CastleBravo

I have a similar problem with a similar system. I can run the game, but get random freezes, crashes and even spontaneous reboots on a Core 2/8800 GTS system with plenty of RAM and current drivers. I've already searched Lucasarts technical support and the FAQs here and nothing helped. [sWKotOR] ReportDateTime=6/5/2008 2:26:18 PM SysInfoVersion=v1.00.60 GameExists=1 GameVersion=v2.10.427 GameInstallLocation=C:\Program Files\LucasArts\SWKotOR2\ [OS] Name=WinXP Version=Windows XP v5.1 build 2600 Service Pack 2 Service Pack=Service Pack 2 Status=Pass [swapFiles] C:\pagefile.sys=4092 [CPU] CPUCount=1 CPUSpeed=2397 CPUFamily=6 CPUModel=15 CPUStepping=6 CPUVendor=Intel CPUName=Intel

I have the same issue on a new system with an 8800 GTS 640mb video card and Core 2 Duo E6600 processor. It also hard-locks my PC at random. Meanwhile I can play S.T.A.L.K.E.R. at maximum settings with no issues. Go figure.

Fallout. You just felt like you had more freedom... more plot freedom, more freedom to finish missions in different ways, more ethical freedom. And a great setting. And mean evil humor. And dumb in-jokes. And gore. But the BG games were alot of fun, you had alot to do, you were just more constrained as far as what you could do and how you could do it.

Deus Ex- Invisible War was a huge letdown. Awful perfromance even on high-end hardware, and looked bad while doing it. All the good gameplay elements were removed or nerfed radically. But at least it had lots of bugs! How you can go from something as good as Deus Ex to something as turdtastic as DX-IW is beyond me. Arcanum was a huge letdown, too. Couldn't stand that game. "We are like the cool people from the Fallout team and stuff! Buy our game!" Yeah, right. More like the kind of fallout that turns your nose into a third ****.

Every once in a while, I can't tell what the hell a particular Malkavian dialogue option MEANS, but usually it isn't that different from the Usual RPG Dialogue Choices... just written in a wierd (sometimes REALLY wierd and/or funny) way. And sometimes other people can't figure out what your statements mean, either. (Not a spoiler, says so in the manual I think). Also, female Malkavian clothing is really wierd and messed up (not a spoiler, just start a game with a Malkavian and see what I mean).

I just started playing this game, I waited till the 1.2 patch came out. So far, it is not buggy at all, and note that I *did* see the stutter bug in HL2. Some observations: -The graphical detail level, on average, is less than that of HL2. -At equal settings, V:BL runs more slowly than HL2. -Sounds and artwork seem to be quite good. -The combat is real-time 1st or 3rd person (you choose), but adjusted by skills, etc., something "normal" RPGers need to be aware of. -The skill/ability/etc. system is simple and logical, but not so simple that you won't be spending time sorting out the system in your head for a while. And finally, so far it is very addictive.

I remember that... POR2 was basically a really big virus that came in a pretty box. It literally ate people's operating systems. Talk about a bug! People on the POR2 forums were literally screaming at the devs stuff like, "YOUR GAME IS A VIRUS, I'M REPORTING YOU TO SYMANTEC!!!"

That seems to be the consensus. Something to consider is that the Source engine still has random performance problems in Half-Life 2, even on very high end systems. HardOCP saw stuttering problems in HL2 on a system with a FX-55 and TWO 6800 GTs running in SLI mode... you can't get much higher end than that. And Valve has admitted that it is a bug, not the user's hardware, that is to blame. And they have released multiple patches to fix that specific problem that don't work. In that context, Troika claiming that it is the user's hardware that is causing the performance problems people are seeing seems pretty stupid.

It isn't so much a matter of being honorable in my mind, as being able to be evil without having to act like a purse-snatching dummy. Vader didn't have to yell at Tarkin to give him a raise to keep his DS points up. I believe Obsidian already said they were going to address this issue.

I think Lucas's changes to the original trilogy are mostly harmless. They were unnecessary and silly, but not really worthy of the hysterical responses they get. After watching Attack of the Clones, and being kind of disappointed with the results (if not nauseated like I was with "The Phantom Menace"), I went and re-watched the trilogy on VHS. I was starting to wonder if nostalgia was causing me to over-rate the old movies. No, the old movies don't have great dialog or "great acting" in the usual sense. But the characters were more fun and likable, and the acting wasn't so bad that it felt like being stabbed in the eye with a rusty nail. In the new movies, the characters aren't likable and some of the acting is just horrifyingly bad (e.g. everything involving that little kid playing Annakin, Hayden Christiansen's love scenes with Natalie Portman... possibly the worst on-screen romance EVER). Maybe it takes a special kind of actor to take bad dialog and produce a fun-to-watch result. Christainsen has acted well in other things, but in TPM he was just awful in all respects. And he's the central character. Of course, this is just my opinion. But the old movies were more of a fun ride, and the new movies are more of a long slogs through awful "plot development" in between overblown, numbing, brute-force special effects sequences.

Toying with me? Does that explain why I was throwing him around like a **** and generally humiliating him with my force powers ALONE? Hmmmm.... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> That was just a poorly thought out encounter on Bioware's part. It seemed more like I had scared him away than the other way around. Malak should have met the player under conditions where he was so much more powerful than you that he just beat you like a drum, then have Bastila's intervention triggered by your health dropping below a certain level so he doesn't kill you.

Yeah, that was pretty blantant, eh? Ancient fish instead of ancient lizards, and the required cover-babe-with-snotty-accent-who-acts-good-then-goes-bad-then-mabye-goes-good-again (CBWSAWAGTGBTMGGA). And the evil-background-without-knowing-it is just BG all over again.

You get an idea of where places other than Junktown are very early. And if you ask the people the right questions, you can learn the general or specific location of alot of places very early. With that information, the order you do things can be very different.

I don't follow what you are getting at. NWN didn't have the one feature everybody wanted, i.e. a party to control. BG2 sold like hotcakes and has piles of fans.

That is OK, but for that to work the story has to be really good. I don't think the KOTOR story was *that* good that it was worth the sacrifice in freedom. It was a cross between Star Wars (Star Forge in place of Death Star, Sith lord on artifical respiration, Milleinum Falcon look alike...) and NWN (snotty-accented good girl who goes bad sells you out then maybe goes good again is central to plot and on box cover, ancient evil powerful fish instead of ancient evil powerful lizards used to rule everything...). It wasn't bad, but it wasn't so great that it seemed worth making the game run on rails more. As an aside, an advantage of having a game more open-ended is that you the player can figure out what is going on in terms of unraveling a mystery, instead of having it force-fed to you.

Master TWF gave you -1 attack and -1 defense IIRC. Master Dueling gives you +3 and +3, for a +4/+4 difference between the two. That's not trivial. A Guardian is probalby best used with a double saber, flurry, and master TWF. He has more vitality (less need for high defense), and he almost always scores a hit at higher levels no matter what (less affected by to-hit penalty). He also has the feats to spend. Combine it with Master Flurry and Jedi Master Speed, and you have an anti-Sith Cuisinart. A Sentinel or especially a Consular has less viatality to spare and a worse chance to hit, so that +3/+3 starts to look really good, not to mention that they have fewer feats to spend to get up to Master TWF in the first place. Also, if you are going with Master Critical Strike, you are probably more concerned with your odds to hit than your number of attacks, since every hit is 2x damage +2-12 +stun, and you want your *first* attack to hit so the enemy is disabled immediately. Also, the critical strike feats have a bigger penalty to defense than Flurry, which you will be eager to negate. And of course double sabers have an awful critical range.

"in star wars universe, the heroes ARE restricted to only these two behaviors so it's not only kotor." I'd disagree. Yes, Star Wars is about good vs. evil. But not everybody is unambiguously good. Lando Calrissian comes to mind here. Heck, Han Solo asking for cerdits and leaving the Rebel Alliance in the lurch at end of Star Wars comes to mind here. In Fallout, you could do a range of not-perfectly-good/altruistic things. You could be just plain greedy and self-absorbed, or you could cheat people, or you could take on evil tasks for people, or you could massacre an entire village (like Annakin does in Attack of the Clones, so you can't say allowing massacre isn't Star Wars-compatable...). You can say Star Wars is black-and-white, but really the whole range of human behavior from mediocre to satanic to angelic is depicted at some point or another. But that is kind of going over old ground... everyone knows that too much of the Dark Side in KOTOR was childish or trivial instead of menacing. Did Darth Vader have to ask for extra credits from Tarkin or help prepubescent children beat up an Ithorian to keep his Dark Side points up where they belonged? Ahem. "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." I just played the game, and followed a rather different trajectory than you did. In fact, I almost didn't save the vault by getting the water chip because I wound up taking what seemed like a logical path, but didn't lead me to the Boneyard until very late. As a result, all the ghouls had already been massacred by the super-mutants, so the whole storyline of helping either of the ghoul factions didn't play out at all... I don't think there is anything in KOTOR like that. Spending more or less time in, say, Kashyyk, didn't really influence what happened on Manaan. There is some connection in what you do in one place and what you do in another, but it doesn't FEEL very profound. Yes, all computer games are linear to some extent, simply because they have built-in limitations and boundaries, or else are vast but almost completely random. And yes, if you want to force the player into 1 story path that branches into 2 at some point, you have to impose more limitations to force them into that story path. But I don't know if that is a good strategy in the first place, at least not so blantantly as is done in KOTOR. Probably the most egregious example is when you meet the Jedi Council. You can look like Satan, and proto-Yoda will still force you to save the galaxy from the Sith. Huh? The point is, the key is that the ILLUSION of freedom and open-endedness is important. The ability to really do this is limited. For instance, Fallout was very wide-open with lots of interconnected consequences and alternate possibilities, but the game world was quite small. Fallout 2 was even bigger, but everthing felt almost too spread out and aimless as a result. The plot of both games was very simple, there was no story but what you made... which isn't a bad thing, just another approach. It would add another level of complexity from the developer point of view, but I think the ILLUSION of freedom and open-endedness could be much improved from that of KOTOR without taking it away from its Star Wars basis.

I recently beat Fallout and have taken a decent bite out of Fallout 2, so here is my take on it. In each Fallout game you get two long-term goals, which you can pursue however you like, or completely ignore for long periods of time. In the first game, you had to get a water chip and then take out the mutant threat. In the second game, you had to get a GECK, then deal with the enclave. These were the anchor points in the game, but you could move around them with total freedom, at least until you hit the edge of the map. Also, you really didn

Do you have a specific example of when a developer went wrong by giving the customer what they wanted? Because that doesn't make much sense on the face of it.

This draft stuff is bull. The MILITARY doesn't want a draft, and if they don't what one, what the hell makes anybody think that Congress and the President will force one on them?

I almost always play a good guy. But that's because being a bad guy in games always seems to entail stealing candy from babies or randomly killing people in the middle of the street for no reason. The former is petty, and the latter is STUPID. People complain about KOTOR being like that, but in fairness almost every computer game is like that. It is only more obviously annoying in KOTOR because the developers advertised it as having a really "seductive" dark-side path, which would only be the case if you are the kind of person who wants to relive their days bullying lunch money from the fat kids in junior high. Evil isn't just killing somebody who annoys you. Evil is pretending they didn't upset you, so you can plan how to kill their family and get away with it, or frame them for murder, or kill them and dump their body at a whorehouse.

I just hate all organic meatbags. Except for the master, of course. Heh.

Jolee, easily. The cathar chick was ugly and kind of a whiner. Bastila was just a recycled Aribeth... goody-goody girlie with snooty accent central to the plot goes bad on you, stinks the place up, then goes good again or not depending on what you do.

Master Uthar was good because he was a depiction of cool, calculating, rational evil. In fact, he didn't see himself as evil at all, he simply thought that the Sith way was the right way, and persued it 100%. He didn't seem like the kind of guy who had to help little kids mug an Ithorian just to get his dark side points. In fact, he was arguably the only character that makes a good case for joining the Sith at all. Yuthura was good because she wasn't just evil for no reason, but started out with decent motives, turned to the dark side as a shortcut to accomplish her aims, and got corrupted by its influence. The more power she tried to get, the further away her reason for wanting the power in the first place got. And her redeem-ability at least seemed semi-plausible in the context of the game.