Knights of the Old Republic I, II, and Perhaps Beyond

KOTOR is one of my favorite games of all time but KOTOR II really killed all interest in the series for me. It was so obviously rushed. To me, that game is LucasArts answer to the prequels: just rush out a sequel for bank and fuck the quality. The game throws up a loading screen every time you turn a corner in the freaking game and the entire finale is basically excised. Some of the character missions just abruptly end with zero resolution and even the final cutscene is almost all dialogue and even that is paired with an incomplete cutscene sequence. It's a horrible, horrible sequel to a great game.

Ah, I love KOTOR II for all its flaws, but what character missions are you refering too?

I enjoyed the last act of the game, you could tell that Obsidian put there heart in it, even though they only had eight months to complete the game while BioWare had three years to do the first. I will admit though that the last fight and cut scene was a total cop-out. Really though, I felt the story was enticing, especially coming full circle on Malachor V in the end.

I'm referring to every single character mission outside of the main character's on Malachor V. The robot's mission ends at what is clearly the halfway mark, As does the tech guys mission...and every single other mission for the people left in your party. They just raped the goodwill the audience had for the series with this sequel. It was like my goodwill for the series was a scantily clad Monica Bellucci entering a tunnel and LucasArts was a French criminal known only as "The Tapeworm." Or the former was my childhood and latter was George Lucas siting in a windowless van with a box of candy, a teddy bear, an ether soaked rag, and a chubby.

If you read up on the excised content in KOTOR 2, the ending was cut to the bone, and what they had planned was actually a great story, significantly better than the more straightforward first. It makes the final product all the more frustrating. Still, I'll be first in line for KOTOR 3, although I'd prefer a straight one-player experience to a MMORPG.

Oh man, I forgot all about that. At least Mira has a small skirmish with the Wookiee. But yah, thats a good point.

I think my favorite moment in the game is when you visit the rebuilt Jedi Enclave playing Light Side, and the last of the Jedi show their true colors.

Personally, I loved the downbeat feel of the storyline and ending. It was the first time a Star Wars story actually seemed to be about war.

Totally, with the Jedi almost entirely gone, the game's universe felt dark and empty. Hell, the Republic seemed to be a shadow of its former self.

I remember all the digging people did in order to find out about the original ending in KOTOR 2. Keeping it instead of the the abrupt, half-assed one they put in would have put the game ahead of the original.

I'm still waiting for someone, something to convince me it's worth my while to give KOTOR 2 another shot.

I always play the evil side if I'm allowed to in games. The original KOTOR provided me with the only time in playing a game on evil that I've been shocked. Having the wookie who owes me his life debt kill his best friend was probably the only time I've felt evil by playing evil.

Okay, I give. How was it supposed to end?

I only played KOTOR II for about twenty minutes. Can someone give me a spoiler-filled "director's cut" runthrough?

This is the forum of the guys doing the restoration. Check it out.

KOTOR 2 can suck a dick. What a glitchy rushed mess. I stopped playing when my character kept getting stuck in walls and I had to reset to continue playing.

Videogame companies really don't bother with the "bring back the same team for the sequel" thing Hollywood at least tries to attempt, do they?

Case in point: instead of Infinity Ward doing the next call of duty, we get more WW2 crap. Arg.

KOTOR 2 was indeed inferior, but it was still enjoyable for what it was. You could definitely tell that the story wasn't implemented to its ulitimate potential, though. If you were playing it strictly for the gameplay and the battles, it was fine.

I agree with an earlier statement about playing in evil mode. While it was fun to play the games in both good and evil modes, evil mode let you do things that were...chilling sometimes.

http://forums.team-gizka.org/viewtop...t=1961&start=0

I'd say roughly a fifth of the game never made it.

There were lots of things cut, but some of the highlights:

There was an entire planet run by droids that was supposed to come before the endgame sequence, where Bao-dur would presumably sacrifice himself for the team (explaining why he disappears suddenly and shows up only in a hologram to give instructions).

The disciple had a much more extensive subplot. I'm not sure it could've made him interesting, but it would be something.

HK-47 had a much more extensive storyline, where he could capture an HK-50 and torture it into giving up the location of GOTO's HK factory in the abandoned base on Telos (a sealed door to the basement is still visible, but not openable). During the Telos battle at the end, he would go off on his own, fight his way through, and reprogram a new generation of HK models. He would then show up with them to end the GOTO/remote standoff according to you alignment, I presume.

Depending on your alignment and influence with the love interests, on Malachor several things could happen. A jilted, evil Atton or Handmaiden could duel the Disciple or Visas, respectively, if you had more influence with them. If good, you would control Atton while he fought Darth Sion. If you lost, Sion would dismember and torture him. You'd then find him all mangled and he'd die in your arms.

There were also a ton of quests and subplots and whatnot that were excluded or don't go anywhere, but this is the big story stuff that would've made for a much more satisfying resolution. This is not to say it's a great game (although I happen to love it con warts), but that I lay the blame for its failings at the feet of Lucasart's timetables rather than Obsidian's team. They had some really great concepts and did as much as they could in the stupidly small window they were given.

I want to know of the "chilling things" you had to do to play evil. In the first one, being light or dark side either made you act like a tree-hugging hippie or a superconservative.

Thanks for the run down. Part II had more than a few parts that could have been better, but I still had no trouble playing it all the way through, and I don't do that for just any game.

Oddly, the one thing I couldn't make myself do when playing dark side was kick that little jibberish-spouting kid off my ship. Making the Wookiee kill his best friend? Sure. Telling some kid to leave? Nope.

Even I don't understand what that's about.

Oh, and for me, what killed the second game was the complete lack of immediacy or imminent danger in the story. In the first game, you had to find the Star Forge before the Sith used it to destroy everybody. That's direct, primal, and easy to get behind. Unlocking the mystery of your past is pretty ephemeral by comparison, and lacks real narrative drive. A Star Wars plot has to have a sense of danger. Unraveling mysteries is for Myst.

I can see where you're coming from, and combined with it taking way, way too long to acquire a lightsaber made the game a little slow to get into. But to me it was made up for by the downbeat, fatigued tone, more intricate plotting, and mainly the better supporting cast. Atton, Kreia, Bao-dur and Visas all had much more interesting stories than Mission, Carth, or Jolee. The gameplay may not have been changed much over the first, but the influence system was a big improvement, even if they didn't get to implement a lot of its intended effects on the endgame.

Sad. I'm not a Star Wars fan, but I adored the dick off of KOTOR and didn't care enough about KOTOR2 to even bother due to all of the bad word-of-mouth. Should I still give it a shot? I mean, it's probably cheap as shit, so it's worth it...right?

I don't have much more to add, other than that I loved KOTOR and merely liked its sequel. KOTOR was not only a great looking and great playing game, but it was populated with interesting characters and a compelling storyline with several moments approaching brilliance (walking on the exterior of the star destroyer, sneaking past mammoth sea monsters, and so forth). I haven't revisited either of them in years, but KOTOR II seemed to look much blander and uglier than its predecessor, had too many weak villains, had a muddled, complicated plot without a real sense of substance, and suffered from a few too many bugs. Even the stuff that was cut doesn't seem like it could have made it that much better. The best moments in the game seemed culled from KOTOR I's better moments- It felt like better-than-average KOTOR fanfic.

Still, all things being equal, it was one of the best RPGs to come out that year- it's just a pity that it wasn't nearly as good as the original.

See, it's odd that you say that, because I thought II's supporting cast was about as interesting as an evening in the coma ward. I still vividly remember the characters from the first game, backstories and all. I couldn't even pull the names of the second's off the top of my head.

But I really, really liked the influence system. It's just a shame that I wasn't interested in any of the people I was influencing.

I think that's just because the first game drew you in more with gameplay and introducing the universe. KOTOR2 was hurt by being more of the same in many, many areas. But as far as characters go, they were more nuanced and 3-dimensional, Kreia particularly. Her plan is much more compelling than simply to rule the galaxy, and ultimately I sympathized with her motivations to the point where I thought it probably would have been better if she had succeeded, which is a more interesting place than about any other game has ever taken me.

Still, it is a deeply flawed game; buggy and incomplete, with extremely derivative gameplay. But the story and concepts, imo, are very interesting and a step above the original. Even then, a lot of the potential is not realized in the final product.

One thing I don't like about the first game, that the second game fixes (Sort of), is that what choices you've made during the whole game doesn't matter in the end, you can easily fix your alignment with one choice on the last planet.

There were a lot of useless characters as well, I mean, when were you ever going to use Mission? The idea of being able to train your party members in KOTOR II was pretty cool, IMO. I enjoyed the villains a lot more too. Malak was a cookie cutter Star Wars villain, but Traya's motives were actually interesting. I sympathize with Sion because I don't think he was realized to his full potential either, but I don't know what the f*ck was up with Visas and her master.

I used Mission quite a bit, actually. But then, I played through the game three times. I used everybody.

I played through the first game all the way twice, and partway a couple times. I don't think I ever used Mission or T3 at all.

Another area where 2 made improvements was in forcing you to use all your party members, and the sequences where the party would be split and the main character out of action. Of course, this is another area where it was not fully implemented, as they cut everyone's solo quests from the endgame (except Mira's small wookie fight). More good ideas, not quite executed.

I just plain disagree. Nuanced and three-dimensional? Sorry, no. They were boring and talked too damn much.

And even if they were, this is supposed to be a Star Wars game. Luke Skywalker and Han Solo were not nuanced and three-dimensional. They were precisely what they needed to be to make the story work. This isn't Chinatown. The characters in an RPG, particularly a Star Wars RPG, should be archetypes. That's all they need to be.

I don't know if they need to be archetypes. I can't imagine ever complaining about a star wars character being too three-dimensional.

I found the main characters to be highly derivative. The main character is--once again--a Jedi trying to unravel the mysteries of his/her path. Mandalore is a less interesting and less useful version of Canderous. HK-47 is in the game again. You have two female Jedi in the party again and they can both be love interests.

Kreia, however, seemed to be a more cynical replacement for Bindo and the most annoying character in the series. She presents this bullshit borderline Objectivist/Randian take on how one ought to deal with others and the fucking game sides with her view most of the time. I really wouldn't be surprised if a few of the members of the development team were dues paying member of the Ayn Rand Society.

....

Mandalore is Canderous....

Did you finish the game? I mean, even if you didn't, wasn't it obvious to you how they had the same voice actor?

That actually is what bugged me most about Kreia. The narrative actually seems to support her point of view. It's one thing to do that in an original game, but they're playing in someone else's sandbox here. It just didn't feel Star Wars at all. Obviously, a line has to be ridden between faithfulness to source material and compelling storytelling, but I thought the game fell off that line and passed out. Not only did it turn its back on the source material, it did it in the service of an incredibly dull story.

Yeah, archetypes are RPG bread and butter, but I don't see why nuance shouldn't even be attempted.

Eh, I finished the game over a weekend a few years ago. Nothing really stuck in mind outside of how clearly rushed and incomplete the last level was, all those damn loading screens I had to sit through, falling through walls constantly, and my hatred for the Kreia character. I had completely forgotten most of the storylines, including Mandalore's.

Okay, I'll concede that point, but I refuse to accept that what KOTOR II did qualifies.

I can understand where you coming from, I'm not going to argue that it's the pinnacle of RPG gaming (I might argue that with the first :P), but I can't help but enjoy the story. While the first was the usual RPG story with a little Star Wars twist, the second actually created a story worth interest, at least for me.

You guys might want to keep in mind that Kreia was the villain. She definitely had objectivist leanings, and I never liked her personality. But her view of the Force as an agent of manipulation and desire to destroy it to free the galaxy from it was new territory for the Star Wars universe. Her "evil plan" was to introduce truly free will into a fated universe, which I did think was admirable in a way.

You can say that's not Star Wars if you want, and you'd pretty much be right. But I've seen Star Wars, there's plenty of it out there and it will always be around. I like that they tried to introduce new things, nuances and greys into the archetypal, black-and-white universe, even if they didn't really succeed with much of it.

That's kind of the problem with RPGs, and particularly this model, where the ability to make completely different choices without altering the core storyline is key. The main character has to be somehow be a cypher and very special at the same time. It's never quite convincing, but its the nature of the beast.

Plus, I have to admit that the first game's late plot twist about the main character's identity is something that's hard to follow. It came just as I was getting sick of how unimportant my character was, too. It was a great little mindfuck.

Definitely. I thought it was a little brilliant how it played off the inherent cypher-ness of the RPG protagonist and didn't interfere with the believability of either the good or evil path.

I did them on my first run-through. After that, I never touched them again.

You were warned.

The first time I played KotOR II, I was left disappointed, I admit. The bugs, the fear that my Xbox DVD drive was going to die at any second, the fact Kreia gave me shit no matter what I did, the Exile not being one 10th as cool as Revan and, of course, that ending.

But y'know, I went back a good while later and it all clicked. And now? Kreia is quite probably my favourite character the entire series has produced at any point. She's brilliantly written and while she's the villain of the piece on paper, she's also something of a hero. She seeks to remove dependance on the Force, restore the notion of free will and control over one's fate instead of everything being part of a grand pre-planned destiny. Even in failing, the [full, restored] ending suggests that by the end of it all, a better, less...assholish (for lack of a better word!) Jedi order is going to result because of everything she's taught you.

Yeah, if you're the kind of person who can't enjoy or appreciate something if the bulk of the characters are unlikeable, you're pretty much screwed here. Beneath Atton's cocky asshole surface lies a vicious little shit, Visas is a morbid bitch, G0T0 is insufferably smug, the Disciple a personality free zone you want to punch, Mira and Hanharr you just want to leave behind the moment you meet them...and yet they open up and grow in ways the original cast never did. And of the original cast, those that do make an appearance are far better portrayed here than in the original game. Canderous has found a sense of purpose - not just to restore his people but to also prove his worth both to himself and to the master who abandoned him. HK47 goes from a mere wisecracking hitman to something much more (particularly in the fully restored version, more on that later) and hell, even T3 has several moments of awesome while Revan is given a far more interesting and impressive backstory here that leaves them looking far greater a character than they were originally.

As for the villains, Sion is a great one (more so with a female character, admittedly). Nihilus, on the other hand, is anti-climatic yet that's the entire point of him - he's built up for the entire game as this deadly, unstoppable threat but really, he's the mirror image of the player, them but for the grace of god. Hence when he tries to kill you the way he does everything else, he can't and he's forced to use a lightsabre, which he's shit at using because he's so dependant on the Force. It comes back to what Kreia is saying all along. As for Atris, hell, you could do a thesis on her alone.

The game is littered with individual little moments that you don't give a second thought to at first but much later, it all falls into place (a favourite of mine is the anti-Czerka aliens talking about a super intelligent droid they were supposed to get that was programmed to calculate ways to help save a planet but which mysteriously never showed up - I didn't even pickup on it beyond a "Czerka must have stolen it, so what" level but the actual pay off is immense but incredibly easy to never discover).

Ultimately, it's an introspective journey about the aftermath of war, dealing with the scars that came from it and trying to come to terms with the terrible things you've done in pursuit of victory. No, it's not the usual Star Wars fare, it instead chooses to try something different and altogether more interesting than just another high adventure tale. Flawed as it is, I applaud them for at least trying.

(and to be fair, Obsidian were royally shafted regarding development time - they were originally told they had xx months to work on the game only to have the rug pulled out from under them by Lucasarts a few months later. Gotta chase those Christmas sales, screw the actual product!)

I'd suggest the single greatest thing to convince anyone of the game's merits would be the Let's Play thread in the Something Awful archives. It's about 80 pages long, covers the game from start to finish, includes acres of cut content (including the Droid Planet and HK factory sequences and the much better, almost Casablanca-like ending), goes into obscene detail about the characters, shows things you're guaranteed to have missed and is generally a far better read than one guy's playing of a game ever, ever, EVER should be. It really is wonderful and yeah, probably better than playing the actual game off the shelf I suppose, as the writer was using a heavily patched up version which fixed a lot of most notorious bugs like Mandalore and G0T0's influence gains (or lack of).

If anyone wants the link, I think he means this tread.

It is a fantastic read:

http://forums.somethingawful.com/sho...readid=2472531


I think I might have to track these down again, assuming they're both backwards compatible on the 360?

If they ever released a "restored director's cut" kind of deal, it would definitely sweeten the odds of me trying it out again. But at this point, I think that's what it would take.

Jade Empire is hitting XBox Originals on the Marketplace next week. Maybe we can dare hope that these will make the grade as well.

So I played Knights of the Old Republic a few years ago and loved it. Stuck Xbox-less and with a horrible computer, the sequel had to wait until I could run it.

Four-ish years late, I finally played and beat it.

My cloudy memory of the original both helped and hurt here. I didn't notice gameplay comparisons where Sith Lords came out poorly. At the same time, some character beats - I had completely forgotten about Canderous, for instance - were lost on me. I'd completely forgotten whether Bastila lived or died in the first, so her showing up toward the end was a nice beat.

The ending certainly left a lot to be desired, but I liked the group here. My general party consisted of me, Mira, and Handmaiden, both Jedi-fied. I was a little disappointed that with all my poking and prodding of Brianna, Mira, and Visas, that there wasn't a single love confession to be found. Sigh.

I also played it as a total light sider. At some point in the near future, I want to play the first and Sith Lords again, going totally evil in both.