schedule and release unfinished products that will drag the name and reputation of your company through the mud? well, remind me to never ask you for a job

i think they did a horrible job! bioware had already written the engine, that's the hard part. all obsidian had to do was write a good story and implement it. we all know they wrote a good story, but they failed to implement it - and failed miserably they did. KotOR2 is just a shell of a game with huge plot holes, sloppy editing, and an extremely poor excuse for an ending. as a software developer myself, i believe it is the developer's sole responsibility to ensure that their software is of the highest quality before releasing it. this obviously was NOT done by obsidian. release dates can be pushed back, as we all know from years and years of seeing it happen first-hand. the developer is supposed to be the one with the sense enough to know when the software is ready to be released. of course LA wanted to get the thing out onto the shelves. that's their job, to get it to market and start turning a profit on the huge amounts of money they invested into the product. the developer is supposed to have sense enough to keep the publisher funding the project until it is finished and ready to be released. obviously, obsidian lacks this sense. if they can't run with the big dogs, they need to get their arses back to the porch and let someone more capable handle it. what more than likely happened is, after a great showing at E3, M$ and/or LA offered them quite a substantial bonus if they could pull off a holiday release and they went for it and sacrificed us all in the process.

read here to find out why you're so disappointed, then sign the petition! i have been busy doing my part to get the word out about this travesty and the petition to fix it. i have been hounding the editor of Kotaku (a video game news site) to put a story about this up on their site. he has been real busy with Game Developer's Conference coverage, but now that the GDC is over, he got a story about this put up this morning, so go check it out! also, scott, who does the popular Extralife! webcomic regularly reads Kotaku and posts news tidbits from there on his own blog, so here's hoping he'll post about this on his site too. we'll see if this has any impact on the petition's sig count in the near future. so please get out there and tell people about this, post about it on sites you regularly visit. get the word out. if this gets big enough, OE & LA may just get enough pressure from bad publicity to make them worry about a KotOR3 release not doing too well (and subsequently fix KotOR2 to keep that from happening).