08.06.07
OMBug!
Great Scott! Two posts in a day! Well if you’d call that last thing a “post”.
This is about KOTOR2. I am just about the last person on the Internet to play this game, so none of what I’m going to write will surprise you. Especially not this first part:
Woah Nelly is that game messed up. I almost wrote fubar, but hopefully it isn’t. One of the reasons I’ve been loathe to write this post is because my good friend Ruben has been harrassing me about my impatience ever since I announced my intent to start the game. I was gonna wait until Gizka (back there) finished their work to restore the game to coherence, but I just couldn’t wait any longer. I’ve had almost everything about the game spoiled already, and now I just want to play more KOTOR, dammit. But maybe… maybe Ruben was right. Maybe it would have been worth waiting for Gizka.
It seems like a really rushed game. Maybe I’m just noticing because I’ve already heard so much about how rushed it was, but it just doesn’t seem done. The areas are a little too empty, the quests a little too straight-forward, and the worlds are just a tad less detailed than I’d expect. Most of all, there are some really bad design choices that undoubtedly (in fact sometimes certainly) stem from cut material.
The worst one was when the game took the time to ask me about the shape and colour of my character’s old light saber, had another character flaunt the saber in front of me, and then denied me the opportunity to regain it. Apparently there was supposed to be a way to get that saber back, but it was cut due to time restraints. Which makes me mad, really really mad. That, btw, was the same level in which I managed to budge up the game completely in the manner illustrated to the right of this paragraph. All I did was to pick the wrong dialogue node, apparently. I played through that entire level, all the while looking like one big question mark, before starting over and getting better results by picking something else to say.
However, I’ll keep playing. Because I do have a large tolerance for bugs, thanks to TNM, and because the dialogue is some of the deepest, most engaging writing I’ve ever encountered in a game. Th debate with Atris in particular was rousing!
Boserup said,
August 11, 2007 at 10:56
Uhm - cheat node?
When i played the game i actually found it really good. I didn´t fint it as immersive as KOTOR 1, but still i found it really good.
But as always its pretty easy to figure out the plot and things like that in advance….games just aren´t as good as movies to do plot twists….
Jonas said,
August 11, 2007 at 12:38
Well I think that’s at least partially because you don’t control camera movement and framing during the game, so you can’t really show the gun in the first scene of act one and then fire it in the first scene of act three, unless you use a cutscene, but that’s lame. The best you can do is give it a prominent position on the wall and hope the player will at least subconsciously notice it.
That means if you want to do foreshadowing that the player will definitely pick up on, it’s hard not to make it just a tad too obvious. That said, you are probably the only person I know who saw the KOTOR plot twist coming (it was you who told me that, right?) Everybody else were astounded when it hit them.
Deus Ex is an example of a game that pulls some really good foreshadowing in the intro, but again - that’s a cutscene.
Smike said,
August 12, 2007 at 02:14
JONAS!! I’M SO HAPPY I’M BLEEDING OUT MY EARS!!
* claps for Teh Jonas *
Of course, for calling cutscenes lame, I must now kill you.
Jonas said,
August 12, 2007 at 04:06
For your information I had heard of that rule before you told me of it. I had no idea what it was called though - and I still don’t! And it’s too late to go digging through your mails looking for the name.
Also, I didn’t call cutscenes lame. I think it’s lame if they are used to tell the story because you can’t tell it in-game. That’s lame. I think a good cutscene between missions can be a great reward. Or they can be used as in KOTOR to show a transition between areas.
However, I respect Valve tremendously for making the story of their game as captivating as they have without ever pulling you out of the game itself or freezing your actions as in Oblivion. Half-Life 2 probably stands as the purest example of how to tell a story only using the game, and that’s brilliant.
It still pisses me off that you can’t shoot your allies. But that’s probably just me, and I have been known to do outright stupidly complicated things to let the game continue if the player kills plot-relevant characters.
Smike said,
August 12, 2007 at 14:32
O RLY? Chekhov? Anton Chekhov? Seminal playwright, FFS? It was HIS rule. You should know him because he built the foundation for much of the kind of narrative that took films almost SEVENTY YEARS to figure out, and which games directly draw on today.
Jonas said,
August 12, 2007 at 14:37
Yes.
Smike said,
August 12, 2007 at 15:16
No.
Jonas said,
August 12, 2007 at 20:33
But… :S
Smike said,
August 12, 2007 at 23:55
Yes.
fox said,
August 13, 2007 at 23:39
I felt KOTOR2 was a bit flat and boring compared to the first one. I played through it without anything really remarkable and I am not very interested in another sequel anymore. Looked like the milking of the mighty SW cashcow to me.
Jonas said,
August 13, 2007 at 23:58
So far I’d say Telos and Korriban were both pretty disappointing, and Pegasus was also a little on the boring side. Dxun/Onderon and Nar Shaddaa seemed far more alive and vibrant, however, and it seems to me they had time to finish those two planets but ran out of time to polish the other ones. That’s how much I’ve played so far (still working on rescuing that really hot bounty huntress at Nar Shaddaa), so no spoilers please
As I’ve mentioned before, the writing in KOTOR2 makes the game worth playing for me, it’s very Chris Avellone in style and ideology (I love the way he’s tried to sabotage the bipolar ideological spectrum of Star Wars at every turn) and there are some real gems in there (like that brilliantly unusual Bith scientist side mission on Nar Shaddaa). Most importantly, I loved the way they tied your character into the background fiction and managed to break with the typical clueless RPG protagonist (only questions - so MANY questions - but in KOTOR2 your character provides many answers as well).
In terms of crafting a world you can believe in, however, KOTOR2 has failed terribly compared to the first game. I’m still hoping for a third installment. I think if Bioware or Obsidian got to do a KOTOR3 and actually got enough time to do it in, it could be as good as the first game.
Jonas said,
August 14, 2007 at 00:00
But then on the other hand, Bioware has Mass Effect coming out soon, so why even bother with another KOTOR game?