kormesios

Sand, definitely. The guy cracked me up. Neeshka and Khelgar were both memorable, though Neeshka didn't wear on me well. Amazingly enough, none actively bothered me. Bishop's designed impressed me, sticking a party with a CE companion should have been annoying and illogical for my NG ranger. But he was both impressed enough when you actually accomplished stuff that his hanging around made some sense, and I could say things like "Watch your tongue, or I'll cut it out" when he was especially rude, without losing influence or even having him sulk.

I still pissed that I was FORCED to fight when West Harbor was attacked. I wanted to hide inside since my character was going to be ROLE-PLAYED as a coward at early levels, but the designers didn't give me a CHOICE. All RPG's force a bunch of things on you. You either go with it, or you don't. It's not like letting Casavir sleep at your keep, or using Bishop as for an hour or two of game time, is more fundamentally demanding than requiring that the player to take a ship to Neverwinter, or personally get involved in every little crisis that comes up. If you don't like it, fine, But it's on a par with everything else going on, and just because some people like it less doesn't mean it's objectively bad.

You couldn't have the insult match between khelgar, neeshka and qara without all three associated with you. Unless you expect them to program n! cutscenes to cover all possible configurations, your options are limited by definiton. And I liked playing a good player and having to deal with Ammon Jerro's issues, which I would have missed if I'd been allowed to kick him out of my party. OK, let's check out BG2--an incredibly nice plot twist with Yoshimo in the party. But, since it wasn't required, they have to cover for his possible absence with a complete kloodge that made me roll my eyes. And, if you didn't take him it screwed up your party configuration since you didn't have a spot for Imoen. That sequence would have been better if the designers could have been sure that Yoshimo was in your party. Yes, there are ways to keep the game moving without required henchmen. But they are not as clean or entertaining, so there's a real benefit. It's a trade-off, but since for the most part "forced" companions means no more than "they stay at the same inn as you", I think it's worth it. I thought all the talk about see invisibility meant people were having trouble getting by them. If it's just going red people object to, I'm missing the problem then. You don't kill any of them, which is what I was trying to avoid. They're theoretically mad at you, but don't attack you and you'll never see them again? Is it a vanity thing, you want them still to like you even though you decided to steal their only precious posession?

What are you talking about? I stole it no problem. My stealthed ranger with an elven cloak walked up, took it, and walked out. No death, no combat, no fleeing.

It adds amusing cutscenes, enables NPC-dependent plot twists, and allows the convenience of automatically collecting all possible NPCs at your base. This is obviously more than "none." It may not be enough for you to make up for whatever complaint you ahve, but for a fake role-player like me it's plenty.

A list based on reader's responses (as opposed to game writers' or designers') will always have the following characteristics: Rankings correlate well with sales (since people only vote for games they bought) More recent games do much better than older games (younger kids have only played newer games) Big studio, major-name releases will dominate the rankings (both because of the sales factor, and the hype factor) Which explains the five football games. My favorite quirk of this type of polling, though, is that if you compile a list of "best games" and "worst games", there'll be a ton of overlap. For the simple reason that, of the 10,000,000 people who bought World of Warcraft, 1% probably hated it. That makes 100,000 that will vote against it is more than ever bough "SimCow: The Bovine Expierence."

Am I the only one that got the GOTO/Remote Ebon Hawk one? Even the first time I thought it was clear the evil GOTO was incapacitating the remote to mess with his programming. Ebon Hawk plummeting was pointless. It's untriggered, and even if there is some "logical" explanation for it's survival, there was no need for it to be there.

I'm going to disagree a bit on the difficulty thing--I think the basic problem is not that encounters weren't tough (which is true) but that the design didn't encourage alternate tactics. KoTOR2 was even worse than 1, but the same basic problem was in both. There was never an incentive to use ranged weapons against foes who were deadly with melee weapons. You never get a chance to force people to fight in a narrow space so they couldn't use their numbers against you, nor draw off a couple members of a large group, nor is there any benefit to "scout ahead" and develop a careful plan for attack. You're pretty much guaranteed that once you start combat, you and your companions will be involved in melee combat, and the only "strategy" is deciding whether it's better to use force-heal or a medpac. Simply making the combat tougher wouldn't have solved the problem IMHO--it just would have made the game annoying, since the rather illogical actions of your followers and your clumsy control of them would move from a minor nuisance to requiring reloads. I don't know how much could be done within the system, but some things could have been tried. Obvious ones would be one or two fights were terrain made a difference (ie, you could choose to face someone across a chasm to nullify melee attacks) would have helped, or getting the force sucked out of you before the fight, or an area that reversed the effects of all your powers, or whatever. A few surprises, anyway--when as far as I can tell the only variety was adding more enemies or making them more damaging. I imagine the alternate ways are trickier to balance--another casualty of the rapid development time lines?