KOTOR II Pushed To Retail Too Soon?

Gamespy has a Resident Cynic column, detailing his opinion that Knights of the Old Republic II was released prematurely. He has some good points to make, and interesting "could have been" details to share. From the article: "I'm not going to spoil the ending for you, nor even dwell too much further on what exactly the issue is, but believe me, it's there. I'm not talking about leaving the story open-ended in order to facilitate sequels. That's fine and I can thoroughly understand it. The problem is that they waste one of the creepiest bad guys in recent history, then promptly send your character off on a series of solo missions, and actually forget to even explain what's happening to the sidekicks you've spent so much time training and equipping."

Comments

I think you are confused

[MyLongNickName]

The problem is that they waste one of the creepiest bad guys in recent history, then promptly send your character off on a series of solo missions, and actually forget to even explain what's happening to the sidekicks you've spent so much time training and equipping."

Obviously, this guy is talking about my job, not some silly game.

Phew!

[grub]

Thanks! Based on that review I've stopped my torrent download.

Re:Phew!

[TrippTDF]

-and now the 15 other people you were sharing with have slightly slower downloads :)

Sounds like Star Wars...

[EnronHaliburton2004]

they waste one of the creepiest bad guys in recent history, then promptly send your character off on a series of solo missions, and actually forget to even explain what's happening to the sidekicks you've spent so much time training and equipping."

Sounds like a true "Star Wars" product... they had to stay true to the Genre!

But I bet there were alot of cool special effects, and a cute robot or two.

Ati video cards

[phoenix.bam!]

My roommates bought the game, crashes and freezes on his ati card. Forums are saying it is happening quite a bit on ati cards. Seems like the developers didn't take into account half the video card market.

Re:Ati video cards

[The Other White Boy]

ive been having pretty massive issues on my new setup, and its an nvidia card.

the most irritating being that everytime it plays an ingame cinematic it changes to 640x480x60hz from the 1600x1200x75hz i'm playing at, which isnt so irritating (except everything on my second monitor gets shifted). the problem is that when it returns to the game engine after the movie its locked at about 5fps. i have to go into graphics settings and change something so it 'resets' and i get my full 75fps back.

if that bug would be fixed i could almost overlook the fact that conversations seem to break occasionally, people i have high influence with occasionally start hating me for no reason (mainly the handmaiden), and party members start referencing things ive never done.

almost =/

Re:Ati video cards

[gl4ss]

ok, but even if it was totally bug free..

it would still feel like a rushed, hacked on sequel with a WEAK ending.

seriously, when you get to the cool looking dark jedi.. just stop playing there and don't continue to the ending planet, and pretend that the endgame was worth it.

A massive letdown - it's unfinished

[diseasesofseamen]

I just finished it the other night. Without a doubt, the ending was vastly simplified at some point. It's ruined for me, almost completely. It's not what was advertised, certainly. All the complex interactions between characters, the careful building up of influence, the moral issues raised - it is all simply frittered away. It's one of the worst endings to any RPG I've ever seen, and I've played a ton. This regrettable state of affairs does lend heavily to one of three conclusions:

1) there was a major disagreement among the creators in the coding or script writing that led to a bad compromise with the ending;

2) time constraints forced a rush job that cut out anything deeply non-essential to shipping;

3) they just couldn't deliver on the ambitious nature of the plot.

It might have been all three. I certainly don't want to think the last, but this was a new studio doing the sequel. They certainly delivered a great game right up to the 'end sequence', then dropped the ball in a way that KOTOR certainly did not.

Spoilers to follow...

In the first KOTOR, the endings left the state of the party more or less known, as most of their tales were resolved before the final battle.

But here, save for perhaps Visas, none of the side characters' stories are resolved. (I played a light-side Jedi, BTW). Why bother putting HK-47 back together, or awakening the Force in anyone? No one save Kreia plays a significant role in the endgame, and I can't even sway her fate. It just turned into a Sith kill-fest and completely lost the questy, thoughtful nature that had been developed for 20+ hours of play.

And in the end, the Ebon Hawk just soars off. To where? Why? Who's at the controls? Did anyone survive the crash? My entire party just evaporated save for Mira and that annoying floating droid.

Kriea's whole plan is the height of Bizarro logic; she makes Malak in the first game look alarmingly sane. Her buddies Sion and Whatsits-with-the-mask were anticlimatic pushovers, also; they folded too easily and served no greater purpose than speed bumps.

When Kriea says, 'there is no great revelation' in the end, I knew I'd been screwed. Because there needed to be one. I expected some classic Star Wars drama - "I'm Balista/Revan/someone-other-than-an-insane-preachy -witch, looking for redemption by destroying everything, starting with you." and I didn't get it.

This was not the kind of story that needed a Patrick O'Brian-style adrupt ending. It needed an epilogue at the very least, beyond Kriea's musings before the main character is set off into the void.

Re:A massive letdown - it's unfinished

[savagexp]

The Dark-Side ain't any better, my friend.

***SPOILERS***

Something for anybody to try: Before you go into your final battle with Kriea, Save your game (you've probably done this anyway, since you've just defeated Sion and you're expecting some great kick-assery to be coming). Before/during/after your battle with Kriea, there will be obvious light/dark dialogue choices. Stick with one or the other and you'll be able to see either light or dark ending.

The build-up is pointless. The influence gained is pointless. The whole freegin' game up to the final "battle" is pointless! When you can literally select your good guy/bad guy ending just with two dialogue choices at the end, you know there's a problem.

Oh, and here's the only real difference between light/dark: Dark Side, you don't find out SHIT about the sidekicks. You just assume they died because the Ebon Hawk fell into oblivion at some point. Then, the final shot has the camera panning away from the planet, there's just no Ebon Hawk flying in it.

Re:A massive letdown - it's unfinished

[th3walrus]

From what I understand there were differences depending on how you played through the game.

I played Dark Side Sith Lord class and got a really lame ending. After I finished the last battle it just sorta zoomed out into space and cut to game over. No Ebon Hawk flying away even. I believed it had crashed down into the depths of the planet killing all the side characters. The cut scene before the endgame portion made it seem that way.

My wife, on the other hand, played through Light Side Jedi Knight and apparantly Kreia explained the fate of all the side characters to her. Not sure her final ending cutscene was any better than mine, but at least she got told what happened. I just had to assume...

And at the end of the game I still had no idea what the story was about. What Scion and mask dude had anything to do with besides being bad guys for you to beat? I just didn't get it. I still don't.

Re:A massive letdown - it's unfinished

[taion]

If you dig around on the forums, you'll see signs of the original ending, which was very PS:T-y. Apparently it was even in some preview builds, which was what was referenced when the previewers talked about influence mattering and absolutely heartrending endings. The stuff was all written, too. No clue why it didn't make it in --- maybe LucasArts decided that having an ending that actually tugged on anybody's emotional strings would've been too much?

The stuff is here, but you'll need to go to the second page to see that formatted in a way that's really readable. If you dig around in the proper directories, you can actually find the freaking recorded dialogue for those scenes. It really rather annoys me that they lobotomised what would've been a spectacularly touching ending.

Re:A massive letdown - it's unfinished

[Rallion]

More spoilers here

I can't agree more. Some things to add, as a fellow light-sider.

There MUST have been more planned to the Mira sidestory. I mean, come on, she just meets Hanharr again, kills him, and that's the end of it? And it still never made any sense as to why Kreia saved him in the first place, really.

NONE of the characters side-stories were fleshed out as well as it seems they were supposed to be, HK-47 especially. Mandalore, and the mechanic guy, Atton...MAYBE they're good enough. But not really even them. Even the astromech droid could have used a little more plot behind him -- they do hint at more.

As for wasting the creepiest villian I've seen lately...uh...yeah. Seriously. None of that made ANY sense to me. They rushed it so that it didn't even seem IMPORTANT that you were killing him, because the game was never clear on how evil he was. The whole end of the game was just very confusing, with big gaps in it. I compare that to the first game, where you know pretty damn well what Malak's up to by the end of the game, everything is very well explained, and so you have some sense of purpose.

The game had HUGE potential. The improvements over the first one in gameplay were nice, really very nice, if minor. But the sorry state the game released in threw it all away.

Bugs? We've got bugs!

[Ahnteis]

Bugs I've found:

1) Incredibly bad pathfinding. Even the character you control sometimes has trouble walking over to that container 3 feet away to open it.

2) Impossible quests. Sometimes your actions will render a quest impossible to finish. Not such a problem except they will haunt your quest journal for the rest of the game.

3) Buggy quests. DO NOT FIGHT THE HANDMAIDENS. This scripted arena-style challenge seems to work fine. However, if you do it, the next level will not load correctly and you'll be stuck staring at a black screen. Hooray!

4) Rushed scripting. (First game had similar problems.) I've almost given up on using any sort of stealth in the game because you will be sneaking along in solo mode (rest of your party hiding behind a rock) and suddenly you'll hit a script spot. Magically, all enemies can suddenly see you (and converse with you) AND the rest of your party will be conveniently teleported (isn't that a Star TREK thing?) to your location. Hooray! WHY don't they check to see if the NPCs can see you?!

5) Low FPS in areas. I have an AMD 2700+, 1.5GB RAM, and a geforce 6600GT. There are STILL certain areas where the framerate just gives up and dies. (It's not just *my* computer if that's what you're thinking.)

I'm not to the point the article mentions where storyline is thrown out the window yet. So far the story is fairly compelling although there are a few items they seem to hint at and then abandon.

So glad

[TheAdventurer]

I am so glad this came up.

I was an enormous fan of KOTOR I. I beat it multiple times and loved everything about it.

KOTOR II is one of the most pointless, frustrating, and boring games I've ever played.

It suffers from multiple bugs. (I had to restart my game at one point because of a fatal crash... on the xbox). It has horrible slowdowns and stutters during battles. The load times are on average 4-5 seconds longer than KOTOR I load times. (In computer time, 5 seconds is a LONG time.)

And the story was a total lump of bullshit. It barely made sense, it never inspired me to complete the game (even though I did, out of pure frustrated desire to see something coherent happen), and the characters were useless and paper thin.

Shame on Obsidian for taking such a royal shit on this game, and what could have been an enduring franchise.

God damn that game was disappointing.

Re:So glad

[FortranDragon]

Don't blame Obsidian, blame LucasArts. Many of the promo videos stated that the game for both XBox and PC would be out in February. LucasArts was the one that moved the XBbox release date up by a couple of months. When a chunk of your schedule is ripped away from you something has to give. :-(

My feelings

[mfterman]

KOTOR II had a lot of stuff that should have been in KOTOR I. For example, the upgrade system was much improved, as well as being able to have two weapon sets to switch between instantly and in some cases, automatically.

I also liked the concept that your Light/Dark choices would have an impact on who you got for a companion, and to a lesser extent your gender would as well. If anything, I thought that they didn't go far enough with this angle.

They were also doing an amazing job, up until the Jedi Enclave on Dantooine of building up an incredible sense of atmosphere and tension. There were all sorts of hidden angles going on there between all of the characters. Even nice little T3-M4 was prone to even creepy behavior at various points.

And it all fell apart after that. One of the reasons I'm so terribly disappointed with the ending of KOTOR II is that they had such a powerful setup and they fell short of that. It could have been a truly mind blowing game and in the end they weren't able to sustain it.

Re:i thought the first one was lame...

[Xner]

That is not oldschool, that is just plain ignorant.

Historically, the very first batch of pen-and-paper contained a good section of fantasy representation. All from most likely well before you were even born. Gamma World, RIFTS, the original star wars RPG, all jewels from teh golden age of roleplaying. And by roleplaying i mean rollplaying.

Re:I've heard it was ex Black Isle people

[Anonymous Coward]

Ex Black Isle?

Could people finally stop to put nonsensical praise on everyone who happend to live in the same building as the few people that did Fallout?

Frankly, even Black Isle produced more shit than good titles and had been living of BioWare's infinity engine for years. Everything remotely successful (and no, PS:T was not commercially successful) after Fallout was created either by BioWare (Baldur's Gate) or by taking BioWare's Engine and squeezing it for cash (Icewind Dale)

Troika is a good example of "Ex Black Isle". Three ambitious PC games, bug infested and commercially not successful and people still blame the publishers for their demise, even if, miraculously, a lot of developers can work just fine with these publishers.

Stop it!

Taking a butcher knife to the ending of an RPG is

[Kaorimoch]

..an absolutely unforgiveable sin.

Do it to a FPS and no one will notice though :)

Anyway, I'm still trying to play it despite having to reboot my computer every 5-35 minutes.

By the way, did you read the bottom of the readme.txt?

"Intermittent Crashes

The game may freeze or crash to a blank screen if you play in one level for extended periods of time. This was typically seen when playing the game between thirty and forty minutes without transitioning to a new level or movie. We recommend that you save the game often to avoid losing progress if you encounter this issue."

Is this supposed to be a game ready for retail?