skuldar

I've done Dantooine as my first planet once and Nar Shadaa once. Both were pretty quick for building my lightsaber. Tough call between them - Nar Shadaa has the party member edge but Dantooine has the crystal goldmine. If you're just after a quick lightsaber, either one would do fine, but if you want a powerful lightsaber early, go Dantooine.

I'll have to agree with those who think K2 has better DS than K1; those complaints are how I felt after finishing K1 DS. K2 definitely improved in that area. Still, I like the suggestions about having more leeway in who and when to attack, though how to feasibly implement that is another issue. My DS character wanted to Force Choke Lt Grenn so bad. And slamming down Atris goes without saying; how dare she keep my property from me.

I'll second that. I had some bugs and graphics trouble at first, particularly when I hit Dantooine, but managed to clear all that up by following suggestions in various ATI threads (disabled vertex buffer objects, reinstalled directX9c, upgraded to Catalyst 5.2 drivers). Having just completed my first run through, I can say that I'm very pleased with the writing overall and especially with the consistency and distinctiveness of the characters. The quests were mostly good too, and compared favorably with the first KotOR. At the end, things did fall off a bit, but my first run-through was darkside, so I'm holding off final judgement until I finish a lightside run. The writing is even more impressive given the compacted time frame the developers had. I went through KotOR twice, but I can see myself going through K2 even more times because the party interactions and possibilities seem more varied, not to mention the additional Prestige classes. I don't like the one-BAB-fits-all of KotOR 2, though, and I wish the hinted romances were more fleshed out (no pun intended).

Granted, the AI needs some work, but that particular location is a problem largely because of the overlapping aggro radii and a ramp-induced line-of-sight issue; it would be a pain even with improved party AI. Still, I ended up rarely using the Ranged behavior mode because they kept getting stuck with melee weapons out even when I thought they should have switched back to ranged. I stuck Atton on Agressive because that way he wouldn't swap out his pistols. Once I started paying more attention to line-of-sight and range, my battles went more smoothly. Try to line up everyone so they don't have to round a corner to attack, and also pay attention to the relative ranges of Force Powers vs Pistols vs Rifles. Or, somewhat against that grain, equip your main with a rifle then pull enemies around corners to your group.

When you have the icon you want for that member, you have to click on it to make it stick.

I added that line, reinstalled DirectX9c from the KotOR2 CD, and updated to Catalyst 5.2 (I have a Radeon 9800 Pro) and I've had no problems since. Prior to that I had horrible lag on Dantooine and minor lags in other spots and was crashing about every fifth area transision. Quick side question: does Obsidian ever officially answer any of the posts in these forums? I haven't seen any Obsidian responses yet, so I wondered.

I hate situations like this where you have a good developer and a poor publisher lumped together in one game. There's so much that's good in KotOR2 I'd like to encourage, but so many problems I'd like to discourage, but the only real choice is whether to buy the game or not (and for most of us that choice has already been made). Too bad we can't separate our payment between developer and publisher to properly show our approval. Obsidian did a great job as far as they went. I've been impressed by the level of content, though I haven't gotten far enough to see if I'm disappointed by the endgame. I was torn with the original KotOR too, because I loved the game overall but disliked the excessive X-Box carryover (Inventory scaling, etc.) and had some minor graphics problems. Incidentally, since I updated to Catalyst 5.2 (I have a Radeon 9800 Pro) and reinstalled DirectX9c and added "Disable Vertex Buffer Objects=1" to the ini file I haven't had any crashes or lag problems. (Would've crossed my fingers writing that, but hard to type that way.)

Doom 3 is OpenGL and it runs great, like I said, so your argument loses some steam there. I know ATI is generally worse with OpenGL and better with direct3D, and the opposite for nVidia, but this performance problem is way beyond chipset bias. I'm not going to buy an nVidia card when my ATI runs nearly every other game on the planet quite handily, both OpenGL and direct3D. And that's my point. If all those other game developers can write stuff that works with my ATI, why can't these? Why is it ONLY the KotOR engine that has these problems? [EDIT] Oh, and here's the other thing. If I go into Advanced Options under Graphics in the game and turn on anti-aliasing or other options and go back in, the lag is gone for a minute then comes back even worse. That pattern repeats whether I turn advanced features on or off. Just now my PC locked up completely on Dantooine. There's no excuse for that. LA/Obsidian needs to get out a patch for this kind of thing; it's their responsibility since it's their code that's freaking out my system. Nobody else's code does this. [EDIT AGAIN] Thankfully adding the "Disable Vertex Buffer Objects=1" to Graphics Options in the .ini file cleared up the Dantooine lag problem.

specs - ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, 2.8GHz P4, 1GB RAM I've seen people listing older Catalyst drivers like 4.11 saying that's the "fix" for lag problems in some open areas. Others say 5.2 is the best version. And I've seen posts that blame ATI and say they need to fix their drivers. Well, okay, but why is it that Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 (and a half-dozen others) run smooth as glass on my system yet KotOR 2 chokes and gags when I turn away from my ship in the docking area on Dantooine? What is KotOR doing that is slowing down the GPU so much? Seems like a buggy graphics engine to me, or inefficient at the least. My setup should have no problems with anything this game throws at it unless it's throwing something it shouldn't. No other game I've played in the last year has seemed nearly this buggy out of the gate. What is the justification for blaming ATI's drivers? Is there really an issue with post 4.11 Catalyst drivers for anything other than KotOR? If not, then I can't see laying the fault at ATI's feet.