alanschu

Didn't your logic just call Bioware a developer that wanted to focus on a more controlled power span AND a weak ass developer that sucks at balancing and shouldn't be making games?

But they're not. They're just using a ruleset that is similar to the d20 ruleset, since there are differences. Since they are not adhering to the d20 ruleset, I don't feel they need to be restricted to it (since they are not using it....just something similar).

For the most part, I agree, but only on some force powers. There are some force powers where I don't think there would be much of a point. Why force push only one person when you can force wave all of them, do more damage, for the same cost in FP. However, the one that I missed was force whirlwind, which was different enough from the others that there were times I wanted to use it.

Canderous, Jolee, and HK-47 all have their own miniquest much in the line of Juhani, Carth, and Bastila. Carth and Bastila have some additional interactions because they are the romance options.

Two reasons: 1) Limit spoiler access to only those that have the game 2) Provide an additional incentive to buy the game

The Jedi Council has made comments on how unbelievably quickly Anakin has progressed. His dual wielding of the lightsaber also shows initiative (although Dooku wipes the floor with him....showing now matter how talented a person may be, their strength with the force reigns supreme).

I don't think the Sith are that decimated. There were many conflicts happening all over the place. We only visited a handful of planets....I think the war is far too big to be limited to the small amount of places that we go to in KOTOR. And Nur Ab Sal, why wouldn't a plot that had people pulling the strings of Malak and Revan in order to start a war make sense?

I think it's bad when the focus of RPGs becomes merely "getting the next level." The main reason why, as much as I would often try, Diablo 2 can never hold my attention for a few months. It's fun running around with some friends fighting the bosses and stuff. But eventually, the game just turns into "Do some run to get exp and maybe some loot." In the end, the game is boring.

True...the way the fight was handled could have been better. I noticed that in Jedi Academy (which I just started playing, and am mentioning since other people brought it up), the first encounter with Tavion's apprentice is similar to Malak's encounter. I kicked her butt so fast and she ended up running away. I think the only difference is that there isn't an obvious health meter like Malak had. Although I will concede the probably should have had Malak be much more difficult and have Bastila come in and save you. Although they probably had to stasis Carth/Bastila to make sure that Malak didn't actually kill any of them in the fight. Perhaps first encounter should have been easy, and second encounter (when Carth and Bastila are out of sight) much harder, where when he smacks you down to low health Bastila steps in.

Probably had something to do with becoming one with the force, which lightsiders are probably only capable of doing. Hayden's would have been the lightside version of his character. I honestly don't think it's that big of a deal.

Hey....I played through it legitmately

Except that you fail to understand that much much MUCH more resources are required to make a computer game than a pnp experience. The more you branch out the development, the more development time rises exponentially. What you are asking is unreasonable. You CANNOT account for everything in a computer game. There are finite resources in terms of capital, in addition to hardware limitations. But I guess only my "silly mind" can understand that. As for the leviathan being "random" in pnp....think about it. If you created a module to DM and you put in all this time and effort into creating your leviathan adventure, can you honestly say that you would make it "random" for the players playing your mod? If you can say yes to this, then why did you spend all that time designing it? Wouldn't that be an extensive waste of time? Also....why would it be random when by that time they are probably looking for you. You think that the Sith leader would sit by while some punk Jedi goes around disrupting everything the Sith does....especially considering who knows what information was gleaned off of people on Dantooine, which could lead clues to your whereabouts. The more I think about it, the more I think that the Leviathan NOT finding you would have been less plausible As for Malak, situations like his are not new. Many villians in many RPGs have toyed with the protagonist at points earlier in the game. Malak was toying with you..... As for Shin thinking it would be possible to beat Malak's implementation on the Forge by that time....try it. Do not level up once you reach Malak the first time, and see how well you do against him on the forge. (or if you have the PC version, get to him and find a way to hack your character to that level, since you wouldn't have to do the rest of the game at that level. As for the health bar, I just considered that to be the amount of damage that Malak felt would be enough before he was done toying with you. I knew I probably wasn't going to kill him. I find it odd that you guys would have preferred a fight that you actually were not even involved in (i.e. watching a cutscene). I generally prefer NOT to be taken out of character as much as possible.

I'm going to take the easy way out and assume that it just cannot be done

I would think that people that play the game as many times as you guys do are in an extreme minority. I played through it 5 times and that took up a huge chunk of my time.

Let me just interject that it is quite clear the Physics of our our universe are absolutely not the same in the Star Wars universe. Hence any comparisons between them accomplish nothing.

I suppose you are right CastleBravo. I guess the thing I was thinking was that it didn't really make much sense to me to run past Junktown (or any other town) to get to the town just after it (Hub). As a result, I almost always progressed through the game in the same way. And Nur Ab Sal......why do you hate the Leviathan so much? Is it that unreasonable to think that Malak has tracked you down? After all, you are flying around in the Ebon Hawk, and by this time have even killed Darth Bandon I believe. There's one thing about restricted linearity, but this linearity makes perfect sense within the confines of the story. To have it be random would, quite frankly, be silly.

I cannot answer. I try to play my character by the moment. In the original KOTOR, I was basically a nice guy that tried to be helpful. I wanted to become a good Jedi, but sometimes I used the force in bad ways, rationalizing it for the "greater good." As I became more dark, I started to pick the darkside option a bit more (plus, if I got annoyed, I would be snappy). Furthermore, I was seduced by the darkside on Korriban. I felt I need to act like I was embracing the darkside, but couldn't admit to myself that I really was. I had become quite evil, and as it turns out, Bastila's urging me to take on the mantle of Dark Lord of the Sith was the final push to put me all the way darkside. It was perfect timing

I will concede that Fallout does have the time issue...which is missing from virtually every RPG aside from it. I like it, because you had to remember you did have some sort of purpose. What was your progress through the game? I cannot imagine a different one just based on the way towns are made available through dialogue. At the same time, I am probably biased because I probably used similar ways each time I played through the game to get the towns. As for the slaughter, I remember Bioware/Lucasarts stating they didn't want mass massacres, because it does exist in a specific timeline, and Tatooine does not get wiped out, nor do the Wookies get eliminated. Furthermore, because travel is limited based on a lot of the information you receive in dialogue, there was probably concerns of the massacres breaking the game and making it unbeatable. I also never particularly liked the massacre approach, because I do not think the AI reacts to it appropriately. I do not think there is any way someone could annihilate the boneyard as just one (or two with an NPC) person. Eventually you should get overwhelmed. But the AI is not up to the task.

Ah...so many things to say. Might as well start at the beginning: PCs do die though. Unless you are still using your old 286 to play KOTOR. The lifespan of consoles and PCs is probably pretty equivalent. And I would wager that a console upgrade is much cheaper. Oh, and I am a PC gamer Actually, I'm pretty sure it can be any planet where you meet Darth Bandon (it is Darth Bandon's encounter isn't it?) ??????? This logically does not make any sense. You are on the internet, where you would be most likely to sample a population of PC gamers compared to X-Box gamers. Any polls done on the internet are inherently biased towards PC gamers, and have exactly zero validity. My English 101 teacher would have a field day for the wordiness of you post. Big words != intelligence, especially when it is a grammitically difficult read. Your idea about using the poll is infinitely more damaging to the way people will perceive your intelligence as opposed to using big words. Additionally, someone making a "discourteous" post does not imply the lack of intelligence, as you indicate. I'd suggest a bit more practice, since your grammatical errors take away anything that the large words contribute. I think his implication was that someone that plays PC games is more likely to have access to a site like this because he owns the PC required, whereas a console gamer can be a console gamer without having a PC. If somehow all X-Box gamers could access this site, I'm confident that this poll would be so heavily slanted in favour of the X-Box you wouldn't even recognize that anyone voted for PC Who here is gossiping? I fail to see the point. PCs may be more universal...but are gaming PCs more universal? I have an old Apple II at my parents place....but I'm not playing any new games on it for obvious reasons. Consoles greatly outnumber gaming PCs. While else would development be shifting to consoles more and more. Mainstay PC developers are now beginning to develop for consoles. It's where the money is, because there is a larger installed base. Hence, the market for console gamers is larger than the market of PC gamers. While multiplayer gaming is certainly more widespread on a PC than on a console, I certainly would not say "no fuss." We are all speaking as experienced PC gamers. Playing online via X-Box live is easier than multiplaying on a PC for the average joe. Console gamers often are not geeks that know how to patch their games manually. I cannot think of many games that, if I were to just install them right now, I could simply connect to the internet and start playing against other people. There is always patch considerations (and this of course ignores any other technical aspects, such as bandwidth and their computer capabalities as to whether or not they'll even try playing the game on their PC), and possibly other things to download to make sure you play the game you want. Half the people I work with play games with X-Box live, and don't even own computers (anecdotal evidence I know). The one that does own a computer, gets frustrated trying to play games online because he isn't sure what to do when it doesn't immediately work. He's just quoting Dak'kon from Planescape: Torment. He would stress the word "know" whenever he spoke it. *Knowing* was very important to his people.

I think another thing being overlooked is that the lightsaber doesn't require the leverage and whatnot to actually cut. I could "swing" it at 0.00001 m/s and it'll still cut right through you

Thanks CastleBravo. I suppose the thing about Fallout is that you can travel anywhere at anytime. But this aside, even the game tends to play itself out in a somewhat linear fashion, unless you already know the plot and simply skip entire parts of the game. For example, Fallout 1 you start at the vault, go to Shady Sands, to Vault 15, back to Shady Sands, to the raiders (although the raiders area isn't very deep), to Junktown, to the Hub. From here it's a bit more varied, but it does nudge you towards Boneyard, where you have the options then to find the Brotherhood, Cathedral, Glow, and other stuff. But thinking about it....is this really that much different than say the 4 planet area of KOTOR or other similar game? I'm wondering if my love of Fallout is biasing my judgement to be in favour of it...when maybe it isn't actually as different as it may seem. The only real straightforward differences I can see are the move anywhere and kill anything. A problem with the move anywhere though is that I think it takes away from the "roleplaying," as I cannot fathom what the motivation would be to just start randomly walking the land. I dunno. I'm kinda playing devil's advocate here too....hoping to get an interesting debate started

Didn't people get really ticked at Bioware for their own variations that were no where near what the 3rd Edition rules actually were? Especially in terms of spells (IIRC)?

I'm pretty sure SecurROM is Atari's choice, not Obsidian's.

When I was a guardian, I used two full length sabers because they did more damage. I can hardly remember ever seeing "miss" on my screen anyways, so the penalty to hit was moot.

I think that by the time the majority of the people found these forums, there was not much room to implement any suggestions anyway.