Jediphile

I picked other. There are several reasons: 1. Loot I haven't seen before. 2. Explore the details of the game - K2's story is deep and filled with subtleties. The fact that the game is unfinishes makes revelations scarce, so replaying tends to shed some more light on stuff or put them in a different perspective entirely. 3. Because I feel like it...

Actually, I think Atris is a good argument for the Exile being male, since the male story, she was attracted to him and became bitter when he left the order and therefore her (Hell hath no fury...), whereas if the Exile is female, she just mutters something about everybody having their heroes, which seems really peculiar to me given that Atris was herself on the Council while the Exile was still only a padawan and not even a particularly strong jedi, judging from Vandar's "average student of the force" comment to Vrook.

I thought the the Exile had already been established as LS male by canon. Guess I was wrong... Still, odd that the art clearly shows the same male Exile for both LS and DS if the Exile is female...

Because that was the fate he resisted at Malachor V. No, I don't agree. If there is one thing consistent about Kreia throughout the game, then it's that she cares more about being right in her theories and teachings than anything. She constantly wants the Exile to listen to her advice, but she has problem being threatened or used as long as the Exile does so. Kreia was exiled by the jedi, because they her teachings as misguided, flawed and corrupting. If Kreia wanted to kill the force, then why did she wait around on Malachor V for the Exile to stop her? Because her intention wasn't to actually kill the force as much as being confirmed in her theories and teachings and proving that the jedi were wrong about her. Anakin wasn't born until close to 4000 years after KotOR2... Besides, Anakin didn't defy the force so much as the jedi simply misinterpreted the meaning of the prophecy (which is always the problem with prophecies...). Not at all the same thing, methinks. I don't think Revan defied the force so much as manipuated it. I think he realised what the consequences of his actions would be, but he also manipulated the circumstances so they would hopefully yield the results he planned. It didn't quite work for him, though, or else he was more himself more powerful than he anticipated. I think Kreia's comment that you mention here referred more to the fact that the Exile lived for a decade without ever using the force even though he was a jedi and as such had come to depend on it a great deal - compare this with her comments to Atton while the Exile sleeps upon arriving to Telos about how helpless the jedi are without the force. That was my take on it, at least.

Really? Personally I want to begin as a jedi again (without losing the initial force powers on level 1 as the Exile did), so my vote went to "true Jedi"...

If it were yet another K3 thread, then I'd agree. However, it is not - note the poll? While suggestions for a K3 game do indeed belong in the "official" K3 topic, I don't agree that this counts in a poll. Otherwise you're suggesting that it's okay to use polls to ask people what they think of all sorts of games, except when that relates to K3, which seems very odd to me. But as someone said, this is not very diplomatic. I won't tell other people to shut up, but I do think it's pretty impolite to spam a topic with inflamatory comments simply for the ulterior motive of getting the mods to lock it, and I do tend to suspect that agenda at work in some of the replies here (not yours), which is just sad... :angry:

I don't see the problem. The subject is clearly marked, so if people hate K3 threads so much, then it's a pretty simple matter to simply ignore the topic, isn't it? No need for K3 bashers to spam this or any other topic dealing with K3 - if you think the prospect of K3 is a problem, then build a bridge and get over it!

I don't see it quite that way. Kreia's goal wasn't so much to prove nihilism as it was to prove that the force could be defied and even wounded. Kreia threatened the force, and since the will of the force dictated the Exile to fall to the dark side, Kreia's triumph lies in letting the Exile become the savior of the force by saving it from her. And the fact that he does proves her point, because if she was wrong, then there would be no need for the Exile to stop her in the first place. Kreia's didn't want to destroy the force, she just wanted to prove her point, and she did. How about Marka Ragnos, who appears as an evil force ghost in Jedi Academy some 5000+ years after his death?

I can't speak for anyone else, but I didn't leave the game feeling unsatisfied because the game had dark or nihilistic content - I left feeling unsatisfied because huge parts of the plot were brutally and mercilessly cut and left us with a game that took a huge left turn as soon as you got closer to the end. It's not the plot or the writing that's the problem in K2 IMHO, because I actually like the story. The problem is that it was rushed and they didn't get to finish it, so we're left with a story that gets cut short *exactly* at the point where it is supposed to reveal its secrets and unmask its villains. On the first playthrough I just wondered if I'd missed something, because I didn't get what was going on. And you sense how it was all cut even when you meet the masters - they rush through the whole thing instead of gradually building to the revelation you're faced. The result is just bad storytelling. But it's quite true that there are other problems. The AI is indeed woefully bad, and the influence system, while a novel invention, is too simplistic (why does Handmaiden criticize me and lose influence when I do bad things, when she herself had DS mastery, for example?). The random loot system doesn't work as well as intended, either... But these things I can overlook as long as they don't stop the game. I don't play for combat - if I did I might just as well play some Diablo II or whatever online. KotOR games I play to see what happens next in the story. It's worse with bugs that crash my system on occasion...

14. I would put Mira in KOTOR I Bastila's age, which is 23.Anyway, are you going to continue this offtopic? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Huh?? Okay, several things here... First, Amidala was around 20 or so when she was queen of Naboo - she definitely wasn't 10. Remember how Palpatine introduces her to the Senate in Episode I? Palpatine: "To state our allegations, I present Queen Amidala, recently elected ruler of the Naboo, who speaks on our behalf..." So, however old she is in Episode I, she has not been queen for long. Second, the Mandalorian Wars lie a little less than 10 years before the events of KotOR2. Note how, when the Exile feels the force again, he/she comments that it has been almost a decade since he/she felt it... I very much doubt that the Exile was younger than 20 at that point, which suggests that he/she is at least 30 if not more in KotOR2. I tend to think that Mira is a few years older than the Handmaiden, but then I could be wrong, and she could be 22 or so and still have been no more than 12 at the end of the Mandalorian Wars. Just to clear that up...

Agreed... and disagreed I would say they're both pretty LS, even if they don't seem particularly light sided on the surface. As you say, T3 generally responds will only to LS choices, but I find Bao-Dur to be actually more LS demanding in this regard, because unlike T3, you can build no influence with him just be talking to him and being appreciative of his presence as you can with T3. On the contrary, building influence with Bao-Dur requires almost exclusively that he is in the group to witness your LS choices in specific situations, and even then those are limited. To build influence enough with Bao-Dur to turn him into a jedi you must take several LS points, which I think puts him the LS group of people.

Malachor V didn't create the wound, the Exile did - the darkess of Malachor V only served as something that facilitated and increased the severity of the wound. As the masters explain over many, many conversations, what happened was that the Exile's strong affinity for force bonds with others made him much more susceptible to all the anguish and terror that the devasation of Malachor V caused to the victims of the mass shadow generators, and the Exile experienced all that suffering much more intensely than other people, because his force bonds gave him a far more empathic experience of it all. And the darkness of Malachor V added to that. The experience was so intense and traumatic that the Exile was nearly killed, but instead of dying, he acted instinctively and unknowningly by cutting off his own connection to the force and thereby silencing all the suffering that he felt. It helps if you have to think of it as someone with exceptionally good hearing, who is suddenly forced to endure a large amount of very loud and painful noises... But though the Exile cut off his connection to the force, he did not abandon his ability to create force bonds, and that is what we see him do in K2. Nihilus does something similar, and as the masters explain, it didn't just happen to him as it did to the Exile. Rather, Nihilus actually learned it from the Exile himself - they are opposite sides of the same force wound. As the masters say, when they felt Katarr die, they felt something they had only felt once before - when the Exile stood before them and they sentenced him. I have my own speculations about Nihilus, but all we really know yet is that somehow Nihilus was also spawned by the Exile's act to sever himself from the force and the force bond that he thereby created.

But I like bathing in the Darkside. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> :D I can hear the ads for it now: "Dark Side puddles - because you're worth it!"

You know, I think it's actually rather interesting that you *don't* battle yourself. I mean, it does serve to underscore the point that the Exile is still in denial about his past and his powers that you don't, doesn't it? Fascinating....

Ignore free force powers?!?!?!?!?!?!

You need to have Bao-Dur when finding these sensors though. And what "black dude" are you talking about, the one that wants these sensors? PS. Moved to spoilers section... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> yeah, that guy. I never remember his name. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Saedhe

You need to have Bao-Dur when finding these sensors though. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Actually no - if you have a high enough Repair skill, you can do it even without Bao-Dur. It's a good idea to have him there, though, because dealing discovering the truth about the sensors is one of the few things that builds influence with Bao-Dur. I usually make sure to have Bao-Dur in the group at that point, but when he offers to look the sensors over, I just do it myself with my Repair skill, and when I succeed, Bao-Dur praises me for my skill at it *and* I still get to build influence with him

No, I don't think they're really prequels in the sense that you're suggesting. The problem with most prequels is that they have end up fitting with the later events and characters that you know from the stories that are supposed to succeed them, and which you already know. This not true for KotOR or TotJ because they are so far back in the past that really anything could have happened in between (and probably did...). Note one thing about these stories - they have all been told chronologically. The TotJ comics begin exactly 4000 years before the movies, and each new story happens after the last one. The KotOR games continue down the same timeline, beginning some 30 years after the last comic book. Thus, there is nothing in the plot that is not possible to do because it has to fit with later continuity - it's a (somewhat) smooth line of succession without odd plots forced into the middle of everything, and you have no idea where the plot is going. After all, one thing that can be annoying in the prequel movie trilogy is the fact that you *know* Anakin will fall to the dark side and become Darth Vader - he simply has to, since the later saga demands it. That means you cannot sit down and be quite so horrified by his bad choices, because you know they're coming, and there can be no shock over it, unlike Ulic murdering his brother or Luke learning that Vader is his father. This reduces the prequel trilogy to being a way for us to see how it really happened, but nothing more than that, because we already know how it *must* turn out...

In context, Revan and Malak were more devasting without having to use suns. The way you say it makes it sound like Kun and Ulic were doing it all the time, but it happened once - and it wasn't even Exar and Ulic, it was Aleema using overclocked Force powers thanks to the fat Kaibur/Sith crystals in front of her . And lets remember - though it sounds like it puts the war in a league of its own, it doesn't - what else did that act of blowing up suns devastate besides the fleet Aleema and Crado were fighting and Ossus' surface? Nothing. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> But then that was a pretty devastating thing. Ossus isn't just some planet, it was the central world where jedi lore was stored, and many of the secrets of the jedi were lost as a result of this action, either due to the directly destructive results to Ossus or because they were captured by the Sith. Note that even in K2, Atris still mentions how much of a loss the devastation of Ossus was to the order, and K2 happens 45 years later... If you didn't like that story or the writing, then fine. I'm just saying that Exar and Ulic definitely left their mark on the Star Wars universe. A lot of people don't like the way the Sith War or most of the Tales of the Jedi stories were written. I thought they were okay myself, though I'd scarcely call the writing good (adding "ancient Sith magics" is a bit of a crutch plotwise to say the least...). And as you say, there is a lot of background that's not detailed in those stories. That I can better forgive, however, since you have to choose your focus in your story. As has been noted in this very topic, K1 also didn't show us a lot of large confrontations in the Jedi Civil War that was said to be devastating to the Republic. The problem is that the story must always center around the characters, and you can only put them in so many battles without letting them come to harm before credibility is hurt. In the Sith War comic, it is much more of a significant point that Ulic kills his brother than it is if some unknown world with millions of unknown people is lost, because we don't know them and so don't care (much, anyway) about them, whereas we've been following Cay for 16 issues of TotJ at the point where he dies. Nobody cares if some unknown extra dies in a movie - we care if it's one of the main characters. The most extreme case of this is in Star Trek, which got infamous for its use of "red shirts"... This was so pronounced at one point that a full character is dedicated to the "problem" in the Trek spoof Galaxy Quest (which I recommend - it's hilarious ) So while we may not see many people die in either war, we're still presumed that this is meant to have happened. Same thing with the Mandalorian Wars. Another thing to remember from the Sith War is all the jedi that converted to the Sith ranks and killed their masters, which no doubt decreased the ranks of jedi, and left the number of jedi reduced, only to be drained further 40 years later, when Revan and Malak caused yet another split within the order. I do think that the jedi of the KotOR era are still hurting from the devastation Exar and Ulic caused to their ranks...

Yes, but that's always my problem with prequel stories - we know where they must end up, and so they are frequently uninteresting since the plot is fixed, or else it does something that contradicts the later plot, which is even more annoying.

Hmm, I suppose one possibility is to allow an automatic transfer of items back to the Ebon Hawk without actually going there. If, for example, you find a cool new armor and want to use it, but it exceeds the weight limit, then you get to drop something to the Ebon Hawk inventory. It's one way, though - one you put it in the Ebon Hawk inventory, that's where it is, and you can't just pull it out from there - you'll actually have to go back to the Ebon Hawk to get it, the assumption being that you or one of your companions took the excess loot back to the Ebon Hawk, but will not get it back automatically. Not a very elegant solution, but it does offer some compromise between the illogical nature of unlimited carrying capacity and undesired bookkeeping. I really don't want K3 to be lke the Diablo games, where you have to use Town Portal spells or similar every two seconds to drop off your loot.

Some good points, I think. Generally, I'd agree with you, and a lot of the lost potential seems to be lost in the cut content of the game As for the characters themselves, I did like Visas, but you're right that she didn't have much to offer - she attacks and then instantly becomes your willing servant, and after one talk, it's all done and you can leave her to rot on the Ebon Hawk because there's nothing more to learn from her... They should have spread the information out more or have added things for Visas to say in specific situations. I would have liked for her to make lots of comments on Korriban given her connection to the Sith, for example, but nope - never a word... By comparison Handmaiden is indeed more of a real character with lots of background and history. As to her reasons for being on the Ebon Hawk, I gather there was supposed to be a cutscene where Atris tells her to join the Exile's crew and spy on him (ony if Exile is male). The sound files can be found and heard if you have the pc version, if you want an estimate of what that scene would have been like. It's not a big revelation or anything, though. As for the other characters, I don't agree with T3. Yes, he comes across as more interesting in K2 than in K1, but then he couldn't possibly have been less interesting than he was in the last game, and now he is interesting only because you are actually forced to play him several times and because he has secrets for you to unlock. I liked that they did that for most of the characters, but they probably should have given each and every character some time in the limelight, so that the there would be some character development. As it is, GOTO, HK-47 and Hanharr are all worthlessly forgettable characters, though they do at least have bonus abilities for the Exile to unlock. Mandalore is only slightly more interesting, but has no secrets - no reason to build influence with him at all - and, as you said, his motives for being in the group do not seem particularly compelling... A lot of people hate Disciple. Not sure why, though. He's not a particularly interesting character, but at least he's a lot more useful than GOTO, T3, HK-47 or Hanharr, and he can be useful to regenerate force points with. He's not a favorite character, but I don't hate him either... Atton was probably hurt a lot by the cut content as well, while Bao-Dur is entirely too quiet in his particular corner of the Ebon Hawk. Building influence with him is difficult - he will respond postively only to a few things - and otherwise he has very little to say. Even if you "jedify" him, the conversation is virtually non-existant... Bao-Dur should have been a means by which to let the Exile gradually revisit the horrors of Malachor instead of having it all just thrown right in your face by the mastes toward the end of the story, but they missed that option completely, and the bad pacing that results ends up as just bad storytelling - even though the plot is actually sound and interesting, at least to me, it just isn't told well...

It's just as you enter the tomb with Revan, but before Revan responds to you. I you open the door and look just to the right of Revan, you'll see a DS Exile standing right next to Revan. The second Revan responds to you and at the cutscene begins, the DS Exile disappears instantly, though.