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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."
But the plot twist in KoTR made my jaw drop. I had not been so wrapped up in a plot in a game for ages. I loved the combat system and the good/evil path in it.
Here's crossing my fingers the plot is as good this time around, too bad my wife is impervious to the old Jedi mind trick when it comes to liberating the $50 bucks for a game.
FYI, the PC release is supposedly in February.
If you felt that way, I wouldn't try this game, it says that it is almost exactly the same game. Bioware has a new game they are working on right now, you may have heard of it, called Jade Empire. They are calling it a Action RPG, bioware just came and gave a presentation at my school, we got to see all the new demos, it looks just incredible, you actually get to fight people instead of choosing moves to do.
Obsidian is not a "relative newcomer." They've been around for over 6 years. Ok, so they changed their name, but by and large Obsidian consists of Black Isle refugees from Interplay. They've been making games nearly as long as Bioware, and have always had a very fruitful relationship with them. Bioware starts a franchise and engine, and Black Isle/Obsidian come along and do more of the same quality. I have no doubt KOTOR II will be the same way. I love how the reviews of KOTOR II keep referring to the "unproven" Obsidian. These guys made Planescape. Need I say any more?
It's basically Kotor I with another "I" in the title.
I'm on the first planet now (the third "stage") and it's a nearly reskinned duplicate of the first planet in the original.
My party consists of the T3 droid from the first one, some guy who thinks he's Han Solo, and my mentor.
Who is a bitch. I hate her. While the rest of us are all headed light side, she's on her way into the red because everytime I talk to her I have to pick the "STFU, bitch" conversation option. Because I really want her to.
If I find out the Dark Siders can kill her at any point, I'm switching.
The HK droid from the priginal is sitting disabled on my Ebon Hawk. Also, my force powers and memory are gone (again)!
Aside from all these complaints (and the fact that the framerate is poor, with noticable slowdowns in large areas), it's still an awesome game. Pure Star Wars.
Go buy it.
Saying that is kind of general. Not so good as in on par to KOTOR, or a little worse, or alot worse? Some people feel that graphics is everything, but nothing is worse than a pretty game with nothing too it. As for it being similar, it is a sequal, so many will expect the same controlls and what not.
Everything is a matter of taste. Maybe RPGs are not for you? I loved KOTR, and I like RPGs in general. But I am not a fan of FPS. I did not buy Doom 3, but I might pick it up when it is $5 in the bargain bin. Everybody has different tastes.
;)
The problem (from your perspective, I would imagine) is that many RPGs tend to have a strange real-time/turn-based hybrid combat system. In a FPS, you hit the mouse and a shot goes ringing out immediately. In many RPGs (including this one) you give a command, and it is placed in a queue. The combat really is turn-based, but each character is taking their turn at the same time, which gives the illusion of real-time combat. Once your character has had his "swing" for the turn, they just stand around and do nothing while other higher-level characters get their bonus attacks. Being an old dog (Vic 20 anybody?) I am used to turn-based systems. So, for me, falling into a hybrid system like this was easy. Youngsters raised on Doom and Quake, on the other hand, might have a hard time getting used to this.
For what it's worth, this is the best KOTOR is the best RPG that I have ever played since Fallout and Fallout 2. The Fallout series is definatley turn-based, but given the limitations of hardware at the time, I think that they made as close to a perfect RPG as has ever been made (except for some strange bugs in FO2). So, since KOTOR is pretty much as good as it gets as far as RPGs go (at least for Star Wars fans), then RPGs probably are not your cup of tea. But that's OK. Not everybody has the same good taste that I do
"-1 Troll" is the apparently the same as "-1 I disagree with you."
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.
Games are very expensive to develop. Basically you got the following areas to cover.
Kotor seems to have basically used the same engine and re-used a lot of the artwork. Only the story has changed. Considering typical development time of Kotor 1 and Kotor 2 it seems that it has saved them a huge amount of time == money.
I have been thinking that this must ultimately be the way for the game industry to get better. Hollywood has long since stopped making custom sets for each movie. During the golden age they had a few stock sets wich were slightly remoddelled or just short from different angles between different movies. A lot of the b&w westerns have exactly the same street.
Say that sometime in the future it becomes possible to make big enough levels so that you do have a realistic city (and not just 1 short street). You could then make a series of episodes all set in the same city but following different stories. In the first episode the barber beneath your apartment would just be empty but another episode wich needs it adds the graphics but reuses the ones from your apartment. It would reduce the cost for each episode and each episode could be produced much faster.
At the moment the game industry is reinventing the camera and sound equipment and the basic tech of set building for each and every game. It usually gives us huge improvements but it also takes 2-3 years between games wich have to recoup all their investments in one sale. Expansion packs are sometimes a way to get some extra money but expansion packs are rare on non-hd game systems for obvious reasons.
Would there be a market for shorter games costing less wich you can buy new chapters/stories for?
The Sims 1 sold for years with the same engine. Half-Life mods have a following long after the engine had been surpassed. And these are PC games where the hardware gets better a lot faster and more often then on consoles. Yet kotor 2 for the x-box (a really crap piece of hardware by PC standards) gets slagged for not improving the visuals.
Is the reviewer just whining or is the industry doomed to have to rebuild the engine for each story?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.