Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II

Jolee was the best and I loved his approach to the Force. One of the only sensible Jedi out there.

You'd be surprised, actually. Carth has quite the estrogen brigade.

Note: Above links are the result of a quick googling and probably neither representative nor exhaustive. Nor would I advise you to follow them - I *do* like Carth (he's one of the reasons I'm among the David Gaider fanbase), and even I feel unclean after some of what I read.

eta: Also, at a few of them might be work-unsafe, if you consider text such.

I hated both Carth and Atton =) They feel like they're both a template token replacement for the real thing, Han Solo. They both just come across a lot less confident, and a lot more whiney.

Carth is in a whole different league of whiny to Atton.

I'd rather whiny Carth than fucking border-line serial killer Atton. I killed her because I loved her indeed. D:

Yeah Atton isn't really Han-like other than in the most superficial of ways. He's freaky as shit otherwise.

I played KOTOR II as a bad guy. I thought, for the first time, I'd play a game as an evil character all the way through. Jedi Knight Chris Daniels, giving into the dark side, because there was a head that made him look like a particularly pointy-headed independent wrestler working an Evil Priest gimmick. So I partied with Mandalore and tried to push Atton down steps and stocked up on droids and then wondered why I had so many droids since tipped them over didn't really feel evil, just kinda dickish. Kreia yelled at me, but she yelled at me a lot. Handmaiden I didn't really get, so we didn't hang out much. Visas seemed all right, but again, I knew nothing about her. Basically, I wished Jolee Bindo was around.

And then there was Atton. I called him Carth for most of the game because he was Carth doing Carth things. And then I got to talk to people and influence them to do things, like be evil like me. I thought I'd make Carth Evil Carth, because that would be funny.

Up until this point I was doing pretty good. A few times the game made me feel super skeezy, but I rolled with it. I don't remember the specifics. But I remember talking to Carth, about his past, about the Jedi, about the girl, about what he did, and I saw those options, and I saw the one that would have reinforced it, that would have taken that tiny bit of doubt and destroyed it, that would have told him yes, you were correct, she deserved to die, that you did nothing wrong, and I said NOPE.

COME TO THE LIGHT, BROTHER
WE'LL GO TOGETHER

And that was the end of my dark side run.

I saw him as more of a deconstruction of the Han Solo rogue with a heart of gold archetype, myself. I sort of think that's what Bioware were trying to do with Carth as well but it...didn't work. Too whiny and not charming enough.

As for Atton...he and I have a history together. I was about 14 when I played KOTOR 2 for the first time and I really liked Atton. I mean, I liked him from when I first saw him in the Peragus level. He was funny, he actually seemed like he could be a buddy for my PC (since Kreia was too focused on being cryptic and unhelpful), and the whole unwavering loyalty thing didn't hurt. So yeah, I grew to really care about Atton. Then he revealed his backstory and, well, yeah. It was quite shocking to 14-year-old me. I had to put the game down and go do something else for a bit. But then I came back and did the conversation again and figured that the funny, sarcastic, loyal Atton that I'd adventured with for past dozen or so hours mattered more than whatever his backstory was. He was on probation, though. If he did anything creepy then he'd get the boot. But he didn't. I made him a Jedi, he guarded my Exile's back, and he was the same old Atton he'd always been.

tl;dr I guess is that I liked Atton a lot, notwithstanding the creepy backstory because he endeared himself to me over the course of the game. He's no Han Solo, that's for sure, but I liked him anyways.

Holy shit, fuck this (I presume) final fight. Oh, I see you've been massing force powers? +9 wisdom and +11 charisma? Nice. Well let's just put values on the boss so high that your powers are worthless.

Ah, you beat that through careful use of shields and force immunity did you? Well let's give the boss full health again and more weapons and HAHAHAHAAHAHAHHAHA FUCK YOU.

I'm going to give this another shot tomorrow and maybe just crank it down to easy. Because seriously. Fuck you KOTOR2.

Yeah the only time that a KOTOR2 run didn't end in game-ruining bugs for me was the time time that I got stuck on the second stage of the boss fight and gave up.

The worst thing about KoTOR 2 is that Bao-Dur wasn't romancable.

In my opinion, the most amusing way to play the game is to always have HK and Canderous in your party and always make light side choices out of pure malice. Their complaints are endlessly entertaining.

If we're talking about books... the novel Revan basicaly took a crap all over the KOTOR 2 story line

There WAS a female called "Exile", but other then that I was shocked at just how far they diverged from Obsidian's story.

Not sure if the author just never played the game (or saw anything about the plot) or if it was a deliberate descision on Bioware's part.

Yeah, the annoying thing is that if you pick the canonically female protagonist in-game, you get saddled with the Disciple instead of Handmaiden. Bleah.

Yeah, not that Handmaiden is any great shakes as a character, but Disciple manages to be useless, boring, and annoying all at the same time.

The author is Drew Karpyshyn, who was the lead writer on KOTOR. It's fairly understandable that his focus was more on the stuff that was "his" to begin with.

In any case, the book really is terrible, for a lot of reasons. The skill set for good game writing is apparently quite different than that for writing a novel.

Hah, I just always considered it as: That game writing quality is really terrible*, and it shows when they try to write actual novels/screenplays. I think it's part of the reason that game movies tend to really suck, as suddenly all the gameplay is stripped away, and your forced to actually see the horrible plots and characters.

*There are probably some exceptions out there, and I never did get around to any of the ME's or DA beyond 1, but I thought ME1's writing was awful drek that could've spawned from any Stars Wars:EU author.

Urgh. I prefer to imagine that everything after KOTOR2 just doesn't exist.

Hm, well, I definitely don't agree that the writing on most of those games is generally bad. They're not all bad novelists, too; Gaider's Dragon Age books are readable enough - not great literature, but they at least manage to keep the same POV through an entire paragraph, which is occasionally a problem in Revan and Karpyshyn's ME books. :P

Okay, bad may be too strong of a word, but the upper end of the quality scale is definitely not even in the league as novels. And when I think of novels, I'm not talking about the mostly just okay writing in the basic fantasy section of the bookstore, but the really friggin' good stuff. I've never seen game writing get even close to the quality of Frank Herbert's Dune, for example, it instead tends to skew more towards the Kevin J. Anderson spectrum, even at it's best.

I tend to agree. One of the things game writing has going for it is that there are a bunch of really good voice actors who can elevate the material. Dawn of War II is my favorite example of this: the writing is usually poor to middling (there are some nicely written one-liners in the unit barks, but each unit has like fifteen minutes of voicework. If you throw that many darts, you'd better land at least some of them), but the actors take that material and make it sing. Provided you've any affection for 40k, at least.

The best example of what happens when the acting isn't there is Guild Wars 2. The writing itself isn't that much worse than what you might see in the TOR planet quests, say, but the voice director was totally incompetent and so the acting is uniformly awful. So the story--which would otherwise be inoffensive by game standards--becomes an excruciating slog.

Like for the spoiler text. Hahahaha.

No, it's that they're completely different mediums requiring completely different approaches. Being good at one does not make you good at the other, and visa versa. It's why every game that has made a big deal about the name they brought on to handle the writing has a shitty story, because you don't write game material the same way you write a book. Or a film.

Yes and no. Bad writing is bad writing. "An Ancient evil awakens." That's stupid whether it was in a film or in a book.

On the other hand crafting a story such that it involves the player is a skill, and is different from writing a book or film, which authors and screenwriters do often forget. I've had to deal with that back on the Sopranos game, where they brought in a screenwriter, but he wasn't a gamer, or even really played videogames much at all. There was lots of back and forth and revisions to make his scenes workable.

But I suppose I am arguing semantics, I could be breaking it up to, "Most plots in games suck, most of the actual writing and vocabulary in games suck, etc"

Ehh, I think you (or maybe all of us) are conflating too many things into one general 'writing' heading. Plotting is only one element, there's writing good dialogue, there's characterization, etc., and all of those are somewhat different skillsets but can all falll under the 'story' or 'writing' heading. The things that novels add that game writers most often seem to fall down on are how they pace dialogue when they only have text to work with, and especially descriptions of places, things, and events. That's something that game writing doesn't really prepare them for and it often shows. When you are giving instructions to an artist or an animator to realize a scene you don't get any practice in actually setting a scene in words and that's definitely Karpyshyn's biggest problem.

Hmm now that you mention it... that sounds similar to how I beat it... (I remember lots of Force Speed and running around at least)

And now that makes me wonder if the devs from KOTOR2 weren't more involved with SWTOR then I thought....
I find when soloing a lot of the Class story and World Arc end boss types, I end up DOTing then running around like a chiken with it's head cut off trying to break LOS from them.
Not verry "Heroic feeling".... but gets the job done.

KOTOR2 was Obsidian, not Bioware, so nope.

Also, if you find that you frequently have to kite the story bosses in TOR then you're almost certainly doing something very, very wrong.

The Agent Act I boss was probably that obnoxious before it was nerfed, but I'm having a hard time thinking of anything else on that level.

Several of the JK bosses were pretty obnoxious at release, in particular the guy right after Coruscant, the end of act 1, and ESPECIALLY the very, very last fight.

The end fight on Tattooine as a smuggler blew goats too.

Ah yeah, I'd forgotten that the JK bosses were legendarily difficult. That's not been the case for ages though, correct? Didn't have trouble with the Tat boss on my smugger, but [it] may have been nerfed by that point.

Even today?

That holds equally true for books, it's just that in books the good ones are usually good in those areas. Because this is often not the focus of a game your exposure to good games does not necessarily equate to good plots, writing, etc.

Actually, in books it may just be equally true. World's best selling author James Patterson anyone?

I don't know - while I'm playing my 2nd JK now, I'm doing it in a group of 4 and even when I'm solo I'm packing close to 300 bonus presence so my ability to judge is totally shot.

Oh man, that brings back bad memories. I must have wiped to that fight for about two hours. Then I just asked someone in /g if they could help and we beat it together on the next attempt. Sometimes it pays to have friends.

Also, I'm leveling up a JK now and haven't had any problems with any bosses so far (I'm level 29 at Alderaan atm). There have been a few close calls where I would have been dead if not for use of my Heroic Moment ability, but nothing I couldn't handle playing solo.

Yeah, same, it was the only time I HAD to bring in outside help. I even killed pre-nerf IA act 1 dude by myself (it took me FOREVER, but I did it). They have since nerfed the shit out of it, though, so that's good.


EDIT: And I don't even remember what the end fight for Voss WAS for the Imperials, so it must've gotten nerfed before I got to it.