athenaprime

I have this same problem...can you use your saved game with the CD in the drive if you were running off the HD during the save? I've tried it with a male guardian and female consular and had the same problem. Arrgh.

I will be the first to dance in the streets if we are interpreting Mr. Avellone's comments as to the lack of a romance, but just in case we are not, allow me to add my strong vote for keeping romance options in the game. KOTOR 1 impressed me with the interaction between the NPCs and the PC, and the NPCs and each other. It knocked my socks off when I discovered that not only was there a romance option for a male PC, but there existed one for a female PC as well. KOTOR completely turned me around on the value of having any sort of game console in my home (I was vehemently against it, and feared my husband and child devolving into vidiots by its mere presence), when I played through the romance, and through the Bioware boards, learned that the character's writer (David Gaider) actually went to the trouble to research the elements of a well-written romance and use that research in the development of the character. I regard RPGs, and CRPGs in the class of KOTOR 1 as interactive multimedia storytelling. Arguing along those lines, I maintain that the story is the most significant element of the game. And if you do your research about stories that the public likes (and spends their money on), you will find that by far, the most popular genre of fiction in terms of sales is the Romance. Romance sells, and people find it entertaining and uplifting. It creates opportunities to plunge into characters and make them significantly more well-rounded and real, and at the end of the day, I'd rather put down the controller with the sense of having just interacted with story characters than a bunch of pixels.

On one hand, I can see where you're coming from. Sequels are hard to do, and it's probably not the easiest thing in the world to pick up somebody else's vision and run with it. But on the other hand, conventional wisdom suggests that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" leads to creators attempting to repeat a known process that has worked once before. And that in turn produces uninspiring sequels. Having fresh blood with different perspectives has the potential to inject uniqueness into the sequel. I think combat is going to be a matter of personal preference. I liked the combat--it wasn't intrusive enough to distract from the storyline, didn't confuse me enough to throw the controller across the room and quit, and didn't require me to be double-jointed, ambidextrous, and have six fingers on each hand. But I am easily intimidated by console combat, so your mileage may vary. Well, there is that whole element of generating a profit, and munchkins have lots of disposable income. :D Although I would like to see a quest that you could succeed at either as a Force-user or not. It would be a challenge to write such an epic level campaign, to create success paths that could be achieved without the use of Force powers, but would require them if your PC were a Force user. KOTOR was the first CRPG I played since playing Infocomm text-based computer RPGs on an Apple II+ back in the Dark Ages when dirt was new, so I may be an easy customer to please. But I'm willing to give Obsidian the benefit of the doubt, if not my outright enthusiastic support. Because while they have a tough act to follow from the first game, they also have a model for success, and the resources to discover what worked and what needs improvement. All they need to do is use their resources wisely.

I don't know how people can get through KOTOR 1 in under 50-60 hours. Maybe I'm just a putterer, or it's because I don't A button past the dialogues and movies (one thing I really loved about KOTOR was that all the dialogue was voice-acted. It made for a very cinematic experience and made the game feel less like a game and more like an interactive movie starring me). The things I most enjoyed about KOTOR 1 were the complexities and flaws of the important (and even some of the not-so-important) NPCs. I liked the fact that they weren't simply buxom tavern wenches who can high-kick, or thuglike shooting machines out of B-grade action movies. The NPCs in all their flawed glory seemed like real people--they annoyed you at times, supported you in others, and admonished you according to their alignments. Technically speaking, I would really like to see more varied skins for random people in KOTOR 2. I enjoyed the interface from the first one--it was easy to learn and unintimidating. Only thing I would suggest for improvement is that equipment inventory screen. I hated having to scroll through hundreds of items looking for a datapad I'd just picked up. If there were a way to sort the equipment into a personalized order, or at least to view it by more intuitive categories, it would make the logistics significantly less intrusive. Also, I got into the habit of putting items like old datapads, extra mines, and people's street clothes into footlockers aboard the Ebon Hawk, and it became tedious to have to do that one item at a time. Maybe that's why my playthroughs all took 50 hours or more. I'm glad to hear they'll be adding weather and night to the planets, but I'm not sure if making them bigger will be of value or not. Dantooine seemed huge, and Manaan's Ahto City was just monstrous...I got perpetually lost on Manaan when looking for the different places I needed to go...ended up going back and forth across the whole city about ten times more than I needed, simply because I forgot where the mercenary bar was and kept confusing it with the swoop track. The most important things I'd like to see in KOTOR 2 is a story as complex and intriguing as KOTOR 1. KOTOR 1's story drew me in and involved me more than I'd ever expected a CRPG to be able to do. KOTOR 2's writers need to give the story the same sort of attention given in KOTOR 1, and there's where I'm more than happy to let them spend inordinate amounts of development time on it. And to do that, they'll need characters even more complex and developed than KOTOR 1. Don't let them slide into caricatures.