ShadowPaladin V1.0

Get the job from the smuggler so you know what he wants you to aquire. Then go tell Gren and he will get you a suitcase with all the bits in it. First time I thought umm I'll go collect the stuff myself and then turn him in. But you get caught up in a lot of bad events over which you have no control. Once you start working for the bad guys (steal the first item) I think it cuts off your ability to work for Gren. Or it might just be when you have to kill the first TSF guy.

Oh , it just highlights one of the major differences between real life and game life thats all. Your point was that in real life you can manipulate people into your way of thinking right? Well you can do that in the game too. So just what are you complaining about? What exactly do you expect from the influence system ?

You were aware that you could open up the conversations through negative influenve I take it?

You can do that in KOTORII just go the negative influence route. The only thing you cant do in KOTORII is to go the middle road. Trying to make up for bad influence by doing something nice. I don't know who you hang out with, but most of the people I know are way too smart and or willful to fall for that one. The major difference between life and KOTOR of course is that KOTOR gives you only a limited pool of potential friends. If we only had one shot at romance in real life, most of us would end up being bachelors.

That's almost as funny as J'dans "You reek of the Troll side of the force".

That aspect of the influence system is because of the Exile PC though. With a different PC it would work in a different way to that. The exiles bonds are so powerful that those around him become like him , even non organics. Thats compounded if you take Sith Lord or Jedi Master (though it does odd things to some characters from what I saw). Just because they happen to come in line with you because you sort of supress them, it dosnt mean that they will be your friends and tell you everything about themselves. I'd like to see the influence system in action with a different character anyway. On the speech thing. There are some differences, though they are pretty subtle. And given that the whole thing is voiced you have two major concerns. Cost - Twice as much speech means more money on the VOT budget. Space - The disk is a finite space. You know Sqenix dropped a whole alternate Rikku romance because they couldnt fit it on the disk.

If he works for who I think he does, he's really nothing but a keyboard monkey. Living life like a mushroom... KOTOR II's story was far more compelling than KOTOR's regardless of how it ended. Putting money first is only long term suicide when your working with niche games. In the real world of big publishers your only as good as your last product. Playing the publisher game is part of the business. Look at PST. people laud it constantly, it sold like crap. LA released some truly awful games prior to KOTOR I and II and yet people went out and bought those games in droves. Once NwN hits the market KOTOR II will be all but forgotten and that will be the new benchmark by which Obsidian is judged.

Well you can look at it two ways. 1. You tell people what they want to hear. It's suprisingly similiar in real life ya know. Tell people what they want to hear and they open up to you. It may require that you put aside your own beliefs but it works. 2. You agree with people because that is how you feel, people who are friends usually agree on a wide range of things. Rarely will you be buddies with someone who has a totally opposite world view than you do. There are a couple of places you can use pursuade, but that will lose you influence since most of the characters are too smart to fall for that. So in effect you are critisising the system for mirroring real life too closely, which I find rather funny. The only thing missing in the game is you cant buy influence with gifts

They made a "harvest moon for girls" too.

Suprisingly enough not very , when you have to wait for 10 hours for the rest of the game to catch up with you. How would you improve it ?Thats usually a good stance to take when your describing something you see merit in , but isnt quite there yet. The alignment changing is a result of who the Exile is , the influence only quantifies his degree of control. Thats why people do things that are out of character when around him. Like Mira suddenly not being bothered about killing. You can even talk to her about it afterwards.

I can see the LS ending sort of. But nothing on Revans gender, although that could be because it's 2am...

The problem with that is that it may lead to LA seeing Obsidian as a problem company. If LA were to wash it's hands of KOTOR as of part III , then they could pretty much give it to anyone and still make a fast buck on the name. I still think KOTOR II has given me better value than a lot of other games with tighter endings. So I'm not going to get all shirty about what might have been, especially since I may have liked what might have been even less.

I'm not waiting. But I have been playing Shadow Hearts II which is trying it's best to knock FFX off my top game spot.

Worth a

Does that only happen on the PC version? I've never seen it before although a lot of people have posted ghost images on the tech forums. The one which was just eyes and teeth was hillarious.

Well lets see KOTOR 1 play over a 48 hour rental. KOTOR II 4 plays over 14 days. Which one was the most value for money...

Wishful thinking and taking comments out of context perhaps. "like to do" and "will be doing"

according to Prima high charisma helps.

As an aside I like the one in Shining Force. Everyone will tell you more about themselves over time. But if you let them die too often they will clam up so it gives you an incentive to keep everyone alive. It's quite basic, but you could intergrate something similiar into a game system. If someone is critical and you heal them - plus If someone is critical and you ignore them and they die - minus Casting buff spells on people, giving them good equipment , that sort of thing. Taking equipment off them influence loss etc.

It just needs to spread out more. The influence system works best when you dont understand how it works. Once you know that you can have everyone influenved and in robes within 10 minutes of finding them it becomes quite shallow. Of course the difficulty as you pointed out, is that if you make it too complex then your going to have a lot of puzzled people posting pointless questions. Still even as it is now it's a much more organic thing than level have a bit of the story from KOTOR. FFX has an influence system of sorts and yet most people never notice it, and I expect most dont even know it exists. Which is another reason to not make one that is too subtle.

Thanks a ton for that horrible mental image

If you did that from memory I am impressed.

Does the game have any bosses? It's kind of unusual for that sort of game (it's normally a tank or something). I've got such a huge rental backlog now thanks to discovering ShadowHearts..

Lets see if I can remember this... "Luke you will go to the Degaba system, there you will learn from Yoda, the jedi master who instructed me". "The" does make it sound like Yoda was the ony one. Rather than one of the jedi masters who instructed me. They needed Qui Gon for EP I because could you imagine Yoda doing that ? Plus of course he would have taken down Maul with a wave of his little green CGI hand, or did a mexican jumping bean impression all over him. They also needed some way for Obi to take over anakins training before he was ready and that would only happen if his master was dead. And since everyone knows when Yoda dies, that was never going to happen. Still having seen what he did to the end of EP V I wouldnt put it past him to mess around with future versions to lend credibility to EPI-III as part of his original "vision".

Thats kind of like the one I am messing around with. But in my version it's Revan and the Exile that you are the child of. And your left on a planet in the care of Jolee(for the moment) before the flee back to unknown space. It actually reads a lot like a rewrite of Luke Skywalkers story. Which at the moment I am not sure is a good or bad thing. Your version however has the advantage of the two PCs from the games being able to be any gender. Mine kind of requires one of each :D The whole amnesia thing is now overdone and it would make a change to play a young protagonist rather than an old one with a pre history. Not liking the reincarnated Malak idea ,sorry RoadReaction.