AlanC9

This is weird. I've completed the game twice. It crashes all the time (9800 Pro vidcard), but I've been able to just restart before. But now, when I try to exit the Hawk on Dantooine to confromt the Jedi council, the game goes to a black screen, every time. I can exit the Hawk on any other planet without problems. This is my first DS playthrough, but I have not killed any of the Jedi masters. I don't know why my LS characters got through this OK. Is there some sort of cutscene? Anyone else seen anything like this?

swaaye, that post would be a lot more convincing if KotOR 1 hadn't run perfectly well with integrated graphics. It's not like K2 is all that much better looking than K1.

Well, Saberist, I'm going to just respond thematically, since nested quotes would make this almost unreadable even if they worked. The engine and combat mechanics: The KotOR games are not swordfighting games, nor were they meant to be. In an RPG, the character knows about swordplay, but the player does not. If you want tactical swordsmanship, look to the JK series. And adding long-range combat would have been just silly. Even if Obsidian wanted to just throw out the Odyssey engine and start from scratch with something like the Unreal engine, that just wouldn't look like Star Wars. Which is, you know, the point. General storyline: Your main objection boils down to Obsidian not writing the story you would have. And you actually have a couple of workable ideas. But proclaiming that "K2 was supposed to answer the question of 'why'? Why be an emperor in charge of an endless herd of sheep when you are a minor god in the things you can do on your own." displays impressive arrogance. What K2 was supposed to be about simply isn't your call to make. Having said that, I'll agree that the motivation for seeking out the Jedi Masters in K2 is very weak. Kreia: I'll accept that it's possible for her to have been Arren Kae, though it's not very well supported by evidence. But to call her motivations selfish is preposterous. She's willing to die to further her goal of shaping the Exile. (Do Sith ethics permit that?) And if she considers herself expendable, how much more so would her lesser servants be? Also, she is a Darth Treya; there have been others. Kreia did not create the Academy. She found it, presumably after the battle of Malachor V. The war against the True Sith: We can't argue coherently about this since we don't know what's going to happen in K3. But it's likely that this will not be "war" as the term is commonly understood. No fronts, no armies, no positions. DS Revan had armies of Dark Jedi. He deliberately threw them away. Therefore, armies of Jedi are not valuable. (The implication is that Revan developed new insight after K1, since before his reprogramming he had been attempting to create such armies.) Edit: possible alternative explanation -- DS Revan has gone over to the True Sith. Gender representation: It's highly amusing to see the same arguments that feminists developed fall into the hands of whiny white males. Sauce for the goose, eh? Though as a white male myself, I'm kind of embarassed by this sort of thing. Thousands of years of male supremacy trickling out like this? Sion: He couldn't really perceive Kreia, so couldn't kill her. But he guessed what she was up to. This explains why he didn't finish her off. When your assumptions start to give you trouble, it's time to reexamine them. Malachor V and WMDs: Not really sure where you're going with that. Our last 'industrial all out attrition war' ended with the use of WMDs too. And the moral aspect of mass destruction doesn't change whether the means used is Force-based or standard technology. Either way, it's power, and death, and responsibility. Mira: There's a lot of outright babble at the beginning of your reply. At first I thought you were on drugs when you posted it. Anyway, which confrontation are you referring to? Under Jek'Jek'Tarr, Mira is justified in believing Hanharr dead. And at Malachor V, she can kill him at the player's option. But no argument at all with the throwaway nature of the M5 sequence. The whole ending of the game is deeply compromised. (I presume you're up to speed on the cut endings... if not, there are plenty of threads and a restoration project) Jedi bashing: yep, it's hard to not get the sense that the Jedi Order has failed in the KotOR games. But this is just like the films. R2D2 and droids: Destroy his behavior core and anything you rebuild is a new droid. So yes, he can die. Sure, he took a shot to the head. But who says the core's in his head. And bringing up the fact that nobody important dies in SW films is true. But again, not relevant to anything. Does this thread really need any more subjects? I'm going to have to call BS here: "It is clear that Lucas is too frightened of his fanbase to do more than play 'sop to the saps'; killing ONLY non-living creatures (imagine if every droid soldier that was effectively cut in half at the waist by a saber on Naboo and the orbital battleship was in fact a human)." This completely muddles up two distinct concepts -- the death of a creature and the visual spectacle of its death. Lucas doesn't kill characters, whther droid or human. He butchers cannon fodder right and left, both droid and human. Due to ratings issues, the droids tend to die less cleanly than humans do. But that's just a tendency. Humans are dismembered too -- Luke, Anakin (twice!), Jango Fett, the bar thugs in ep. 4. You seem to be simply assuming that droids aren't people. There's no evidence of that in the SW universe. Lucas certainly doesn't think so. The droids were originally going to be major characters. (Whether a droid is capable of moral choice or not is an interesting side-issue) Personal shields: Good point that we don't see them in the movies, and so they shouldn't exist in the KotOR games. Blame BioWare, not Obsidian. They set this up in K1.

I don't really buy that. The Mandalorians aren't Force wielders, so the True Sith would probably have a free hand with them if they actually managed to conquer the Republic.

The Sith holocron is intact if Revan was DS. It's a message from Evil Bastila. Korriban isn't all that short if you get the hidden tomb in the Shyrack cave.

You had lots of points I'd like to address when I have more time. One thing I would like to point out is that your way of setting the Y-Axis is a tiny minority. Forward == up and back == down is the default way the mouse works on the computer. Leaving it that way works *for* the vast majority of gamers since flight-sim gamers are a minority even in the hardcore gamer groups. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Hey, I'm a flight sim player too, but it still didn't bother me. It felt perfectly natural to work the turret control like that. You're not flying the ship, you're pointing the guns. Saberist is using the wrong control metaphor. As for the Kreia=Kae thing, it's only plausible if you buy that Kreia's a lot older than she looks. Handmaiden has to be in her early 20's.

It's hardly a spoiler if you've seen the promotional art. She's the one with her eyes covered.

Edit: looks like the quotes are freaking out again. But this is Star Wars. Your point? I'll agree that Kreia's motivation doesn't stand up to rational scrutiny, but none of this stuff is correct. She isn't Kae, she didn't build the academy, and she didn't spend long years with the Sith. You're misremembering or misinterpreting. No, numbers don't count in the war against the True Sith. If they did, Revan wouldn't have let his empire disintegrate. The plot's internally consistent, though I can't quite imagine how they'll portray this in KotOR 3. And Kreia has no interest in preserving the Republic. This is going to be the first time I've ever agreed with someone who uses the phrase "whipped white male syndrome" non-ironically, but you're right. I can see Vrook learning nothing, but the other two are acting inconsistently. Vandar could die in K1, and so couldn't be present. Frankly, I think you read too much into the whole gender thing. That's not what I see in the scene. It looked to me like he just guessed where she might be. I don't think he could see her at all. (Though some argue that Kreia let him do it, to convince the Exile that the Force Bond could be lethal) Guess you didn't get all of HK-47's dialogs (not surprising since you played LS). Revan set up Malachor V for the effect it would have on his own forces. But Kreia isn't a Sith; not really. She doesn't have to follow that code. I'll give Mira a pass on that one. What would she know about Force healing? For all we know Hanharr was totally dead when she left him there. Huh? The MSG is just a weapon of mass destruction, nothing more. It doesn't have any moral aspects beyond that. That's just silly. Some of Lucas' droids are expendable. Some are not. If R2-D2 had actually been destroyed in Ep. 4, I think it would have counted as a major character dying. And Lucas has people killed right and left in the films without ratings problems.

I don't mind having mandatory party members when it makes sense. For instance, having Mandalore the first time on Dxun. It's his ship, and his contact. Or T3 solo on Nar Shaddaa. But some of the forced choices didn't make any sense. Why lock out Atton on Dxun -- he's a pilot, not an engineer. Why would my character take Kreia to Onderon? And why am I playing as Mira, who just gassed and captured my PC?

Since you seem to be the local continuity expert, what determines whether something is continutiy of not? And where is is information available to the public?

Come to think of it, Dex builds were almost untouchable in K1, too, except when you got to Malak.

If it isn't true, and the PC is just an ordinary Jedi, then Kreia's actions don't make much sense.

An extra 1000? Please. A midrange gaming PC can be put together for well under $1000 total. But yeah, the form factor is a real difference. Personally, I prefer to play at the computer desk anyway. Too many games that I like simply wouldn't work without being up close to the screen (hardcore strat games will never work on TV screens).

I've had that happen, but rebooting fixed it. It's actually kind of fun to see the whole level laid out before you with all the placeables hanging in thin air.

Isn't calling Kreia ugly ageist?

Funny -- what I take from this discussion is that console gamers seem to be less tolerant of hardware difficulties, but more tolerant of crappy games. Didn't the XBox folks think the KotOR 2 ending was OK? As a PC gamer, I can't think of a single worthwhile of the last few years that didn't appear on the PC, while there are several PC games that never appeared on consoles. Probably because I'm a fan of dying genres.

Well, you could go back to Win 98. I've never had any slowdowns anywhere on my 9800 Pro with that OS. Don't ask me why.

From what I've seen, game developers don't take laptops seriously.

Not all video cards support the visual effect the power uses. What's in your PC?

If you want more specific answers, try posting in the spoiler forum.

What do you mean by "better party support"? The only problem I can see is that the game doesn't let you use NPC skill in places where it should (item breakdowns, building stuff on the Hawk, repairing T3)

I wouldn't worry too much about building stuff at the workbench. You can use any character to build stuff at a workbench (except at the Hawk). But breakdowns seem to work from your PCs skill only, so you probably do want repair skill. If you let computer skill go, you'll miss the T3 repairs, but that's not all that critical to the game.

There are some KotOR builds that fail badly against Malak even though they're quite successful in the rest of the game. For instance, an LS scoundrel/consular isn't all that good. You can't get enough defense to matter against his AB, and the LS offensive powers don't help much, given his immunities.

Are you setting their AI to use force powers?

Hold it. Isn't 10 the base defense that everything gets in d20 games? As far as I can tell, Battle Precognition is a passive ability that adds your WIS bonus to your DEX bonus. So it would be limited by the armor. Orchomene is right -- women get more mileage out of armor than men.