Althernai

Eldritch Aim is basically the reason I said "most" rather than "all" -- but even that one is not as good as it sounds because the base duration is only 10 seconds so even with a significant boost from INT, it will only influence 1-3 spells depending on the spells and the need to properly position the Wizard and enemies. I haven't gotten to Deleterious Alacrity yet (only level 4), but from the description in the manual, it doesn't sound that promising: short duration, inflicts damage on self, Movement increase is not very useful since everyone is already quite fast (the problem is avoiding Engagement). I guess it depends on how much Speed is increased. I don't see how using a Wizard as your main tank would be anywhere close to a decent strategy. First, you will again suffer from the fact that you can't pre-buff: the enemies will hammer you while you're buffing and, given that Wizards have Very Low or Low combat stats across the board, probably knock you out before you've had a chance to fully buff (bonus: they can also interrupt your spells!). Second, the number of spells you can cast is limited so even if you did manage to buff, you'd be able to pull this off for a grand total of about 5 encounters before needing to rest. Compare this to, say, a Fighter, who not only has naturally higher Endurance, Health and base defenses, but can get a combat mode with +10 to defenses across the board (good luck getting that kind of bonus out of your buffs and talents).

Sort of. Resting did not help with the loss of spells due to buffs because few of them lasted long enough to persist post-rest so you would just end up casting them again -- this was in fact one of the disincentives for resting. PoE goes to the other extreme: resting is very restricted and you have few spells and the opportunity cost is high.

No. In the IE games, the tradeoff was that if you pre-buff, you have fewer spells to use for combat. In PoE, this tradeoff is still there, but now there's an additional opportunity cost tradeoff: combat is really fast so by the time you've managed to cast a few buffs, it's basically over anyway. This makes most buffs which only affect the caster utterly worthless while the party-wide buffs are a mixed bag. I understand their reasoning behind getting rid of the pre-buffs, but the system they used as a replacement is at least as problematic and possibly even more so.

Talent points must be spent or else it won't let you progress with the level-up process. Skill points do carry over (my characters just leveled up and I checked) -- otherwise you would wind up being forced to distribute points to skills you don't want for the sake of not wasting them. You cannot allocate points to skills unless you have enough to pay for a full skill level (i.e. if your current Lore requires 5 points to upgrade, you can't give it 3 points now and 2 more at the next level up; it has to be all at once). Basically, the "answer" in the last sentence of the original post is completely wrong.

You don't have to, but yes, the decision to combine Search and Stealth into a single mode does mean that it is extremely useful. Note that if you press D, the characters will move at nearly normal speed. They're not that squishy. If you feel they're going down too much, you can always give them heavier armor. Also, you seem to be thinking about the rules in MMO terms -- don't. MMOs are very pernicious in making the player think that the enemies should focus on attacking the "tank" whereas anything more intelligent than an animal would go for the "squishy" damage dealers first and leave the tank for last. A six-person party combined with Real Time with Pause combat (a-la the IE games) was one of the drawing points during the Kickstarter. I'm not sure what else to say here; they delivered exactly what was promised. You can probably minimize the pausing on Easy if you really don't like it. I kind of agree. My character is a Wizard so I have 2 Wizards and a Priest now. I've managed to get some use out of the spells, but honestly, they're hard to use and some of them are a whole lot more effective than others. To be fair though, the Infinity Engine had the same problem: somebody who selected Infravision, Chill Touch and Shocking Grasp would be complaining in exactly the same way. We just need to learn which spells are good (e.g. the Priest's Accuracy buff is worth it despite the short duration and the Wizard's cone-of-fire spell is devastating if you can position the caster and time the casting right).

I think it's about right for somebody who has played Infinity Engine games on the highest difficulty settings, but isn't familiar with PoE's rules. I'm playing a Wizard on Hard now and I think that if I knew which are the "good" spells, it would probably be easy, but since I've deliberately stayed away from guides, it's pretty balanced.

It runs fine on my nearly 4 year old laptop: Core i7-2720QM (4 cores @ 2.2 GHz) Radeon 6770M 8 GB RAM 1920x1080 display Windows 7 Home 64 bit

I'll start with Hard and if it becomes too annoying, I'll turn it down. Hard seems like the middle-of-the-road difficulty (the really tough ones are combinations of Path of the Damned, Trial of Iron and Expert Mode).

Hmmm, which droid would that be, so I can check it out... It's IS-18 (the one standing in the ventilation area of the Industrial Zone). The correct way to deal with him is to always answer choose the first answer (1) until he tells you that he needs you to go to the Manufacturing Droid and get the number of droids in the colony and access to the terminal. On the other hand, if you input the sequence of answers 1-1-1-2, the conversation will terminate just before the final step. Talking to him about it again will result in some dialog about the reactor, but it quickly leads to a forced exit from the conversation without getting the journal update. Asking him about the planet in general does not help.

I think that is actually one of Bioware's better "evil" paths. It makes perfect sense that if you travel with a party of idealistic heroes and suddenly decide to become the new Dark Lord, some of them are going to turn on you and you will have no choices except to destroy them or at least run them off. There might be an argument to make regarding tying the choice to a single decision, but the consequences are well executed: being the Dark Lord has a price.

Yes, I installed both of the mods (restored content and droid planet). In one sentence, the mods definitely make the game better and I heartily recommend them, but they're not quite enough to fill all of the gaps. Here are a few more detailed comments on TSLRCM (some spoilers, but not too many): The HK Factory is great. I'm not too fond of combat with a single non-Jedi character, but the dialog and interactions there are very good. My main complaint is that it is complete non sequitur: you finish dealing with Atris and then suddenly you are HK-47 at the factory -- some transitional material would be helpful. Nar Shaddaa feels like it has a lot more content now. I went to Dantooine first, then to Nar Shadaa and by the end of that, I thought that either I was misremembering the quality of the game or the mods fixed a whole lot of stuff... sadly, this turned out to be more or less the game's high point. I liked the extra interactions between characters on the Ebon Hawk. They still wouldn't say much to me, but at least the game didn't feel as empty near the end. That said, some of them made a lot more sense than others. For example, the interactions between G0-T0 and the remote finally became something coherent whereas Kreia blasting T3 with lightning was just weird (it doesn't seem to have any consequences nor much of a cause -- beyond her disliking droids, I guess). Malachor V feels less empty, but more confusing. What is going on? How did everyone get separated? And what are half of them doing? The droid planet was a bit worse, though still fairly decent. First, there are some fairly annoying bugs: after the radiation is cleared from the Industrial Zone, facing in a certain direction while in that zone causes the game to slow to a crawl -- not a showstopper, but annoying. Also, I chose T3 as the droid to clear the radiation and during one of the critical conversations, I accidentally chose a dialog option that exits the conversation. This results in the journal entry not being updated and going through that conversation again does not bring up the same option (I had to reload). Many of the quests didn't really click with me -- I kept trying what I think are reasonable solutions (e.g. why not ask the manufacturer droid to make some droid legs?), but it turns out that the game wanted me to do something else. And, of course, the planet's story is limited by having to preserve the status quo of the endgame, but beyond that the mod is pretty good.

I didn't choose any font. I needed to turn off my laptop before finishing that long post so I copied it into a text editor. When I finished typing it and pasted it back, that's how it looked like -- and it appears I can't edit the post. Sorry. I disagree. It's true that KOTOR is essentially a variant of the monomyth, but that story occurs so often across many cultures precisely because it only needs a slight variation in order to work. KOTOR is simple, but it does what it is aiming to do and it does it well. Also, I think the characters in the original are of comparable quality to those in the sequel. Again, most of them are archetypes with a slight variation, but there is nothing wrong with that. It also has HK-47 and Jolee who are pretty original. KOTOR II attempts to tell a much more complicated story... but it doesn't do a very good job of it. It's not just Malachor V -- the entirety of the final sequence is lacking, the characters stop saying new things two-thirds of the way through the game and the content density is very uneven. Furthermore, the complexity of the story is its downfall: it's hard to screw up the monomyth too much because the audience can fill in any blanks whereas some aspects of the ending to KOTOR II are just plain confusing. I don't mean that in the sense of "I'm going to have to think about this to understand it," but rather in the sense of "There are definitely a few cutscenes and/or some dialog missing here." Finally, KOTOR II tries to be philosophical in the Star Wars setting which is akin to trying to swim in water that is one foot deep. It's not quite as bad as the midichlorian nonsense, but it's uncomfortably close.

This should probably go in the other forum, but for the sake of keeping things in one place, I’ll put it here. After reading this thread, I decided to play KOTOR II. My general impression of it is unchanged: it’s very disappointing. Judging by the first part, this could have been an incredible game, but as it stands, the first KOTOR is significantly better. Since I knew this before I started playing, I decided to cheat a bit: while the original was played as-is, for the sequel I used mods which try to restore some of the missing content: version 1.8.3B of TSLRCM and version 1.1B of M4-78EP. The mods are well done and they help, but it’s not nearly enough. Interface, Combat and Loot The interface and combat are mostly the same as in the first game, which is to say that the interface not very good and combat is mediocre. However, I was pleasantly surprised by quite a few small changes. For example, empty containers now show “Empty” upon selection while datapads have their own section and display upon being picked up. The basic system and all of its flaws are still the same, but these small changes add up to make it somewhat better. On the other hand, there are also several less pleasant changes to the mechanics. For some reason, the developers decided to cut the duration of one of the more useful Light Side powers by almost a factor of two. Also, they introduced some unique Force powers with usage mostly specific to an interval of the main plot. In principle this is a very neat idea and they’re cool when you first get them… but because the interface is that idiotic list which must be traversed without the option to skip anything, they wind up cluttering it up for the rest of the game. They also tried to increase the value of skills, but mostly succeeded in making them more annoying: you now need a “thief” type character to open locked “chests” without damaging the goods inside. Much more importantly, they made most of the loot random which I found to be a big change for the worse because it ruins the atmosphere behind items. It is one thing to find a powerful item lost by a Jedi you read about on the corpse of a legendary beast this Jedi was hunting and quite another to find the same exact item on the corpse of some completely random enemy that doesn’t even have a name. And they didn’t even bother to check whether the item is already in your inventory so you’ll probably find multiple copies of items with descriptions that imply they’re unique (Nomi must have a had a whole closet full of identical robes). To compensate for the fact that the random number generator might not give you the stuff you want, a lot of items can be created in the Workbench and Lab Station (another attempt to make skills useful), but the only really good ones are upgrades and consumables. Story and Characters The story very clearly tries to be Darker and Edgier and probably succeeds at this too much for its own good. Star Wars is no stranger to darker sequels. For example, The Empire Strikes Back is significantly bleaker than A New Hope. However, KOTOR II goes significantly further: everywhere you go is in bad shape and you are rarely welcome. Furthermore, don’t expect any reasonable authority figures among the Jedi: they left out the Yoda-type creature from the original KOTOR not just from the present of the sequel (which can be explained by the story), but also from the Council flashback – Jedi such as that would not have allowed the events described therein to proceed. I don’t know whether this darker tone would have ultimately worked or not because this game is well and truly unfinished. It starts off well with a nice scenario borrowed from the horror genre and a couple of the planets are quite good, but the closer one gets to the end of the game, the more obvious it becomes that not nearly as much effort went into the latter parts and the final sequence (starting from the completion of the final “spoke”) is very rushed indeed. The “restored content” is a double-edged sword here: on the one hand, it makes the game feel less empty, but on the other, it’s clearly missing some explanatory linking sequences and thus makes it even more confusing than it was. The characters are pretty good, but again, they suffer from the fact that the game was not finished (most of them simply run out of things to say to you a little past halfway through even if you did everything right). The one that left the greatest impression on me is your “mentor”. Unlike in the original, it is not possible to recruit every character: you can only get one out of a pair based on the gender of the protagonist and one out of a different pair based on your alignment. On my first playthrough, the PC was male so this time around I used a female PC instead. It turns out that their dialog is not merely different regarding themselves, but they also result in gender exclusive content regarding other aspects of the story. I guess this is done for the sake of replayability and it could work in a game where a bit of story will not be missed. In an unfinished game like KOTOR II, it is a bad idea. KOTOR II differs from the original in featuring an “influence” system. Whereas in the first one, the characters had a set of conversations that outlined their stories and, as long as you continued to talk to them and ask them to talk, they would give them to you. There were some exceptions (the romances needed the player to indicate an interest and HK-47 required a high Repair skill), but for the most part, even if they did not like your responses, the characters would continue to talk to you. In KOTOR II, this is not the case: each character has a parameter called Influence associated with them that is a prerequisite for later dialog and is affected by how you responded to the initial conversations as well as reactions to events while they are in your party. Playing KOTOR and KOTOR II sequentially led me to a realization: I really, really don’t like “influence” systems. There are several distinct reasons for this. The most obvious one is that influence locks the player out of late-game content and, again, KOTOR II has precious little of such content to spare. However, this is not the worst of it: influence takes an experience that used to be analogous to reading a story and turns it into a mini-game – and there is no way to refuse to play without giving up on conversations altogether. Even if I resolve to roleplay my character my way and not pay attention to the system, I still notice the choices that are likely to result in positive or negative influence. It’s the same reflex action as thinking “8” when somebody says “3 + 5”. Finally, having to work this mini-game into dialog limits what the characters can say: for the game not to be random, they must have some predictable traits and the conversations are built around these. The system sounds like a good idea, but in practice it is very unpleasant. Details and Conclusion The mini-games are much improved: pazaak and swoop-racing are fundamentally better while the annoying frequency of the turret game has been greatly reduced. There are some hints of romances with two characters, but either this is bugged or it really doesn’t go anywhere (although the game claims that I’ve chosen one of them over the other) – in any case, it’s nowhere near as good as the original. Also, I can’t believe somebody played through that Malak cutscene victory and thought “Hmm… looks good, but you know what would be better? What if anyone could defeat the protagonist like that? Jedi, Sith, droids – it doesn’t matter that your character is basically invincible and does hundreds of damage per round, if the story calls for it, you’re going to lose.” I’m not sure if I would recommend this one. It starts off great – many of the less pleasant aspects of the original appear to be fixed or mitigated – but the later parts of the game are very disappointing and the whole thing just leaves a bad taste. They made so many design decisions intended to enhance replayability, but, unlike the original KOTOR, I have absolutely no desire to replay this.

I would have enjoyed this game 20 years ago, but, as I discovered by backing another Kickstarter, after BG2 and PS:T, there is no going back to player-made parties.

How is N-time/day ability uses (kind of D&D legacy, present in every single edition from Advanced to 5th) used in IE games is different from extremely long cooldown? As mentioned earlier in the paragraph you quoted, I was referring to the "usual" implementation of cooldowns -- the one seen in World of Warcraft and its followers (e.g. SWTOR), Dragon Age: Origins, the game in the original post and many others. The hallmarks of this system are that the player is forced to use abilities that are sub-optimal for the task at hand and gameplay consists of finding what in MMOs is referred to as a "rotation" of powers to be used in the proper order. As PrimeJunta pointed out, the abilities per day in the IE games are fundamentally different from this and although you can argue that the IE games did have a "global cooldown" of 6 seconds for all spells and abilities, this does not result in any of the implausibilities or typical gameplay associated with cooldowns. This is true. It's possible to create a system with cooldowns that is neither implausible nor susceptible to the usual problems, but nobody does that. Almost every system out there (including even Dragon Age where I honestly expected something better) is lightly modified version of WoW.

In practically every implementation I've seen, cooldowns are the lazy solution to "balancing" a class or an ability. Half the time they make no sense (why does a warrior need to wait 45 seconds between two instances of bashing an enemy with a shield?) and in general they're designed to force the player to use abilities that are sub-optimal in a specific scenario. Cooldowns are a terrible idea and practically any other solution (mana, spellbooks like in Baldur's Gate, PoE's system) is probably better.

I wouldn't worry about it too much. It would be a lot easier to take them seriously if the GPUs they gave were in any way comparable, but they're not even close. The 6750M is much, much more powerful than the 330M -- by more than a factor of 3 in processing power and by a factor of 2 in memory bandwidth. In fact, I suspect that your HD 4000 is about the same as the 330M or maybe even a little better. I don't have the backer beta, but I can tell you that Unity is relatively friendly to Intel's graphics. Wasteland 2 and the Shadowrun games all chose my lowly HD 3000 by default and all of them worked OK, though to crank the settings all the way up required me to switch to the discreet card. I think those settings simply reflect the worst laptops that they've managed to find. You'll probably be able to play, though I suspect not at the highest settings.

I agree with you about the diversity of combat. I think this is one of the things that BG2 got right that very few subsequent games managed to emulate. There is a lot of different enemy types (golems, beholders, vampires, mindflayers, werewolves and many more) which don't just look different, but play differently. Also, it does not overuse any particular type to the point where I tired of them as I do in many other games. For example, Wasteland 2 and Dragon Age: Origins had decent combat, but both give me the feeling of "Can we just get on with it already? I've killed enough of these things" at multiple points in the game. I disagree about the difficulty. Yes, it's hard the way you play it, but it's not necessary to play like that. BG2 was the first D&D-based game that I ever played. I didn't know the rules at all and so played a Mage that only discovered the usefulness of Stoneskin circa Chapter 4. I also neglected to play through the tutorial and thus did not realize that the game can be paused until the d'Arnise keep (at which point it got too hard so I realized I was missing something and finally played the tutorial). I believe I played on Normal difficult and the game was not easy, but nor was it unreasonably hard, though there were some places where I had to reload and come back later so I partly agree with you about the need to telegraph difficult quests. The reason your way is hard is that you're taking on all of the optional enemies which are naturally more difficult. I took one look at Firkraag and decided, yeah, I'm just going to fight your pet mage, grab the prisoner and walk away. I also avoided the Shadow Dragon (do you have to fight any dragons at all in the original game? I think not) as well as most of the liches. I didn't even find the mindflayer base in the sewers until a later playthrough. In retrospect, it is not satisfying to play like that because you miss out on a lot of the best items, but it's certainly possible.

There was recently a Star Wars Humble Bundle which included both KotOR games plus all of the Jedi Academy games and some others for something like $12. I've finished playing KotOR (it was surprisingly good) and have moved on to the sequel which is good so far, but that's not saying much since the problems of that game begin in the later half. I've installed the restored content mod this time so hopefully it won't feel as empty.

This is true, but having a predefined protagonist comes with a significant drawback: if you can't stand the character, you're not going to enjoy the game. My little sister loved Baldur's Gate 2, but she simply refused to play Planescape: Torment for more than a couple of hours, even when I explicitly asked her to give it a chance.

Not really. To make the combat better you would first have to fix the interface. This would require a pretty fundamental reworking of the game. I'm playing the sequel now and even Obsidian did not try to do it -- they fixed some minor issues which reduce the degree to which the interface is annoying by quite a bit, but the core of both interface and combat is basically the same.

What does Carth have in common with Kyle Katarn? The former is a Republic soldier whereas the latter is an Imperial officer who becomes a rebel operative and then a Jedi. They're not even remotely similar.

Sorry, I had no idea that forum even existed! I don't think I've ever scrolled that far down the page. Also, it seems to be about KOTOR II whereas I wasn't even going to play the latter when I started this thread (I don't remember much about it, but I do remember that it basically runs out of content two thirds of the way through). Thanks for pointing it out though -- it looks like there are some mods that restore a lot of cut content so I'll give it a try. Yes, these are excellent characters. I haven't met anyone who didn't like HK-47.

I didn't mention character creation since that post was already way too long, but yes, that is not one of the game's strong suits. There are actually two distinct problems there: first, as you mention, you get set to play to play one class and then suddenly they make you change to a completely different one. Second, because the character was initially designed for something else and because of the gimmicky nature of the final fight, it is possible (though just barely; I've personally never done it) to get to the very end and then realize that your support character without the proper offensive force powers is somehow expected to singlehandedly beat down an enemy oriented purely for combat and not just once, but something like 8 times. There should be some kind of warning for that. And yes, they went about that Malak encounter the wrong way -- it would have been easy to accomplish the same story purpose without gameplay-story inconsistency. That said, this kind of thing is fairly common so I don't hold it too much against them. Regarding the plot twist: once you know, it is really, really difficult to believe that you missed it before. There is probably a dozen places where they hint at it and at least a couple where they almost say it outright (e.g. the statement of one of the Masters on Dantooine is a complete non-sequitur without the twist). However, the first time I played the game, the revelation came as a complete surprise to me.

Some people have no patience at all. It only came out 12 years ago! More seriously, playing this is a part of trying to determine why modern games don't make me care about the plot and characters (see this thread). Part of it is obviously that I'm older, but there are also qualitative differences between the old games and modern ones. Thanks! I tried it and it solves half the problem for me: the game no longer minimizes or disables the mouse, but the movies are still shown on a relatively tiny fraction of my display. I suspect this is system specific. This is true. The writing definitely cannot be accused of taking itself too seriously. There’s a couple of beggars in the Undercity who have got to be the most loquacious panhandlers in any media. It can be very funny. Yes, Malak is all about brute force… but he does manage to demonstrate why this alone is not enough to ignore him. I spent a lot of time fixing stuff on Taris and Dantooine, dammit! To be honest, I think the game would be better if Bioware deviated from the formula and gave the player the option of skipping the very last confrontation. By that point, it’s all over in any case – it would have been more appropriate to demonstrate the consequences of sacrificing and alienating everyone as Malak did. I disagree. Like most other aspects of the game, it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It is immature, but it’s also cute and funny if you take the right dialog options and they do grow up in the end.