Iolo

The sequel should take the Dark Side ending and take place a few years later after Revan and his apprentice Bastila.

Sales shouldn't be the only factor when developing sequels or evaluating what worked in the original. Actually, the combat and the rules is one of the common complaints about KOTOR. They could have been slightly better in both of those without losing any sales and instead been a better game for it.

No, I am never wrong.

If adapted properly, neither would be a problem caused by the rules. The problem is BioWare taking a Turn Based system and trying to make it work in a Real Time game. They just don't translate well.

Why? So it can explain why the game developers took the easy or lazy way out?

No Morrowind was better. Period. Saying one is better than the other is pointless because they are subjective opinions. Besides, they are very different games and I don't think they can be compared.

Why? KOTOR2 isn't announced yet.

I think it only comes under here as an RPG because it's somewhat based off of Chaosium's CoC game. At least the developer said they had that license but I may be wrong.

Put very simply if someone isnt interested in playing the character you have created for the game then they wont buy the game. Thats a pretty big gamble to take. In the case of PST one that didnt pay off. On the other hand you give them the tools to create a character from their imagination and they will. All those millions of people playing BG and NWN must be seeing something in the ability to create their own characters that you are missing. All games need a start point being a member of the republic fleet was nothing more than that.No different from having to start in a vault, or in Candlekeep. Inherently it wasnt restrictive. Where as the character being Darth Revan was because it would overwrite your previous character with a new identity. Though in the case of KOTOR as I said above the character who Revan had become trying to come to terms with who he had been was rather a high point of the game for me. A predefined character is one you dont create yourself. Tidus from FFX is a pre defined character. Yuna from FFX-2 is a pre defined character. TNO from PST is a pre defined character. The only difference is that in TNO's case they yanked his memory for you to find in the course of the game but hes very much pre defined as who he is. And if you dont have any interest in the characrter then you have no interest in the game. What is the advantage of allowing the player to define their own character if they aren't really provided any meaningful ways to enact their definition of that character within the game's narrative? By that definition, by not providing any first person narrative, DOOM gave you a lot of freedom to "role-play". The fact is, that within the context of the game's narrative, PS:T gave the player more freedom to express his/her definition of who this incarnation of TNO was than, say, BG did to really describe the personality of the Bhallspawn. Not really. BG didn't force upon my character a history or past or background other than growing up in Candlekeep. Like I said you fill in the blanks in BG. The choice of playing a Wizard or a Fighter or a Bard or a Ranger or Paladin or a Cleric is still roleplaying. You don't need to have everything spoonfed to you in order for it to be roleplaying. Doom isn't a good example because you have no choice in how to define your character or evolve it as time goes on whereas BG and PS:T both had that.

Why does every choice have to be reflected as a change in the ending? The fact is, the individual quests in Torment could often be solved in interesting and character defining ways, whereas in BG the quests tended to be more stereotypically good/evil. What BG did not do was make the choice of gender, race and class significant outside of combat. Characters in the game very rarely reacted in any substantial way to your choice of gender, race or class. In that case, the ability of a player to select these has practically nothing to do with his or her role within the narrative of the game, which if I'm not mistaken is the whole purpose of role-playing. On the other hand, in Torment some of your choices made a huge difference throughout the game and in the ending. There are quite a few ways that the last encounter can be approached, and many ways it can be solved. As for the ultimate ending, that was the destiny of the Nameless One regardless of how you played him. What that ending meant, though, changed significantly based on how you played the game. Which, I think, is a lot more interesting from a role-playing perspective than any choice BG offered me. Essentially, all BG offered were the sterotypical roles of "I am good, so I will vanquish the evil!" and "I am evil, so I want the power that the evil people have!". PS:T let you choose a variety of motives for your character and provided a variety of factions you could choose to ally yourself with. Clearly, though, a choice that affects the rule system of a game but doesn't affect the player's role within the narrative is not a role-playing choice. BG's narrative did not change in any substantive way, whether you were a man, woman, elf, dwarf, cleric or fighter. PS:T's moral decisions, on the other hand, allowed the player to have a much more complex way to express their alignment (through the dynamic alignment system and through the use of actions that were independently lawful/neutral/chaotic and good/neutral/evil) and often did change aspects of the narrative, in addition to what the ultimate message of the narrative was. Every choice doesn't need to be figured into the ending. The key though is whether the choice has a significant impact upon the game. How a choice earlier in the game affects an ending is one way of showing that. Fallout had this. Yes, Torment had lots of choices for solving quests but you were still constrained by what the designers forced upon you, just like in BG. No BG had the choice of gender, race and class affecting things outside of combat. Not all features of races or classes figure just in combat. Rogues and Bards are strongest outside of combat for instance. But like I and ShadowPaladin said you can fill in some of the blanks yourself. In reality, no CRPG is really a roleplaying game. You can never do everything that you can do in P&P. If anything games like Planescape Torment may provide you some additional choices compared to other games but you are still contrained by what the designers decide to implement as opposed to what you want to do. I don't recall that many decisions in PS:T affecting the game throughout the game. I got as far as the Fortress of Regrets on the Shadow Plane (I think that was the end game) but didn't complete it past that. Don't confuse good story with roleplaying. Adventure games have good stories but they are not roleplaying games. No, a choice that affects how you play the game outside of a narrative is still role playing. Role playing isn't just how you approach the story or what the story provides to you. Those are constraints placed upon you by the game's designers so technically it's not even roleplaying. if you are willing to fill in the blanks yourself as to your character, some might argue that BG had more role playing. as an example of filling in the blanks, take a look at Icewind Dale 2 Adventuring Companies forum at Interplay. Everybody comes up with an idea of a party they want to play and provide a background and why particular people (which means race, class and gender) are in their party. Is that not roleplaying? Anyway, I only brought up that aspect of the game to see the responses I would get. Compared to PS:T, BG had better character creation and didn't restrict you in the character you created. The race and class you choose in BG affects your gameplay. Your gameplay and not just combat or narrative is roleplaying. I am surprised people would think that character creation in BG wasn't a significant difference between the two games. How else do you customize a character to be what you want to roleplay as?

Yes but I was referring to the fact that BioWare screwed up the ruleset. The ruleset wasn't even developed by LucasArts. It's Wizards of the Coast who developed it. The previous version of the ruleset was developed by West End games. But BioWare adapted it and didn't do a great job with that aspect of the game. Star Wars Galaxies invented its own ruleset as well. You see I interpreted this "ruleset" as being either WotC's D20 Star Wars ruleset or West End games ruleset (which wasn't used but I bring up to illustrate the point). No Star Wars game is canon anyway and neither is the EU material so no point being too stringent there.

I think the word you are looking for here is BioWare and not LucasArts. No other LucasArts game other than KOTOR had a "ruleset".

There was more choice in BG as to how you created your character and how you chose to develop as you increased in level. I don't call this "roll-playing" either. It's the heart of what the rules of D&D are which frankly Planescape Torment played very loosely with. How can giving the player the choice of gender, race and class not be role-playing unless you have a narrow definition of roleplaying. Remember what it was that made D&D a role-playing game to begin with. Any combinations of those three choices gives you roleplaying but perhaps in BG2 you need to fill in some of the blanks yourself as to how that affects your roleplaying as opposed to getting it spoonfed to you like in PS:T. In some aspects PS:T is more similar to an Adventure game. A game could follow the D&D rules more closely and still allow lots of player choice. If anything following the rules closely gives the player potentially more choices. But if you want to debate choices. How many choices in PS:T really affect how the end turns up? At the very end of the game, if you were good you fought Ignus. If you were bad you fought Vhailor. But that's the end of the game and how many choices you make throughout the game really changed its ending? It's like with Deus Ex. Nothing throughout the entire game had much effect on the ending. You still had the choices of three endings regardless of how you played the game up until that point. Of course I never claimed BG was a game with a great amount of player choice. It certainly was a linear game.

I know but I don't see KOTOR2 changing the formula much. They sold millions of copies. To BioWare, that means more than some geek on an Internet message board. They really don't care what people on the message boards think unless those people agree with the majority that bought their game. I wouldn't mind a PS:T wannabe if it was as good as PS:T or better.

Then maybe you shouldn't play KOTORO2. I imagine they aren't going to change the formula much.

The significant different is in character creation. In BG you can choose gender, race and class of your own choosing, choosing from all D&D choices for all three. In PST, you are forced to be male, human and one of only three classes (Theif, Mage, Fighter) throughout and you are forced at the beginning to be Fighter. As you level up in BG, you can dual class to other classes and you have the choice during character creation to be a demihuman multiclass as well. These are pretty significant differences in the games. Unless you haven't played either too much, I don't know how you can think they are not major differences. The fact that your character in BG is raised by humans is irrelevant to your race. You still exhibit all advantages and disadvantages of the race in D&D, technically. Of course, I didn't bother reading the whole thread either.

Bleh. Just announce the thing already so all this pointless speculation will end. Don't let us down either MCA.

They weren't the publisher of FOBOS either so that wasn't a good comparison. Black Isle. Developer of Fallout (yes I know it's debatable to put this there), Fallout 2, Planescape Torment, Icewind Dale, Icewind Dale Heart of Winter and Icewind Dale 2. As well as developer of cancelled projects Stonekeep 2, Torn, Jefferson and Van Buren. It's a shame that what looked like their more interesting projects (outside of Fallouts and Planescape Torment) were all canned due to incompetence, either at Black isle or with Interplay management.

Speculation isbased on a press release a few months back from BioWare and Obsidian that they would be working together on a project. BioWare's words were something like that they have more projects on the go then they currently can do internally so they aregoing to proven develpers like Obsidian (ex Black Isle people) for some of these projects. There is also an announcement on Obsidian's Web site that they are currently working on a RPG for PC and consoles. This as well with an article on IGN about a rumor that KOTOR2 was in development and that Obsidian is working on it is why people have concluded this to be true. B)

It's console but it's not console only. Their Web site indicates the game is for the PC and for consoles.

I don't think that's anything new. Other games had areas that evolved later through the game. I recall Zelda 64 had that for Hyrule. It's just an expansion of the concept, which isn't bad in itself I suppose.

Since apparently only how KOTOR failed can be discussed in this thread... I don't think the point here is that the game failed overall. It shipped in Oct or Nov 2003 and sold more than 500,000 copies before the end of the year, on the PC. On the XBox, these numbers were blown away even more. It certainly didn't fail sales wise. But one can enjoy a game and still feel it failed in some ways and discuss that. That is I beleive the point of this thread. Morrowind for instance has its flaws but I still enjoy playing it. I enjoyed KOTOR as well. I don't see why BioWare wouldn't listen to some fan input. How about ideas for more skills, making skills more useful, a little bit more nonlinearity? It would be arrogant for them or Square to think that they shouldn't consider some fan input unless any feedback at all as to how the game could be improved would be looked upon as "radical" fans. BioWare certainly considered fan feedback for NWN's expansions. HOTU seemed to take efforts to eliminate many of the original OC's flaws for instance. But if it's a hindrance to them, maybe BioWare should just eliminate their forums entirely or just leave them up for troubleshooting and spoilers. No fan feedback or criticism no longer allowed. I may be exaggerating slightly but where do you draw the line between constructive feedback that would only improve the game and "radical fanatics".

Why so we can get a FOBOS lookalike on the PC called Fallout 3 that shares nothing with the original other than the Fallout name on it?

LOL volo, Bio didn't add multiple henchmen, fans did. You fanboys id funny! You're incorrect. There was a multiple henchmen hackpak before HOTU came out but it was a hack. It was implemented by each henchman having a henchman themselves. This means you couldn't directly control any henchman but the first one using the menus/inventory/etc. The hakpak worked around this using dialogue. HOTU is a real multiple henchmen implementation because they changed the internals. Of course, they probably wouldn't have made the change in HOTU if it hadn't been for the previous hakpack.

It would be ironic. Actually, I want someone other than Interplay to somehow get Fallout rights which would lead to FOBOS2 being cancelled. I hate Interplay. I haven't said it lately so I will today.