KOTOR II -- impressions??

jpom

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I saw a comment in the farcry thread, so I figured I'd throw this up.

Just wanted to get people impressions on this game, I personallywasdissapointed. I won't go into to many details because I don'twant tospoil anything for people, but these are my general thoughts:

1. I found that the character development was almostnon-existant,whereas in KOTOR the characters were very well developed(For the mostpart) and you actually got to know them, in KOTOR II Ifound thecharacters to be very 2D, you get some backstory on them butthey arenot really developed to the point they were in the first one.Andthere are no character quests that I could find.

2. I found the worlds to be dissapointing, some of them were verysmalland had very few quests, and some of those were pretty pathetic.

3. The dialog and influance system in the game is a pain. Ithink it wasdesigned for re-playability as I think it would be verydifficult to getevery character to their finished status by only playing once. ButIhave found that the dialog options for the characters veryseldomchange and sometimes you have to go 3 or 4 steps into a dialogtreethat you've already done before getting a new option.

4. As for re-playability, I'm about 1/4-1/3 of the way through mysecond time and am pretty bored already, I'm focussing on differentcharacters in my party this time, but I just can't bring myself to careabout my party because even when you focus on them you don't reallylearn much about them. KOTOR I played 5 times and was on my 6thwhen I recieved KOTOR II.

5. The ending, if you can call it that , was rushed to say theleast.And if you finish this game then be prepared to wait forKOTOR III forany closure.

All in all, I was dissapointed in the game, at the same time thoughIdid enjoy it too a certain extent, but it has the potential to besomuch more.

To me it feels like they had a lot of good ideas for the game andjustnot enough time to implement them. If they had been given another6months it could have been a great game.

I also think that one of the reasons I have found so manypeopledissapointed is because KOTOR was such a good game that KOTOR IIhadsome high expectations to meet, unfortunatly it didn't quite makeit,if this game had of been the first one instead of the second Ithinkopinions would be different by far.

James
 
Digest Version
* rushed game
* bad graphics
* worse cutscenes
* neat new features and polished skills
* gaping plot holes
* minor bugs
* w00t great Star Wars game!

So far I've found the gameplay to be about as exciting as reading a good Star Wars book. I find myself at times relaxing back in my chair and just reading and deciding how to respond.

I’ve only played few about 12 hours or so but the MAJOR bugs I encountered in the first KOTOR have not cropped up in this game, and besides a few odd graphical anomalies I'm happy to say the game has only crashed outright once!

Lots of the new skills and other things in the game I've found to be very much undocumented.

Compared to the first game, I've found the levels to be very large with lots of quests. However in the process of completing one quest, usually 3 or more other smaller ones are resolved at the same time.

The feeling I get is developers these days are really rushing these games out before they are really in their finished state.

/Prince of Persia II rant
*insert about 20 lines of WTF piece of øøøø!*
Its safe to say that after painfully living through the bugs in this game I got nearly to the end but to be stopped in my tracks and unable to continue from any save point due to bugs in the game…
/End Rant

KOTOR II looks graphically like a game released 1-2 years ago. And I've encountered some pretty major plot holes and have wondered more than once, what, where and why a particular team member has suddenly disappeared from my party.

Textures: Lacking, obviously this game was intended to be if not part of the original to be released much earlier than it was.

Cinematics: I don't know what they were thinking; I've seen better cinematics made by teenagers with a copy of 3D Studio or Maya.

Sound: Nothing special, you'll forget its even there soon enough.

Quests: Very simple: go there, get that, bring it back, the end.

Character Creation: There are some neat additions which really enhance the game from the first and slightly polish skill usage, but when it comes down to it, it’s just more of the same with very few actual new abilities.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the game so far and am planning on going through it at least twice. If you’d asked me before I thought about it for any length of time I would have given a very wholeheartedly cheer of “Great Game!”. But if you didn’t play and love the first game, you are going to hate this one.
 
If your 12 hours in and already found plot holes just wait until you get to the end.

As for quests I can say that Citidel Station and Nar Shaddaa have fairly descent quests, some of them on Citidel Station are pretty boring I found though. Oderon is half descent and while i found that Dantooine had 1 good quest that was the only one it had, oh and Korriban has a couple things that are interesting but no real quests.

I just found a lack of side quests throughout the whole game, and like you said almost all the side quests that there are include "go get this or do this and come back to me" but I found that most of them just didn't have the ability to make me want to go do them like KOTOR did, or maybe I'm just biased because I quite enjoyed the character quests in the first one and there are none in this one.
 
Alot of unanswered questions I found, eventually found myself not really caring.
Did get struck with a few bugs to start with, where after a battle you couldn't move.

I was disappointed that none of your companions from the first game are really in it, aside from a brief and useles appearance by Bastilla.

And the ending was just crap.
 
Lord will undoubtedly post here - I've heard him playing it quite a bit :D Not heard him mention bugs, but his light sabre seemed busy at times ;) Anyway, he is up in Brum and probably recovering from teh party right now - be back next week though so watch this space :cool:
 
1. played the first one til you can't play it anymore so that I didn't miss anything, and I mean anything.
2. Played the second one time through and it's obvious that Obsidian was not prepared to keep up the quality that Bioware put in to the first one. They added nothing and did a poor job.

Whenever a game was done by one company and then for the sequal given to another company you can expect one of two things. Great changes to the game that make it seem almost too different or just a rehash of the game with the only difference a mere different story line. We received the latter compared to the former I just stated.

the last 1/5 of the game was an utter dissappointment.

this game was a just a quick fix for fans til Bioware was done with their more recent game Jade Empire and hopefully they will pick the game back up to do the third.

This game could have been so much better had Bioware done it and not let Obsidian take over the project. Jade Empire from Bioware better be good or I'm going to be mad they skipped out on doing KOTOR2.
 
Same as with Tuffgong I played the first one until nothing remaind to be discovered. I have played KOTOR 2 twice through now, the second time I used a save game editor to increase my influence with my party members so I could see what kind of things there are to do in the game without having to worry about the whole influence thing. I have to say that I am happy I cheated and did not try to get all these "Sub-Plots" (I use the term loosely) the proper way, I have found at least 2 plots that seem to be unfinishable, the first is a plot/quest and the second seems to be a major factor in the game that I assume was cut out for some reason, or was left as a trailer into KOTOR 3. Either way I will probably play 1 more time as DS (since my last 2 were LS) and then the game will go onto my shelf and will probably not be touched for a good long while if ever again, unlike KOTOR 1 which I have played probaly 5 or 6 times (not because I am finding anything more in it but because it is a good game, and very easy to lose yourself in and kill a few hours).

As for bugs, I've had problems with 3 so far.

1. Not being able to move after comabt, I can use the asdw keys to move but if fighting mulitple opponents after killing one and selecting a new target you'll just stand there and won't move towards that target. In that case I have to cancel all my combat actions, use the keys to move to the target and then restart combat.

2. I had problems with random crashes througout the game, but that was fixed with a no-cd patch (shhh... don't tell) I tried installing and playing from 2 different optical drives, but it would randomly crash on both of them, threw the no-cd patch in and havn't crashed yet.

3. Party member's alignment keeps changing, sometimes when I level up, or my party members level up or I gain ls/ds points or I move to a new area the alignment of my part members will change from LS to Dark Side Master, most of the time if this happens I can use the addlightside cheat then quick save/quick load to balance it out, but something that doesn't even work. More of an annoyance than anything else, but damn do the characters look ugly with the whole vein thing going.

anyways sorry for B**ch posts, but I'm in vent mode right now, and the more I play the more angry I seem to get.
 
1. Save and load also does it.
2. Mine crashed and no cracks.
3. Didn't care :)
 
w00!

Kotor 2 is going to absorb many months of my free time. Its quite simpley the ebst game I've ever played :)

After getting an older ATI opengl driver ( can attach on request) to work around an ATI bug (ati's fault not obsidian's) Its simply awesome :) Nowhere in the game did I feel as bored as I did on Manaan in kotor 1, the dialogue for darkside takes some ral thought if you want to gain influence and not gain lightside points (I often found my self with a net lightside gain so I'm not devious enough yet) I encountered no bugs game wise at all the gfx are great ( not awesome but I like them) but yeah.

You owe it to yourselves to play this game if you are an rpg fan :)
 
I'm shocked you have such good comments about this game after finishing it. Try taking a look at my thread about this game here and follow the link I posted to find out a little more about this game and some more complaints from the fans...
http://forum.osnn.net/showthread.php?t=58029
 
I read that thread. Based on my own experiances I would rate that as people whining becasue Obsidian didnt turn out a super game in 9 months. If you follow the dev diareies and interviews at gamespy/ign you will already have known they chopped a lot of stuff out to meet the deadlines, you would know they never intended to do much to the core engine.

As I said, other than the ATI driver issue I encountered no game bugs, no AI problems adn generally feel that this is the best game I've ever played, IMO kotor3 cant come soon enough, nor can NWN2 seeing what the obsidian team did with kotor2.

I do get the opinion though that people were expecting far toom uch from a product that only had 9 months development time and only 2 months extra QA time for the PC. It was never meant to be ground breaking. It was meant to continue the story, and that, it did, exceedingly well.
 
But see that's just the problem, I know that they only had around a year to get this game going, and for the amount of time they had, they did a great job. But whether the game takes 12 months or 12 years i still have to pay for the game, and I still expect a completed product, which I don't feel this game is.

I don't blame Obsidian for this, it was Lucas Arts that set the deadline, and Obsidian has proved that they can do a very good job when given the proper resources (time). I would also like to say that it would have been great for Obsidian to tell LA to shove their deadline, but alas I know that is not the way the world works.

As for bugs, again with the deadline it's going to be difficult to test the game completely and release it bug free. I personally have run the game on 2 systems, both AMD 1800+/3000+, 384/1024 Ram, ATI 9600/GeForce 6600GT OC and had no real problems on either system, or at least none that I can blame on the game itself. A lot of people seem to be having problems with their ATI cards, but I believe Lord said that it was an ATI Issue not Obsidian. I think the most annoying bug for me is the party member alignment, you know there's something wrong when I have a dark mastery bonus and HK-47 has a light mastery bonus, I tell ya it's just not right.

Anyways don't get me wrong, I may have worded my last few posts badly (probably cause I was just kinda ticked about the whole thing). Even after everything I'm not trying to say that this is a horrible game that's not worth playing, far from it, I'm playing through on my 3rd time now and I think that anybody who played the first one should play this one, even if they wait for it to hit the bargin bin. But nonetheless I am dissapointed in the game, and i think that given an extra 6-12 months this game could have been 10x what it is and would have met 98% of people's expectations.
 
Hi guyz srry to post the Way above post, But I play this now im at the ice planet , and leaving a White dressed chic, And still do not have a light saber is this normal ?
 
depends how you play it I usually do telos, dantooine, and some other place before getting the lightsaber.

I should play telos, nar shadaar, onderon on my 3rd play through and abuse hanharr to get him to tell me about stuff :) And I want visas marr to give me force esight :D

lots of replay yet :)
 

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