Mark Havel

I've endured the same ugly framerate drops when I went to Dantooine. It lagged and the framerate was about 1 to 5 fps, which is totally unplayble. The game happened to crash after. To be more helpfull to the techs, I have an Athlon XP 3000+, 1 GB of RAM, a Radeon 9600 Pro with Catalyst 5.2, Windows XP SP2 totally up to date and my mobo is an Asus A7N8X-X with the nFORCE 5.10 drivers. Of course, I have DX 9.0c... I hope a patch or some to fix this will come as soon as possible, because the game seems to run fine in all other place I've seen. It seems I've find in one of the others posts the way to fix this. Add the line "Disable Vertex Buffer Objects=1" in the swkotor2.ini, in the [Graphics options] section.

Since Obsidian do not plan to make it's own 3D Engine nor adding some "me-too!" stuff, there is some chances that KotOR II will be very similar to the first one gameplay wise. This is perhaps a coincidence that the gameplays of Deus Ex and KotOR are actually the same in the way BioWare did not want to make a Deus Ex-like, but the facts are here.

Let's make my point about this: Basically, it's just a matter of choice. In both games you have some freedom to do certain things. In Deus Ex, it's an action freedom, you can basically choose 3 paths to do things like opening a door, manage your way into a base, ... while it's a dialog freedom we have in KotOR where you can choose to say and consequently to do (because saying something like "I gonna kill you Sith scum!" will certaintly end in a fight) something bad or good and perhaps more neutral. You've certaintly noticed most of the KotOR quests can be solved to get DS points, LS points or no Side points at all, like it's possible to kill Anna in the 747, in the metro station or in the UNATCO Headquarter and in the last case, you can even use her killswitch word in Deus Ex. Gameplay wise, it's very similar, and in both games, it's not very difficult to play them at least 3 times to see most of it's content without having the sensation you know them by heart (which I had in Invisible War while finishing it for the second time...). I think Warren Spector noticed this in an interview and noticed the manicheism of the game 'KotOR) too, so this poll and assertion don't seem me stupid or laughable at all. I hope this fundamental gameplay element will stay in KotOR II.