metadigital

Checking! Beware -- curiosity leads to the Dark Side ... (killed a cat, y'know?) ... then again knowledge is the path to the Light ... I know, you should persue knowledge without searching it out! Just be a sponge when it rains, but don't go seeking ... j/k

It is if you use it in a way such as it wasn't intended. If you play K1, you can transit out of the middle of a fight and back again. I'm sure they didn't want you to do that.

Change the changes file? Is that allowed? Won't LA sue for breach of copyright? "

You make a good point plano skywaler. Self-discovery plots end up needing the amnesiasc beginning; unless the first person perspective is just the closest witness to the real story. Using the first person in this way frees the PC to be anything -- or more importantly nothing -- at the start, to be solely determined by their actions throughout the game. This requires a little more thought and planning (different endings, like K1) but is ultimately more satisfying and feels far less artifical. Certainly the end product of K2 was a million miles away from a conhesive and immersive experience; I for one felt little empathy for any of the characters (except that one guy on Nar Shadarr who gets mugged) because it wasn't my story -- I felt as though I was reading someone else's. And back on topic, there is plenty of scope to have a character -- let's call her Kreia -- be totally convinced that The Force has a Will. We could be immersed in one of those "too co-incidental to be random" type stories to implicate her as mad, then have some unexplainable (and therefore enigmatic) event happen at the end that leaves a doubt in your mind as you watch the credits roll... Because in the real world we cannot even decide whether God exists or we have free will. I remember a great skeptic, Isaac Asimov, related a story when he was talking with his wife as they potted around an old market. Conversation turned briefly to music, and he was reminded of an old religious song that he had not heard for decades (since he was a small boy) and he couldn't remember the name of ... seconds later they opened the door on an old bric-a-brac shop and the very song was playing over the loud speaker ... Synchronicity, anyone ...?

And if the PC is Revan, that will just open up a whole new can of worms. <_< <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Well, Revan's gender and alignment can be determined at the beginning of the game ... and Revan can have amnesia and have lost fitness over the last few years, so as to be back at a low level ... oh, wait -- that sounds familiar ... "

Yes this has annoyed me very much. Speed is the first power I take, and I use it almost constantly throughout the entire game (I am very impatient). I remember thinking of a reason why it wouldn't be feasible to remember the last power/stim/armour/form/attack whilst playing ... can't think of it now ... maybe the reset after cut scenes / switching between different PCs. Also the speed tends to run out at odd times whilst not un-blurring the landscape. I spent most of the Dantooine sub-level blurry. (It did stop when I got back outside -- maybe speeding in the dark hurts your PC's eyes ...?) Ditto with the Force Whirlwind. If only the Whilwind was a multiple attack ...

... and maybe even those little baby pod thingies from Brave New World, so that the females can just deposit the embryo in the fertilized receptacle whilst they go off and wash the dishes and darn the computer socks for all the men. Why are there no children or young people in SW? Are people just born young adults? Have you been to a shopping centre/mall lately? The percentage of pregnant and / or baby-varrying people is closer to 75% than 0%. Children would be good human shields in the game. "

Welcome back! What is your "romantic" view? I am intrigued... There is a guy (in England, I believe) who is hooking himself up to the internet to allow others to control his body / see through his eyes. Also, there are a couple of different groups of scientists who are working on totally incompatible and different methods to augment the sight of blind people with cybernetics. Of course this is all happenning in your dream, so you needed concern yourself. Voices? Did anyone hear the other voices? (Quiet, I'm busy talking to my imaginary friends on the little boxey thing ... No, don't hurt them ... No I din't need to hurt them either ...)

... Is on First. Who's on second.

Heh, when I first watched that bit I was wondering where she got the vibroblade from. I checked my Exile in case she nicked it from her, since the exile was the only one that had one at the time. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Yeah, well, considering how clumsy she is, I didn't think she needed my Exile's sword ... she may be handy, but we wouldn't want her to lose it ... :D

See, when I'm playing a role-playing game, I like to identify with a character. If I want to stare at a bum, I can load up a picture of a bum and stare at it. But if I'm trying to identify with the character behind the bum, said character being of the wrong gender can be an impediment to that. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Let me introduce you to a new concept. Let's call it empathy. Perhaps you might one day know someone of the female gender, well enough to imagine what she feels and thinks, even how she would react in new and interesting situations. This is called role-playing.

I always make sure Kreia is empty handed when we reach the Harbinger ... so that she magically crafts a vibroblade when a certain "sleeps-with-vibroblades" NPC appears ... "

... Or Douglas Adams. Yeah, those new piccies don't look like dododroids. Whalebots, maybe. They don't have much room to turn around in that tank, someone should tell the droid RSPCA. I wonder if that's the Force's aquarium .... "

Ooh, pick the dropout! I know! Part XII: The Feeding of Malachor V ... planetoid. ... JEDI MASTER KREIA, Revan's old mentor, is still haunted by guilt, wondering whether it was her teaching that resulted in Revan's fall to the dark side, and begins to search for him. Sensing his last location, she travels to Malachor V, but is unable to shield her emotions, and is completely consumed by the dark side of the Force. She is lost to the Jedi, spending the next several years on Malachor V, learning its secrets, and eventually becoming The master of the Sith academy there. ... And: Part XIII: Ascension of the Sith Time frame: 3,953 - 3,951 B.B.Y. ... It is the beginning of the Jedi's decline throughout the Galaxy. Individual Jedi begin to leave the Jedi Order, and the Jedi Watchmen of many systems, disenchanted with the endless, pointless struggles, step down and exile themselves in unknown quadrants of the galaxy, echoing the disillusionment of Jedi Master JOLEE BINDO. ... ... I fortell a deep (and pointless) look at the Greek pantheon in this thread's future... <_< . I again take my leave. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Hey, Plano Skywalker asked metadigital, not the dropout! Planetoid? Small planet? Okay, I guess that's because it's a clump of debris -- I'll let that slip. Well, now we have been appraised of the plot, the game makes a lot more sense. It's a pity the edited excerpt we learn from the narrative arc of K2 is so abstract that none of this is even guessable. No need to delve into classical, norse, eastern or modern interpretations of mythology for this (and none spring readily to mind). Why a summary of this wasn't forthcoming in the game is the real mystery. After the confrontation there is approximately twenty minutes of FMV and follow-the-bouncing-ball dialogue. At the end of the game there is another opportunity. Maybe the Force could have even given the PC a vision of the past (I know that's allowed). One thing that isn't unclear is the philosophy of the publishers. " And I still say that all references to the wound/echo in the Force are inconclusive at best (and downright contradictory at worst).

And another reason I like my "Force has a Will" plot is that K2 becomes a step backwards in the over-arching story. In K3, "The Anti-Force League" are trying to accomplish what Kreia was trying to do. She would be re-defined from a mad, extremist psychopath to a gifted, driven visionary. (Which has happenned throughout history.) And the Exile is just a fish in the Force's aquarium. So Revan would have worked all this out, and either convert/kill the Exile. (Harks to Blizzard's Warcraft III plot.) And the Force could be defeated, but this is only a temporary remission, before it comes back with a vengence in 4000 years. The Force is the "Empire", the "Authority" against which all oppostion is "hopeless". ... But it was just a dream ....

Life is a journey, not a destination. It is in the doing that we live, not the arriving. :cool:

Yeah, I guess we've covered Eastern, Western and everything in between. I just wish that the dialogue in the game actually made sense. It's just too vague. Characters contrdict themselves in adjacent sentences of the same monologue, whilst agreeing and disagreeing with other characters in adjacent monlogues! I get the impression that the philosophical underpinnings were not part of the core writing effort. The writers seem to have just added some suitably mystical philoso-babble at tactical places within the story to add some flavour. Hmmm, I feel a bit like those anoraks that find anachronistical, geographical and continuity mistakes in films (like "That bird doesn't inhabit the Amazon, it's a native of Finland!", and "That Victorian Urn should not have been present in the Georgian era of the War of Independence ..."). Oi vey.

Why should the equivalent of +1 (d20) be +50 (d200) ? Surely it should be equivalent, and that would be (200/20 = 10) 10 x 1 = 10. So the d200 bonus would be +10. At the moment a DC of 40 is outstanding. If we use d200, then 400 would be similar. Instead of adding +10 for each additional level, you could use a smaller increment, such as +8 or even +5. So that next level your PC doesn't have a DC of 410 but 408 or 405, respectively. Why must you get an AB of +100 immediately? Level 1 characters miss more often than hit. If you come across an aponent with a DC of 150, you have to roll in the region of 140 now (with the +10 bonus). To be clear, I am not proposing changing the mechanics. I am proposing using a larger scale of the same mechanics. Granularity. Think of it this way: keep the same d20 system, just change the bonuses to +0.5 per level instead of +1. And then roll a d20.0, so that you will get any number from 0.1 to 20.0, inclusive. Then when you try to hit a target that requires a 75% score, for example, you will need to have bonuses and a natural roll adding up to 15.0 (bonuses of +1 + 0.5, therefore a natural roll of 13.5 or above). Similarly the DC would be 40.0. Yes?

Lightsabers can end up much better, with all the correct upgrades (five upgradeable components per lightsaber). Also they make that satidfying buzing sound when you flail them ... :D

Okay, your misapprehending. d20 die roll = 12 (12/20 = 60%) bonus = (+2+1) score = 15 = 75% chance to hit (15 divided by 20: if it helps, remember that 1/20 = 5%) so, if we use a d200: die roll could be, for our example, anywhere from 115-124. (This expands the equivalent percentage out to 57.5%-62%, and half of these "die rolls" will end up less than required to hit the target, so we are effectively rolling d"20.0", where a 14.9 won't hit and a 15.0 will.) Bonuses can be staggered more gently, so that instead of +1 d20 (= +10 in d200), we can have +5 or +12 (= +0.5 and +1.2 in d20). Do you see? We are breaking down the bonuses so that we don't have to add them in 5% increments. We can add in 0.5% increments (d200) or 0.1% increments (d1000). So you could end up with a 99.5% chance to hit (e.g. a stationary object) but each level would be only a little better than the last (say, 0.5% better). Look at it this way: adding +1 per level means that after 20 levels you have run out of effective room on the d20. Adding +5 per level would not run out until level 40 for a d200. Make sense? d20 AFAIK was never meant for epic levels: it was thought up for paper-based D&D to help make a quick approximation of percentages (one twenty-sided die roll gives 20 x 5% probabilities). Each level took approximately double the experience of the last level, so Level 20 was almost unheard of (for PCs, NPCs could be met with said experience).

I'm not sure about changing the colour, but I do know that you can delete the redundant threads you created accidentally. Just Look at the controls in the bottom left of the post, and you will see an "Action" box where you can Delete your current thread.

No no no! Don't go. Good debate needs you! We need to make sure we don't get too carried away with our new clothes, in case they don't actually exist!

There is no need to have continuity of combat systems, so long as the new system works similarly (i.e. in a simulcrum of reality with fantasy elements, like Force powers). The character classes betwen K1 and K2 have vastly different bonuses associated with their levels, for example. The problem is epic characters make a nonsense of the scale -- they break it. So these bits need to be handicapped, whilst the early levels and low statistics are adequate. The biggest improvement needed is more granularity in combat, the bonuses and calculations in general. Think of this: instead of d20, why not d200? Instead of 15 STR = +2, it could be +22 to hit (equivalent to +2.2 in d20) and 16 STR = +25 to hit (equivalent to +2.5 in d20). So a calculation like 75% chance to hit (15/20): STR (15) = +2 + Roll (12d20) + Weapon Bonus (+1) = 15 which hits becomes: STR (15) = +22 + Roll (119d200) + Weapon Bonus (+ = 149 which misses This gives more, smaller increments, so that you don't have a 95% chance of htting at the end of the game, for example. Why not d1000, or even d10000? And it would not affect the earlier games at all.

I guess I'm even more of an optimist, because I actually like the final dialogues. I could do without the boring action bits, but the dialogues are worthwhile enough. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> My problem with the dialogues is that they don't actually tell you anything. I may as well have listened to a Linguaphone lesson for Swahili: that will have more interesting sounds. I have just been replaying the last few scenes to collect some of the underlying philosophical framework revealed. And my research is inconclusive. Characters contradict themselves in adjacent sentances of their own monologues. And different characters agree and disagree similarly in their respective adjacent monologues. (And all the monologues seem to be joined together in certain areas of the game, so that the player is bombarded with philosobabble, that is not meaningful on any level, for a sufficient length of time to allow for the saturation effect to overcome any common-sense dissent.) So, either the writers were being vague because they didn't have time to complete their planning, or they didn't want to say anything controversial. The result is that Yes, no existing SW lore is invalidated; but equally, nothing new is introduced -- except for the "wound/echo", which is never explained further than "it's bad", so bad that both Dark and Light characters have to stop it. Or something bad will happen. We think. So the game actually ends up being bubblegum, not sustenance. And the tragedy is the story has a lot of promise. If the writers had been a bit braver (or organised?) we could have had an instant classic; a timeless plot. Oh the humanity.

I doubt BioWare is going to do it. Although, they could be pursuaded to license out their new RPG engine I suppose. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> That might work. Use the Jade Empire engine ... :D