Thalandor

I agree with the original poster. The game is way better than the critisims seem to imply. OK, the controls (for PC) get a litle bit of time to get used to, but once you do, it works. I found myself getting trashed at first, because I thought this would be a simple click fest. It's not ! You have to think strategy, use the correct stance at correct times and don't be afraid to block/dodge. Speaking of block, spacebar is your friend in this game. And its not random that they bound the spacebar key to defensive skills too. When you get swarmed, you block with spacebar, hit "1" to get your healing going and then take the fight to the enemy. Or hold spacebar and use directional arrows to dodge and reposition yourself. It works very well. I'm a bit worried though about the "empowered" version of talents in the full game, which will require that we push "Shift". Empowered defensive talents will be Shift + Spacebar + 1... When you combine that with the stance switching and dodging and whatnot, I foresee some finger acrobatics.

From the math it appears that the threat range using Master Critical Strike is determined using the weapon's base threat, multiplying by 4, and then adding any crystal/lense modifiers - which makes the feat pretty useless considering the lightsaber's base threat is 20-20 - but that's just my opinion. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Lghtsaber threat range is 19-20, double bladed is 20.

When I was playing kotor2, some things felt not right. I went back and played about half of kotor 1 to try and comfirm what I thought, and here are my observations: 1- In kotor 2, the head of my character had polygons poping out of his neck depending of the direction he looked. Never had that in kotor 1. 2- Cut scene transitions are always messed up in kotor 2. Like it will fade to black, then for a second you will see the game view, then the cutscene or movie will play. It was smooth as silk in kotor 1. 3- All the problems with camera locations during dialog are not present in kotor 1 4- Kotor 1 had a decent ending. 5- The graphics are much more detailed in kotor 1 ! By that I mean the backgrounds mostly. Finally, one good thing about the graphics in kotor 2 was the heads of the various human models, which looked much better than the elongated faces in kotor 1. And the items too had better graphics, and increasing the resolution didn't make the user interface super small.

Same here, I discovered about prestige classes pretty late. Kriea was getting on my nerves so I didnt bother talk to her, until one time I did and found that out. I was like wtf, could I hav gotten it sooner ? I think I was lvl 17 at the time...

See topic. I thought keen gave extended you critical range by x2, but there's a seperate property for that in lightsaber components decriptions, so I'm lost. Thanks

Hi ! When I first started playing kotor2 (pc), the start-up screen showed the grey sith lord who seems to have been through a shreder. After a while, it got replaced by the sith lord in a dark robe and the black and white mask. I thought it was random, but now I'm more than half way through the game and I never get to see the grey guy on the start up screen anymore. Is it normal ? Thx

So I got the PC version yesterday and basically played 12 hours strait today. So here is what I think so far on the game, to let ppl know if they should buy it or not, or wait for patches or not. Let's start by getting rid of the main issue: bugs. I started playing this game thinking that it would be a horrible bug fest (according to Gamespy review). Well, I'm 12 hours in, and I got a crash ONCE. And it did not reproduce itself. I did not encounter other problems, except maybe a couple of glitches in camera positioning during 2 or 3 conversations, but nothing bad really. So far so good. Flow of the game: I was a bit surprised by the initial amount of linear content you have to go through. I'm at the point were I can choose to visit 3 or 4 planets in the order I wish, after 12 hours of play and a level 11 character. Much longer than Taris and Dantoine were in the first game. Oh ya, and still no lightsaber. It seems you gotta work hard for the darn thing. Graphics: About the same as Kotor, but I have to admit the rectangular corridors are a bit boring. Outdoor environmenents look better though. And also, they seem to have redone most of the faces for the characters, and they look better. The NPCs look very good too, kudos to the artists. Voices and sounds: Generally very good voice acting. The woman playing Kreia is extremly talented, and the character itself is very intringing. And that other character too, Bao-Dur... he sounds like Bill Clinton lol. It suits the character very well. And, a nice surprise was that Carth Onasi from the first game is voiced by the same person. Kewl. Gameplay: The gameplay is very much like the old kotor... but somehow refined and a bit more varied. They have added a bunch of customization options for weapons and armors, its no longer as restricted as it was it was in the other game. In fact, its not special that a weapon can be upgraded, its special when its not upgradable . Also I find that there is way more conversation that there was in the other game, but its very well written and acted. It helps tell a very complex story and that doesn't surprise me, knowing the designers. Very good job here. In any event, if you liked Kotor 1, you should really like kotor 2. Playing this game makes me nostalgic of old black isle games...

Lol, that's mean. I wonder if the game will be using the bioware automatic update system ??

Yup, 8.5... Not bad. The best thing in the game seems to be the story and voice acting, while the down points are the graphics and the bugs. Yes bugs, including crashes to desktop during load screens. I mean come on, it isn't like they didn't see that happening during QA... And don't tell me that PCs are so varied in hardware that you can't find all the possible hardware issues etc. that's the most lame excuse ever. If a QA department doesn't have a wide array of different machines, what kind of QA department is that ?? And it isn't like the reviewers on gamesites use obsolete or uncommun hardware either. In any case, most bugs users encounter in games are a result of exceptions in the code that the programmers didn't think about, and not hardware. Which should have been found during QA, cause those game reviewers found them easily. I'm going in circles now, I guess I'm just too pissed off, as I was eagerly waiting for this game. I'm a bit disapointed, but then again it took 3 patches for KotOR to become virtually bug free, so there is still hope. Anyways, I think I'll pass until there are words of a patch to fix the issues that ppl will report on this board.

For me its easy, I'm not buying the game until there are enough patches released so that there is close to no bugs left. I've had enough of buggy software, especially buggy PC RPGs. And in times of old, blackile games were full of bugs on release too, and still full of bugs after the patch. And then Interplay would stop supporting the game, even if it needed more patches and ppl were still reporting bugs. Ok I'm pissed just thinking about it.

I dont know if you guys played Xbox of PC version, but on the PC version green twi'leks were a rarety once you were out of Taris. There are many colors of twi'lek in the PC game, and some have actually very nice colors...