Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II

I've started this game something like four times yet never made it off Citadel Station. I actually quite enjoy the opening, but the early NPCs weren't doing much for me, and the combat is as rubbish as it was in KOTOR. This time though, this time I'm going to finish the game. Installed the restored content mode 1.8.1, cranked the difficulty to difficult and I'm a good 30 hours in and currently just landed on the last planet currently on my map which I have to visit.

This is a really rough product.

I heard a lot about how this plays with the idea of the dark side being just another side of powers you use, rather than inherently evil. I'm not seeing that though, even Keira hasn't really touched on this concept much. Almost every dark side option is still douche mode, with the odd slightly more subtle douche mode. Generally it's murdering folks though and my face changing to murderous evil. I mean, rail-roading me into killing the jedi master I saw simply because I was on the dark side is not really convincing me that there's much to this idea of the force not being about good and evil.

I like the idea behind the NPCs, but there are all sorts of problems. Their dialogue was front-loaded so I had lots to chat with them about when they arrived, but little thereafter. Conversational dead-ends never disappear so I have to wade through it all again to try and find where the influence gateways are, and wouldn't it just be better if they came and spoke to me when we hit those points? In a Bioware game I know people will have new things to say, but in this game I keep randomly chatting to them after influence changes and level gains to see if there's something new buried in the dialogue tree.

Keira has grown on me though, I enjoy the way she challenges whatever I do to make me think about my reasoning and the consequences of my actions. It does feel at times though that all the NPC development went into her, leaving little for many of the others to do.

The little cutscenes between NPCs on the ship are great, it's nice to see them have lives of their own. But again. Front-loaded. I did a lot of hopping on and off the ship on the first planet, and these scenes are tied to ship visits, so I saw almost all of them at the beginning of the game and it's been one hell of a dry spell since. The cut scenes don't flow very well either, here or in other parts of the game, it all feels a little janky. Even the dialogue has this feel occasionally.

The combat is easy, even easier than KOTOR if that's possible. Same terrible combat system though.

They somehow made the UI worse. No way to see what the modifiers on you are. No way to check companion stats on the ship. Defence values only calculate for companions off the ship. etc.

I'm being overloaded with loot, money became no issue almost immediately.

The biggest issue though is the alignment bug. I decided early on to draw people over to the dark side. It's going well. Except some of my companions reset their status and stick at their default level until I kick them out and have them rejoin, assuming I'm in an area that let's me, which on the ship I can't do. It's sucking my will to continue because I've no idea how much this might be ruining my play-through. Are there things I should be seeing or conversations I should be able to have which I can't because of this? No idea. But considering alignment shifts was one of the big bullet points for the sequel this is annoying.

And no, I haven't used any cheats or the console.

I'm pushing on because really I just need to spam Force Lightning in combats and I win, but I'm not really feeling it. My companions feel silent and dull with few interjections and little to talk to me about. My primary goal feels vague and unsatisfying, mostly because I feel so rail-roaded in my dialogue with my targets. The game has also made my past a factor but only slowly reveals it to me, the person who should damn well know it. I really, really hate that because it makes dialogue about me such a bear. You're never quite sure what answer you're giving because you don't know if you're in possession of all the facts. Facts you should have.

To sum up, this game strikes me as incredibly over-hyped.

Just to respond to the beginning, the game is not about the dark side not being evil. The game is about neither the light or the dark side always being the right answer, that the correct approach is to make decisions individually on their own merits rather than always defaulting to light or dark. Ultimately what I got from the game when I played it was that a true altruist walks the line between light and dark (which is why Kreia's alignment is neutral and she scolds you everytime you make a decision to one or the other extreme).

You're right and I think I went in with some preconceived notions which caused me to not really take that in. Regardless though, I don't think it works for a couple of reasons:

1. Combat rewards you for going one way or the other. There's no advantages to being neutral. As a dark Jedi you can spam damaging powers, while a light jedi has great buffs and stuns. Neutral is a master of nothing.
2. Dialogue trees force you into actions. When I encountered Kavar I had no choice but to tell him I was going to kill him, which seems rather against the message Keira is putting out.

I could be wrong about this but in terms of stats I believe there is a stat boost from being within a very low threshold of light/dark, but as you said sometimes the game forces you to make a choice one way or the other which ruins the bonus until you get a chance to make an opposite choice to get back into the narrow neutral zone, which just forces you to game the choices again without really thinking about each decision individually. There are also some items I believe that are pretty strong which are restricted to neutral characters.

The issue is that, as I understand their pamphlets, the light and dark ideologies are more about how you feel about the things you do, rather than what you're actually doing. The light side dogma advocates nihilistic repression of emotion whereas the dark side is about acting out in an orgy of hedonism at all times. But these on-paper descriptions of what the sides are about are nearly orthogonal to the actual actions that are performed, which are the computer's basis for categorizing you, so the programmers just find it easier to make them generic goody-goodies and douchebags respectively.

I've never seen that alignment bug - I wonder if it got introduced with the mod you're running?

Everywhere I've read about it says it's introduced by overly high charisma people introducing when modding stats, or through using the console. Maybe I've just focused so much on charisma as a stat I hit it naturally.

It's unrelated to the RCM AFAIK.

I've been playing KOTOR 2 recently as well. I'm surprised it works as well as it does on my crappy laptop. This isn't my first time playing the game, but it is the first time playing on PC, so I went a bit crazy with the mods. Problem is, I finally got my lightsaber but my character isn't holding it right. It looks like it's floating a few inches out of her grasp and it's driving me nuts. I'm not sure which mod is causing it and I really don't want to have to restart my saved game from scratch.

I finished KotOR 2 last month for the first time, using the Restored Content mod (I had played the game a few years ago but gave up right in the beginning because it was too buggy). I liked it a lot! Maybe that's because it's been 5+ years since I last played the original KotOR so iI didn't have too much base for comparison, but I thought the game was really great and I played it all the way through in just a few evenings. The only part I hated was the HK-50 Factory. What a fucking terrible section, thankfully it was near the end of the game and I was already invested in it, otherwise it might have been enough to make me stop playing completely.

Well the HK-5 factory is part of the added content from the restoration mod so that might be why.

Yeah, I'm aware of that, in fact I believe it's the most high-profile of the additions they've made (it's the only one I knew beforehand, at least). I believe that it's more of a problem of how the section was originally designed and not how it was implemented by the modders though, since during the rest of the game the mod additions didn't stick out for me in any way, which shows that they've mostly done a good job with it.

The HK-50 factory is part of a problem with the way the game dialogue is designed. I haven't reached the section, but early on you get a journal entry for what you need to collect to locate the factory. Having located these items you ask about the factory again only for a fourth wall breakage to occur with the game explicitly stating that the factory will unlock further into the plot.

Why not just space out the items until the appropriate time? Fucking terrible design.

That's true, I also found it very jarring when the game flat out told me that I wouldn't be able to access the factory until later in the story. Then again, I thought the factory was so bad when I finally reached it that this became a minor quibble in comparison.

Haven't reached the HK factory yet, but I'm really liking the added conversations that the restored content mod implemented. I've been trying to space them out so I don't have that drop in content that the OP was talking about. Some of them come right out of nowhere, though. Like the one where Kreia randomly zaps T3 with force lighting, mutters something about the Exile, then wanders off. End scene.

I've also found that I may have boned myself when it comes to trying to corrupt companions. The Handmaiden has been telling me she wouldn't speak to me since the first planet. This apparently is because my influence with Visas is too high (and happened in almost a single conversation). I assumed it was part of her story and more would come of it since it happened without any real warning.

Apparently I assumed wrong and I have cut myself off from all hand-maiden content. It seems I need to sort of game the system by getting high levels of influence before allowing myself to drop into dark side territory.

It's all so incredibly clumsy.

Yeah. I still like it better than the original KOTOR though, buggy and unpolished as it is.

You could always use the save editor to raise or lower influence if you run into a wall.

I'm not really sure if my alignment is having any effect on my companions. I'm always a bleeding-heart in Bioware-style games so I'm all the way lightside and I've only gotten Atton, Bao-Dur, Kreia, and Visas so far. Kreia never shifts from dead-central, but Atton's pure-lightside by now and Bao-dur's pretty blue himself. Just got Visas, so I dunno about her yet.

I anticipated that while it would be rough around the edges, with the restored content mod it would prove a more interesting game with NPCs living in a world of grey and a deeper take on the nature of the force. At first that was true, the prologue is really well done and there's plenty of chatter on Citadel Station.

But after the first planet I seemed to have run through all the NPC content and its been almost all silence. No banter, no interjections, we don't even always discuss new planets or even the aftermath of meeting a jedi master! With KOTOR the content was better doled out and I felt a real sense of story progression. Here it feels like no one gives a shit and finding another master is no big deal.

I was looking forward to corrupting companions, but most of them have little to say. Even when I did unlock some more about Atton it hasn't led on to anything else.

I'm struggling to push through this final planet because there's no reward in completing them.

EDIT: I do like the interludes where it gives me control of a separate chunk of my team. It's not usually my sort of thing, but it's a nice way of ensuring everyone (not just jedi) gets an outing and that I need to consider equipment across the board.

Hm? Haven't you made him a Jedi yet? That's what the result of getting his backstory out of him is. The ability to teach your companions (well, some of them) is one of my favourite parts of the game.

I loved KOTOR even with the clunky combat system. I played though the whole game twice with different builds (Soldier/Guardian & Scoundrel/Sentinel). I'd even quit my first game (as a Scout/Sentinel) about halfway through to start over once I understood the abilities I wanted. I absolutely hated KOTOR2. I've tried to play it twice, once when it first came out and again when it was patched up, and couldn't get more than a couple of hours into it.

I don't know exactly what they did, but I didn't like it much. I think part of it was the way the KOTOR intro pulled you into the game and made you want to find out what was going on. In KOTOR2, I don't think I cared about anything in that world.

I had to turn on godmode to get out of the droid factory. I don't know if it's supposed to be that hard or I just did something wrong.

Some of the Restoration Mod content throws the pacing off -- the droid factory in particular, and there was another extended fight on Nar Shaddaa, I think -- but the mod as a whole was definitely worth it.

I had a similar problem with Fallout New Vegas. I just did not give a shit about the main plot.

Same with Alpha Protocol, now I think about it.

To be fair, did you guys actually care about the main plot of KOTOR1? The love interest plotline was a basic rehash of NWN1, hell, I think it was the same voice actress. And then the big bad's plan was to take over some sort of evil factory? The amnesia bit had a nice twist, but that's about all I can solidly remember liking from the main plotline, and other than that I couldn't tell you about any of the main plotline other than that. I recall I had to do the standard bioware thing of going to one of three places that are totally unrelated to one another and doing stuff there.

HK-47 made that game, and the only worthwhile darkside choice was forcing the wookie to kill one of your other companions.

Aribeth and Bastila do not share a voice actress.

It was far better driven. I had to save Bastilla to save myself (though I would argue the KOTOR 2 prologue is actually much better). Then I went on an intergalactic treasure hunt without knowing what was at X. The game constantly gave me feedback on my progress with signs and talk of the war at every location I visit. Then, as the story gets late and the treasure hunt is perhaps losing its allure, the story throws an awesome wrench into the works that allows you to completely redefine who you are.

It sure wasn't perfect, the structure was the lame NWN "go to four places and do shit", but at least I had some compelling end goal and I felt like the story and my companions recognised the progress we were making.

In KOTOR 2, apart from the awesome prologue, it's find these Jedi masters at locations which don't have anything tying them together, with minimal feedback as to your progress, all to battle a Sith presence so in the shadows it won't play any meaningful part of your game, perhaps until the finale.

That was handled so badly. When you get back to the ship he reverts to his standard dialogue tree. What a face-palm moment.

I barely played with HK-47 because the KOTOR games so heavily favour Jedi over anything else.

Maybe it's just the kind of person I am, but I am way more motivated to go on a galactic quest to personally tell off four people who ruined my life than I am to find map coordinates. Especially when the lurking Sith presence had torn me a new one in the prologue, and I was desperately trying to level to catch up with him.

KOTOR II was one of the rare games where it really is all about the journey.

Rare? Aren't all games about the journey? I could probably name less than ten games that have really satisfying endings.

And no, I think Obsidian tend to suck at player motivation. I am not going to care about the Sith because they didn't ruin my life, they ruined the life of some guy who existed before I gained control of my character. Not only that, but you're asked to make dialogue choices on how you feel about that before the game has even told you what happened!

A good motivation is built into the world. I cared in Planescape Torment because it keyed into the game mechanics and the people around me. I cared in Fallout 3 because I was given a chance to see the world before it fell apart, because that falling apart affected me directly, because I could choose not to give a shit if I wanted to, and because I got to experience the transition from caring about the world I came from to the world I now lived in. I cared in Mass Effect because my companions became my galaxy and the loss of the galaxy would mean the destruction of those bonds.

Fallout 3 - WHERE THE WHITE WOMEN POWER ARMOR AT
Mass Effect - WHERE THE BLUE WOMEN NEW PLANETS AT

But seriously. I bonded with the KOTOR II characters in the way it sounds like you bonded with your Mass Effect characters. I'm not gonna criticize or poo-poo you for that, but what I meant about the journey was that my primary motivation was to learn more about the characters and backstory, rather than to advance the plot - which is essentially why I kept playing Fallout and Mass Effect. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but by confusing "all about the journey" with "has a long journey" I think you're missing part of what I'm saying.

Has a long journey? What? I'm saying every game is about the journey because isn't it the minute-to-minute stuff that draws you to a game? Seriously, how many games have good endings? Never mind how many bad games have endings that make up for the badness that came before.

I'd loved to bond with the characters, but they rarely say or do anything. it's why I spend so much time in this genre, it's all about the characters for me.

It's possible I screwed myself by moving my alignment too early, or trigger too many conversations early, and that there's actually a rich depth of NPC content. Except I'm never going to see it.

I did reasonably enjoy Nar-Shaddaa, it's just that nothing has really happened since then apart from me sleep walking through battles and my companions remaining mute.

My problem with the KotOR games and their alignment system is that the evil alignment choices are mostly just so incredibly petty, basically the equivalent of kicking puppies and bullying people to give you their lunch money. That said, KotOR has deliciously evil moments near the end, but you have to put up with an entire game's worth of idiotic dark-side choices to get to that point.

I never fully bought into the KotOR characters. I guess I was more interested in the min/max aspects of KotOR when I played them. Well, okay, I suppose the NPC story arcs aren't that terrible. Certainly they're no worse than the Baldur's Gate NPC stories. Really though, it's the in-the-moment characterization that I remember and not the details about so-and-so's history with the protagonist. There's a reason why we remember Minsc and not what's-her-face mage (... uh, Dynaheir?) even though their NPC stories are entwined. Similarly, KotOR has its superstars like HK-47 and its duds like the Disciple.

I remember the basic plot of KotOR, not so much the plot of KotOR 2. Actually, I think that was one of the main failings of KotOR 2, and the devs admitted as much. Sure, you can play the "amnesia" card and sort of handwave it away as purposely obfuscated. I haven't played it with the Restoration Mod yet, which I suppose might fix things up a bit. Still, it gets sort of old after the initial "why are the Sith trying to kill me" thing wears off.

Quitch - When I think minute-to-minute stuff I think about the fights you're sleepwalking through. When I mean journey, I'm talking about the characterization over time that I think you've been missing :( The other games have different amounts of each. Does that help explain my position?

Well, this is true, but *mostly* true because Dynaheir isn't in BG2, where they really upped the ante on the level of detail in companions, and Minsc is.

Yes, I understand, just not sure I agree with you on its quality in this game.

Quitch - you're not alone in your opinion. I've played through KOTOR II twice now - one without the Darthy Stoney mod when it was released and one with the content mod some years later - and I still don't think the story is that well told or the characters that compelling. I certainly don't think it's a bad game, but I think the story and characters are better in the original KOTOR. I think it's a matter of personal preference and maybe some people really like that Obsidian-method of story telling. Personally, I think Fallout 3 (Bethesda) is also superior to Fallout: New Vegas (Obsidian)

Hmm, I know I've always felt that KOTOR2 had way better characters than KOTOR, but thinking about this I've come to the conclusion that it is mostly because Kreia is just so goddamn awesome that it warps the whole comparison.

Agreed. KOTOR1's characters just felt so bland. Except Jolee, I liked him.

Jolee is totally my favorite as well (of the non droids anyway. T3 is always lovable and HK is obviously a classic.) I like Bastila a lot, but that may have something to do with what Jennifer Hale doing a British accent does to my lizard brain, and I'm always a sucker for her particular romance trope as well.

KOTOR2 has its share of duds as well, though. Bao-Dur may be the single most boring companion in any of these sorts of games.

The phrase after "but thinking about this" was pretty damn relevant to his statement. You're really not agreeing at all. :)

In the original game, HK is an absolute classic of the genre, Jolee is great and I like Bastila. Plus, I like the story a bit more. The second game has its fair share of good and bad characters, but I'm not quite as fond of the story.

Well, I think I probably still give KOTOR2 the edge overall. Mission, Zaalbar, Juhani - none of them are very interesting. And nobody likes Carth.

KOTOR2 does give us some bad ones in Bao-Dur, the Handmaiden, the Disciple, but adds the totally awesome G0-T0, and I also really like Mira. Atton creeps me out, but he's still better than Carth. Hanharr is an interesting take on wookiees, so he adds some value. Visas - eh, I think she's problematic in a lot of ways, so she's a deduction I guess.

The other 3 are shared between games so I don't really count them either way (although KOTOR gets credit for coming up with them first, I think in particular

gets a lot more interesting in the 2nd game.)

Yeah, just went back and realized that I'd completely missed the point. I need to get some sleep.

KOTOR did have some fucking boring companions.