Knights of the Old Republic I, II, and Perhaps Beyond - Page 2

Playing a dark side Consular in the first game remains one of my all-time favorite gaming experiences. Entering a room by knocking everyone there on their asses, then covering them all with force lightning was beautiful.

OI'm thinking of getting PC KOTR 1, but apparently it causes problems for Vista. True?

OMG, this trailer is awesome:

http://www.swtor.com/media/trailers/...ourceid=ea3719

That trailer makes me wish TOR was a single player game.

Exactly. I'll give his one a shot only because of bioware, but I'm so done with MMO's. They are so fucking pointless.

Yuck, didn't realize that was an MMO. I saw Old Republic and freaked. Oh well.

If they make a decent MMO for a platform I'll be excited, but I can't be bothered on the 'puter.

As opposed to all other video games.

I didn't want the old wizened Jedi to die. I think I felt more in those 3 minutes than in (at least) the first two prequels...

Too bad the game will be absolutely nothing like that trailer.

Don't be hatin' Billy. Allow us our untainted hope that this will be the next coming.

Don't give me that shit. Other games have endings. I've played tons of MMO's. I'm currently playing Champions at the moment (only because it's free) but in this point of my life, I don't have the time to sink into a MMO.

I have to side with Rob on this. While this LOOKS great, I really don't want to get involved in another endless timesink. When I'm burnt out with my current MMO, I'm going to endeavor to not start up on yet another one.

Someone once compared MMOs to an abusive relationship - you know they're no good for you, but you keep coming back because you love them. I go in stages - I'll be into one for a while, then I'll get fed up and cancel. Back and forth.

I am hopeful about this - I hope I can be an HK-47-style assassin droid.

Full E3 presentation write-up: http://www.massively.com/2009/06/04/...demonstration/

And some hands-on hype: http://www.joystiq.com/2009/06/04/ha...-old-republic/

Did that really exist? No shit?

So, far as I can tell, from these and the official site, there's to be 8 classes, 4 each specific to the 2 factions. Trooper, Smuggler, and presumably Jedi for the Republic and Sith and Bounty Hunter known for the Empire. With all the voice acting described in the article, I don't think anyone's playing anything but a human, unfortunately.

Sort of. It was an offshoot of one of the artisan professions but at that time SWG didnt really have specific classes so its a little misleading...not that it wasnt still a stupid idea.

No dumber than dancer classes that you were forced to pay and watch to heal certain wounds.

For everything they got right in that game, they got something astoundingly wrong.

And they got very little right.

They don't get enough credit for the planets and the very different personalities they had. I would sometimes spend hours running around exploring and trying not to fight anything. Running around Tattooine and having a dust storm kick up (very good sound design as well on things like that) was enough to keep me happy for a while.

They also had the best crafting system of any MMO that I've played. Too much grinding involved, but the way that the quality of different materials varied from month to month and rewarding people who searched out the best materials was good game design.

Okay, so all the good stuff didn't really have anything to do with actual game play but at least there was some good stuff.

Latest developer doc for The Old Republic, about all the V.O. work, shows a lot more gameplay than I was expecting at this stage, current UI and all:

http://www.swtor.com/media/trailers/video-documentary-3

And the branching dialogue system looks to be the same as Mass Effect's.

The second Star Wars: The Old Republic cinematic trailer (intended for E3) was just released/leaked:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBGvAJ6-SsY

Ancient Sith and Jedi forces battling it out on the planet Alderaan?

You BET YOUR SWEET ASS I'm gonna be there with bells on.

Damn. I really don't give two craps about cinematics. I want to see gameplay footage. I want to hear about the mechanics. Cinematics are worse than useless.

Yeah. I'm willing to give BioWare the benefit of the doubt 99% of the time, but not with an MMO.

You can find some gameplay footage on the game's official site.

I loved KOTOR1 and I'm excited about this. For some reason it's the non-Jedi classes that have my interest piqued - Trooper looks fun, and I'm curious about the Imperial Agent.

I think BioWare's earned more than a fair bit of trust from us by this point...even blind trust.

This may be their first real MMO effort, but the fact that they keep discussing the characterizational and storytelling aspects of this title gives me faith that it's gonna at least equal the first two KotOR games from that side of things.

Shit, if nothing else, it's GOTTA turn out better than Galaxies did -- not that that'd be a hard thing to accomplish, granted.

They did just announce that you get your own ship to pilot around the galaxy. As a kid who spent his childhood pretending he was flying around the Falcon that's pretty damn neat.

Yeah, that got me stoked, too. Galaxies' implementation of spacecraft was abysmally stupid. Even the quick shot of that Ebon Hawk-lookin' freighter on the landing pad was damn cool.

Oh, there's hours of gameplay footage on youtube, but none of it looks exceptional, especially up against Bulletstorm et al.

RPG versus FPS.

That's like comparing an Abrams main battle tank to a Los Angeles-class attack sub. They both operate on entirely different gameplay principles from one another, serving very different purposes. They're not supposed to be identical.

I agree with Trevor. If you hand me a next gen Knights of the Old Republic single player game, I'll sell both of my shins and kneecaps to own it because I won't need to walk anywhere for the forseeable future anyway. But Warcraft burned me out on MMORPGs in a big way, I don't want to spend my time grinding Tatooine for whatever xp womp rats give up, I want an engaging storyline.

Can't believe how incredibly cynical everyone is right now, and about a BioWare RPG, of all things.

The rumblings coming out of BioWare seem to indicate that there's going to be far less gold-farming/skin-collecting like you'd find in WoW, than actual, meaningful storytelling and character-development.

It sounds like they've gotten the message about gamer disenchantment with Blizzard-style slog-grinding (Ray Muzyka even mentioned something to this effect in an interview I read not too long ago). As I said, BioWare seems to understand the essentials of pure storytelling better than most other outfits. We'll see.

There's the fucking problem. We're not seeing ANY of that.

Perhaps this video is what you're looking for...


http://www.swtor.com/media/trailers/video-documentary-4

When it hits PS3 I'll check it out. It looks like a lot of fun.

Just not true anymore. Fallout, Oblivion, Lost Odyssey, and Mass Effect 2 prove that there's parity. It's no shock that they're not showing footage of TOR, which frankly looks a lot like KOTOR II.

That doesn't say anything qualitative about the game, but I get why they're not showing it off.

But those are single-player games. Aren't the system demands different when hundreds of players are occupying the world at once?

I dunno...patience, maybe? And for Christ's sake, this ain't some late-period John Romero game we're talking about, here. Though, this being Star Wars and CHUD, I get that there's automatically gonna be some hostility toward it, even given its developer-pedigree.

Not quite sure what to say.


Unless they're going for more of a turn-based experience, à la the first two KotORs, Dragon Age, and some Japanese RPGs, is what I was saying -- whereas Mass Effect 2 was as much FPS as RPG, and was more "traditional" RPG in the dialogue than in the actual combat itself.

Hi, have we met? I'm the resident Star Wars apologist round these parts. And I'm willing to bet there isn't a warm blooded human in this thread who wouldn't give a kidney if this game magically morphed into a single player RPG. The reason there's hostility is because it's a MMORPG, period end of argument. It's a genre that by its very nature thrives on monotony. , and the kind of effort Bioware is going to need to put forth to keep this interesting is either A: not going to happen, or B: happen, and keep that company from crafting the pitch perfect single player we know they excel at.

But trust me, I want to believe what we're seeing in these trailers is some indication of what we'll be seeing story-wise. Every other MMORPG ever created says otherwise.

MMO develoepers tend to keep system requirements relatively low to attract players with old hardware. The number of concurrent logged-in users might have had a marginal effect in the past, but not so much now. MAG supports hundreds (on the PSN of all places) and still looks fine.

Hi. True, I share your skepticism about the MMORPG genre in general (having gotten more than a few burns from it myself), but it looks like we'll have to (respectfully) disagree about expectations -- I very much concur that BioWare has one helluva steep mountain to climb here, but who knows.

Part of me thinks this whole thing might still fall apart like Watergate testimony, but the other part of me isn't so sure. Given BioWare's track record, though, I'm inclined to bet on it somehow coming together properly in the end. Like I said, it's a wait-and-see-approach type of thing.

I love the KotOR 2 Discussion. It was my favorite despite all its flaws, thanks to the reasons stated. It was a world filled with shades of gray and well, Everyone's said it better than me.

ToR as an MMO gives me a big resounding 'Meh." I'll wait for it to launch, and see how it plays.
But I still have incredibly fond memories of SWG, pre CU/NGE. It was a sandbox MMO which is pretty rare for a mainstream MMO title. I was the 'dancer class', and it was really nifty in that it provided the casual players, or the players who weren't all about killing things to have alternate paths to take.

Their skill set was more about having X number of points to spend on skills, and no set 'class' or structure, unless you wanted to excel in any particular field.
For example, mine was dancer/terakasi(unarmed combat. Fit with the dancing)/Fencing/Anatomy. Another character was all about the guns. It was a nifty system.

Yeah, second this. I'm poor and I have a desktop computer with basic integrated graphics. Yet I can run WoW no problem. I wish this would be similar, but I'll deal with waiting a while before I can buy this. Unfortunately I don't have the cash to buy a brand new graphics card for one game.

Yes, that helps. I'm intrigued by what appear to be cinematic camera angles happening during combat, unless that's all fancied up footage for display. The fact that there are no stats on screen makes me suspicious. But if the game really is going to have no HUD, I'm doubly intrigued.

I really enjoyed the trailer, just as I did last years and the two cinematic TFUII trailers. Not because they represent the games at all, but because they look great, and they have exceptional setpieces.

I don't care much for RPGs, and I care much less than that for MMOs. So I just appeciate the little slices of (admittedly, character soft) Star Wars the ad campaigns give me. I am interested in the inevitable "Art of TOR" Book though.

I appreciate the artistry, but the trailer is the same CG wizard vs. wizard shit we've been seeing in games and movies for nearly a decade. People aren't bored to death of this scene yet?

I also like how Lucasarts is against any character having a definably unique weapon or ability in their universe. I think my heart sank a little when that girl lit up a double bladed lightsabre.

Well said; hell, this game and Funcom's "The Secret World" are going to be the last chance I'll give to the MMO genre.

You mean here and in Glaxies, or overall Star Wars games?
Cause Im pretty sure a "Force Unleashed" characted had some sort of lightsaber tonfas I'd never seen in SW before.

It's just that in the original films lightsabres were interesting because only two of the characters actually use them. They're unique. We get to the prequels and due to its focus on Jedi every motherfuckers got a lightsabre and they're all the same.

Apart from the main bad guy, he's got himself a double bladed lightsabre and he uses it in a way that is unique to him. Except that people liked the double bladed lightsabre, so everyone starts getting them. Same with force lightning, that shit was so much cooler when it was something unique to the big bad Emperor.

Yeah, i guess its a "Look guys i made a new toy, who wants to play with it?" kind of thing.
Hell, I wouldnt be surprised if we saw lightwhips or lightstaffs in this game.

I mostly avoid RPGs and fantasy, so I've ducked most of the CG wizard vs wizard movies. So these have novelty for me, and yes, their artistry and detail is part of their charm. I'd consider TOR (just for the concept and art direction) but I have no gaming PC. I still like the SW universe, if not the recent storytelling taking place within it.