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Knights of the Old Republic 2 Ships
The sequel to the hit console/PC game Knights of the Old Republic shipped to retailers on Tuesday. KOTOR II: The Sith Lords has been surrounded by trepidation as original developer Bioware was replaced by relative newcomer, Obsidian Entertainment. Gamespot has a review available. From the review: "you might have a much tougher time settling into The Sith Lords, since chances are you'll feel like you've played this game before, only you'll swear it looked better the first time. But, on the other hand, so what? It's just as important to note that no other game since Knights of the Old Republic has managed to deliver this excellent style of role-playing. If you're a Knights of the Old Republic fan, then you should find a certain satisfaction in knowing almost exactly what you're in for going into The Sith Lords."
I agree with everything you said, except for the quality of the good/evil system. If I had one complaint against KoTR it was that they did a horrible job on the dark side. Basically, I saw KoTR has always presenting three options. Good, cautiously pragmatic, stupidly evil. If in KoTR you ran across an orphanage while on the run from the law, you would have three options.
Good: Hide in the orphanage and try and help them in their plight to raise money. Cautiously pragmatic: Hide in the orphanage, but lay low and don't help them.
Stupidly Evil: Burn the orphanage to the ground and kill every little boy and girl that comes out, and follow this up by feasting on their bones. Then arrange the bones to so that ships passing over head can see "P0wn3d by S1T|-|".
My problem was that they never made the 'moral' decision hard. If you played the entire game simply being as good as possible, you end up with the most money, the most experience, and never suffer a negative consequence. If you play the game 'evil', then you need to make uncountable stupid mistakes and spend the game struggling forward.
What I would have liked to of seen are tough moral choices with consequences that do not always favor doing the 'right' thing. It would be nice if you could 'fall into' the dark side without sitting there and consciously picking the most evil thing you could do each time you hit a dialogue tree.
Does anyone know if the PC release will be optimized for all graphics cards, unlike the original?
I remember playing the original, through on my old Ge3 machine, and it looked fantastic. Recently I played it through again on my newer radeon 9800 machine, and it looked a lot poorer (esp when I compared screenshots).
Nice effects such as glows,and even specularity/gloss effects looked a lot poorer on the radeon or were totally absent.
I think this was down to the original game using Nvidia specific GL extensions, imo the game looks rather bland on ATI card, and it would be nice if they used some more generic extensions, or at least optimized it equally for ATI.