AlanC9

The ironic thing is that the gay marriage issue is probably what won it for Bush. A huge number of people thought that "values" were the big issue. He should send a thank-you note to the Massachusetts Supreme Court.

Now that's just silly. 11 states just added laws to ban gay marriage... and this president wants to add it to the US constitution... If that isn't on the "offensive" I don't know what is. Just wait and see... they've already promised to take a crack at that amendment again, and they now have expanded house & senate support. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> The amendment will fail. It's not even going to get out of the Senate, let alone be ratified. Truth is, there was never any serious intention to pass the amendment in the first place; it was just a way to whip up the base. And the point isn't that gay marriage is winning; the point is that it's become conceivable. That's the typical arc for these things. Inconceivable > dire threat > moderate threat> inevitable. Opposition to gay marriage collapses among people under thirty. Check the polls.

Yeah, a little more calm is definitely in order. Whatever you think of the social conservatives, their agenda is going nowhere. They're playing defense, not offense, and they have as much of the government under their control as they'll ever have. Remember, gay marriage became a serious policy option under Bush, not Clinton.

Yeah, I know it's exploring. But what's the point of exploring? It depends on the plot for me. Exploring isn't your job in KotOR, except to the extent you need to explore to find what you're looking for. Exploring isn't nyour job in BG2/ToB. Exploring isn't your job in any of the NWN campaigns. Exploring is your job in Fallout 1, since you don't have the slightest idea where the thing you're looking for is. (Less true in FO2, since you've always got a good idea where to go next). The same could be said for the early stages of BG1, and if you install the expansion after winning BG1; my preferred method. Exploration would have made sense in KotOR if the Star Maps had been harder to find. But this is just another way of saying that KotOR should have been longer, isn't it?

But to let you wander the country, they have to build the country, no? It's not that it's difficult, it's that the devs considered building empty areas to be a waste of time.

Well, that's a shame. But there are obviously a lot of people who are willing to pay 50 euros (or $50 -- what's the current exchange rate, anyway?) for a game without a toolset. The economics of including toolsets are questionable. There seems to be strong price resistance to anything over $60 or so, toolset or not. They'd have to get a lot more sales from including a toolset to justify doing the work. Assuming LA would let them do that in the first place, and I'm not sure they would.

There are disagreements, but the pro-romance side consistently wins, and usually with an absolute majority. Folks who think it's a waste of dev time usually poll less than the "who cares" party. Whether that's "consensus" or not is a metter of definition.

I agree with most of your argument, but the Bio designers didn't make up the D20 dual-wielding rules. And LucasArts approved the D20 rules, so blame them.

No holiday is fake if it gets you a day off work. And if you don't like Christmas, be a pagan and celebrate Yule, or Saturnalia. It's no secret that Christ's birthday was moved to match the traditional winter solstice festivals.

Well, there's the DS female ending Bio cut, where when Carth confronts you on the Star Forge, you renounce the Dark Side and kill Bastila, and both of you go down in flames with the Star Forge. It's still LS, but not as hunky-dory as the main LS ending. It would have been my favorite if they'd left it in.

Interesting. I killed her in a straight-up fight, and she wasn't there at the ending -- the LS ending's the same, but she isn't standing with the group. I guess it's a bug in the clean kill dialog.

But since Revan's personality derives from the player, how can Obsidian do a credible job with the later Revan as an NPC?

Have you tried Starshatter? It's not an E3 game, but it did just get a publisher. Though it's probably based too much on the flight-sim model for your tastes.

If you build that mod, it'll probably be a hit. The whole Bastila question is just a subset of the biggest issue about KotOR 2 -- how do the devs intend to accomodate all the possible KotOR endings without making whatever happened in KotOR an exercise in futility? I don't have a clue.

I'm pretty sure AMFV is abandonware now, like all the rest of Infocom's titles. So feel free to download it. Ah, the good old days of text adventures.

TIE Fighter. X-Wing Alliance was pretty good, but the ending was a big letdown, and some of the mission designs were just plain idiotic. OK, you've got these delegates you want me to protect, and you're flying them around in a shuttle? Here's an idea -- put them on the Otana and I'll deliver them safely and wipe out the whole Imperial fighter force too. And the original X-Wing was just way too tough, I thought.

About time a dev cleared this up. But I've read eslewhere that there will be companion-specific missions, like the Leviathan sequence in KotOR 1.

Except the Force doesn't work like that. It's not like you need to make hand gestures to use it.

Don't forget the Enchanter trilogy. And Planetfall/Stationfall. And A Mind Forever Voyaging. And Bureaucracy. (I played them on a Mac.) I think they're all abandonware these days, so drop by Home of the Underdogs for a nostalgia trip. Back on topic: one problem in the SW setting is that Jedi really should be able to crush non-Jedi, other things being more or less equal. How do you balance that and still let folks play non-Jedi? Then again, considering how easy KotOR 1 was, it might very well have been playable as a non-Jedi if you'd had the option. But that just means that Bio botched the difficulty. I also want a game that's actually a challenge. We'll see. But my big worry is the plotline. So far, it sounds like whatever you did in KotOR 1 was an exercise in futility. I won't be happy if this turns out to really be the case.

You know, repeating that slavery is evil isn't really worth the effort. I think there's a consensus that slavery's evil. Here, now, on 21st century Earth. It doesn't appear that the Republic has achieved that consensus by the time of Ep.1. Anyway, good and evil aren't the appropriate terms here. Lets say light side and dark side. At least those have objective content, thanks to George. Believing that something is DS does not necessarily imply that you have the right to use extralegal means to interfere with it. I'm sure the Jedi do believe that slavery is from the Dark Side. But does that mean that they have a duty to break the law to interfere with it? If that principle has a limit, where is it? You say that the Jedi aren't above the law, but you also say that they ought to break the law in certain cases. So specify which cases. Let's have a nice clear objective principle.

Moral relativism is an observable fact. Different cultures have different values. You can assert that your values are better than other values. In fact, you should do that - if you don't assert your values, why do you have them? You may even prevail in the political struggle to have your values enforced, instead of other values. But that just proves that you've won. It doesn't show that your values are objectively better. As for the Jedi, I'd argue that setting yourselves above the law is inherently DS, even if you're doing it to promote the LS. It's also terrible in terms of practical politics. Do you really think common people would take well to having their laws and cultures judged by an unaccountable elite of mystics who take their guidance from some source that an ordinary man has no contact with? That'd only be workable if you set up some sort of Jedi theocracy, and brought the common folks into the church. It's conceivable, but the Republic doesn't work that way. In the real world, we don't expect Catholic priests to bomb abortion clinics.

Oh, please. Saving levels is just so munchkinny, not to mention it's metagaming. I'd call it cheating, but it doesn't make the game much easier, really. Logain, those fights are only easy with a good build. I've seen builds that have a real problem with Malak (LS scoundrel/consular, for instance). Sure, you can say they're just bad builds, but it's kind of rough on someone when his build works OK all the way through to the endboss and then fails. I'm not sure how your suggestions improve things. It just means you have to change feats every so often. It's still not strategy. And it penalizes characters who don't have enough feats to master more than one combat style.

Actually, most cultures in Roman times didn't have a problem with slavery, any more than they believed in universal rights. Slaves might not have wanted to be slaves, but that's not the same thing as believing slavery itself to be wrong. Sure, you can say that Roman civilization was evil. (Any society where a head of household has the right to have his children executed at will, for any reason or no reason at all, strikes me as a bit questionable). But can you prove it to the Romans? The Jedi are already unaccountable. I don't think going about ordering the normal folks to change their ways would be a good thing for their order in the long run. As for the Jolee business -- can we make a distinction between having Jedi levels and being a member of the Jedi Order, please? (Drakron says that's impossible under D20 rules, but who cares? Not Bio.)

The key word there being "eventually". The trick is to get some other company to go all-DVD first. Then they're the ones who lose sales until the new standard is universal, while you keep selling on CD until every gamer has a CD-ROM. I'll be honest. If KotOR 2 comes out on DVD only, I'll put in a DVD drive, just like I'm going to have to toss my vidcard when Half-Life 2 ships. But games that I'll upgrade hardware for are few and far between. As much as I liked NOLF, I still haven't picked up a vidcard to run NOLF 2 (no Hardware T&L on my Kyro 2). I can always pick it up out of a bargain bin later

Yes, you can't get enough defense to matter against high-level attackers, especially with the undocumented defense stacking cap. lordcecil, you don't need to build a simulator to check builds against each other. Statistics don't lie. That chart's from Sherwin Tam's faq.