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 Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic is a 2003 role-playing game developed by Bioware and published by LucasArts. It's also one the best Star Wars games out there and one of my favorite games of all time. KotOR was initially released on the original Xbox and PC, with later ports to Mac, iOS and Android. I will be playing the PC version. When Bioware first hooked up with LucasArts to develop a Star Wars game, LucasArts told them they could make a game based on Episode II: Attack of the Clones or go way back in the timeline. Wisely, they went with the latter option and set the game 4,000 years before the Star Wars films. Speaking of which, I think they're making a new one of those or something. I haven't really paid attention. The story is still rather familiar: the Sith are being evil jerks and the Galactic Republic is screwed unless someone manages to defeat the Sith and their "undefeatable" fleet led by Darth Malak. You know, your usual Star Wars stuff. In any case, it works, and the game feels like good old Star Wars. Some people prefer the darker vibe of Obsidian Entertainment's KotOR II: The Sith Lords and I may be one of them depending on what day of the week it is, but both are excellent games. Having played through Knights of the Old Republic enough times to lose count, I pretty much know it like the back of my hand. However, this time I'm using the KotOR 1 Restoration Project mod, which restores a whole bunch of cut content and should ensure that I find some surprises along the way. Of course, unlike the sequel, this game was actually released in a finished state and most of the cut content was probably removed for a reason, but we'll see how that goes. The one thing I know for sure is that K1RP does not restore the planet of Sleheyron, which was meant to be in the game and shown in early screenshots but got completely removed early on in development. There is an ongoing mod project to restore Sleheyron, but everything in that is made from scratch by the modders. I also have a couple of other mods installed, but those are mostly cosmetic. And yes, there is another KotOR/K1RP LP by GMArcturus going on right now, but my approach is going to be a bit different. While this is also going to be a light side playthrough, even more so than the other LP (because I'm a gigantic wuss who doesn't want to be a dick to video game characters), I'm doing it in SSLP form with slightly more informative commentary, and I'll be choosing a female character to play as (that means no romance -- while there is a romance path for the ladies, we won't be doing that for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who has played this game). There may be some thread participation later on, although for the most part I'm I'll try to update at least once a week, but there's no real schedule or anything. SPOILER POLICY: This game is old and most people who read this will likely have played it, but I'd like to see no story spoilers here.  Updates: Part 00: Character Creation (bunch of stuff about the classes and game mechanics) Part 01: Fall of the Endar Spire Part 02: Carth Conversations Part 03: Scum and Villainy Part 04: Party Like It's 19 BBY Part 05: A Good Old-Fashioned Gang War Part 06: Many Vulkars Died Part 07: The Underdwellers DMorbid fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Dec 24, 2015 |
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Dec 11, 2015 05:42
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reserved for stuff
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Dec 11, 2015 05:42
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Part 00: Character Creation MUSIC: The Old Republic Theme  Naturally, before we can do anything else, we need to create a character. While the canonical protagonist of KotOR is male, we're playing as a lady because the ongoing VLP is already showing off the dude path. There are three character classes in KotOR. Soldier is obviously the tank of the bunch, with a ton of health and great attack and defense stats. They don't get many skills or feats to play with, though, so they're boring. Scout is the middle of the road type of guy, decent at everything but doesn't shine at any particular area. They do, however, get access to stat-boosting implants from the start. As I tend to roll rogue-type characters in RPGs, we're picking Scoundrel as our starting class. Scoundrels have the lowest combat stats, but make up for it with their skills. Strangely, it's the Scout that starts off dressing up like Han Solo, instead of the scoundrel. From what I recall, Star Wars expanded universe stuff made that outfit into the official Corellian smuggler uniform or some nonsense like that.  If you feel that you have to get to gameplay RIGHT NOW or are allergic to stats, you can select the quick character option. If you do so, the game handles all the RPG stuff for you and all that is left is to pick a face and a name. Of course, we're not gonna do that.  I don't remember seeing this face in the vanilla game, but that might also be my memory being faulty. FAKE EDIT: Apparently it is my memory being faulty and this face was in the game all along. Kinda strange that I don't remember it at all.  We're going with Bright Eyes here, that portrait looks like a scoundrel to me. There is a decent number of faces to choose from for both genders, although most of the models haven't aged too gracefully and, frankly, didn't look that great in 2003 either. Unfortunately, you can't change their haircuts or anything like that.  Here's our stats sheet. You can click Recommended to distribute the points in a way the game deems optimal. I usually do that and then fine-tune the stats to my liking instead of putting all the points in manually. In this case, I've taken a couple of points off INT and CHA to give myself a bit more strength and constitution, which may not be optimal if you're into min-maxing but whatever. Even though KotOR uses the d20 system from the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons, no knowledge of D&D is needed to play the game as it explains itself quite well.  These are the recommended skills for a Scoundrel. I never bother with Stealth and don't need Demolitions yet, and 4 Awareness is overkill for now so I take two points off that. I redistribute those ten points to give myself 2 Computer Use, 4 Persuade (which we also don't need yet, but might as well put in those points early) and 1 Repair. Computer Use and Repair are cross-class skills for my Scoundrel, so leveling them up takes two points instead of one.  Next up, we've got feats. The game auto-grants us eight feats at the start (including Scoundrel's Luck, a much-needed passive +2 boost to Defense), and we can freely select one more. There are some nice ones that give us boosts to our skills, but at this point the skills we have are more than enough. Flurry is going to be my primary combat feat throughout the game, so I might as well take it here.  Finally, it's time to name the character. For those of us who are terrible at naming our RPG protagonists, there's a helpful random generator for Star Wars names. One of the names it gives me is Sara Avery, which really isn't a Star Wars name at all. I consider picking it (in fact, I do pick it and use the name in the first update, only changing it later via KSE, you can see it in one of the screenshots) but eventually settle on Sera Dakari, another name the generator came up with. As for the reasons why I change the name after the first update, I figured that while a Star Wars character with a totally non-Star Wars name was amusing at first, I'd rather not do an LP with a name that could well be shared by a real person somewhere.  (probably should've just gone with DONGS) That is the character creation part done, time to move on to the game itself! DMorbid fucked around with this message at 06:08 on Dec 12, 2015 |
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Dec 11, 2015 05:43
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Part 01: Fall of the Endar Spire VIDEO: Opening crawl & intro cinematic (I'm not sure why the uploader put a spoiler warning in the video title, it's just the intro from the game)   KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC Four thousand years before the rise of the Galactic Empire, the Republic verges on collapse. DARTH MALAK, last surviving apprentice of the DARK LORD REVAN, has unleashed an invincible Sith armada upon an unsuspecting galaxy. Crushing all resistance, Malak's war of conquest has left the Jedi Order scattered and vulnerable as countless Knights fall in battle, and many more swear allegiance to the new Sith Master. In the skies above the Outer Rim world of Taris, a Jedi battle fleet engages the forces of Darth Malak in a desperate effort to halt the Sith's galactic domination…   We open with a cool space battle, although this looks to be less of a battle and more of an all-out assault on a Republic frigate by a fleet of Sith fighters.  The Republic ship has seemingly lost all control and drifts slowly towards Taris. MUSIC: The Sith/Endar Spire -- The track that plays throughout the prologue.   Our heroine, Sera Dakari, is woken up by an explosion. Considering the sheer ferocity of the Sith's attack on the ship, you'd think that anyone on board would have been awake by this point.  As she looks around trying to figure out what's going on, the door opens and a Republic soldier enters the room.    : I'm Trask Ulgo, ensign with the Republic Fleet. I'm your bunk mate here on the Endar Spire. We work opposite shifts; I guess that's why you haven't seen me before.Apparently we've never talked to the guy who sleeps in the same room with us. Fair enough. Maybe Sera has only been on the Endar Spire for a day or so, the game doesn't really clarify that but it seems like she might be a recent arrival. Doesn't matter, though, there are more important things to worry about. Choosing the other dialogue option seems to imply we don't even know the name of the ship we're posted on. I know I took a couple of points off INT, but that's a bit too silly to be believable.    : Who's Bastila?: Bastila's the commanding officer on the Endar Spire. Well, not an officer, really. But she's the one in charge of this mission. One of our primary duties is to guarantee her survival in the event of an enemy attack! You swore an oath just like everyone else on this mission. Now it's time to make good on that oath!I'm not sure why Trask is lecturing us, I was just asking a question. The other dialogue option here is to say you're gonna save your own skin, which would make Trask's response more understandable.  : And I'll admit, the Republic is in dire need of someone with your kind of skills. Desperate enough to overlook your shady past. But now that you've signed on for this mission you're part of the Republic fleet. And Bastila needs all troops at her side during this attack!But yeah, you're getting lectured no matter which option you pick. In any case, let's just get going.  : So hurry up and grab your gear. You need to suit up so we can get out of here. Yes, getting dressed might be a good idea, unless we want to distract the Sith by running around half naked. That does kind of sound like something a lady scoundrel might try on occasion, but I don't think it's a good idea in this situation. Our clothes and weapons are in this footlocker, along with a computer spike and a security spike.  Here's the equipment screen for posterity. Currently, we only have 7 health points and barely any defense, so we should be careful. Our attacks are rather wimpy as well. Even though the tutorial is easy, you can still die during it if your character is on the squishy side and the RNG decides to have a bad day.  We equip Sera with a blaster pistol for now. The blaster is a Dexterity weapon, and since Sera's DEX stat is higher than her Strength she has a better chance to hit things with it than she does with the sword. Also, she is a scoundrel, and you know what they say about a good blaster.   Trask joins up with Sera, so now we've got our first party member. That sure is a great-looking character portrait he's got, I bet he's going to be with us for a good while.  Some interesting wording there, but sure, let's use Trask to open the door. Also, since Sera doesn't have the override codes, she would have been locked inside this room and most likely died horribly if Trask didn't show up. If the Republic fleet is in the habit of locking their own soldiers inside their dorm rooms when the Sith attack their ships, it's no wonder they're not doing so well at this whole war thing.  Pressing Tab lets you change the party leader. This bit with Trask and the door teaches you that if your main character doesn't have a certain skill and is unable to, say, pick a lock or hack a computer, you can switch to another party member with the suitable skills. In practice, that is rarely necessary unless you're playing a particularly meatheaded soldier or something.  : That was Carth contacting us on our portable communicators. He's one of the Republic's best pilots! He's seen more combat than the rest of the Endar Spire's crew put together. If he says things are bad, you better believe it. We have to get to the bridge to help defend Bastila! There's a map of the Endar Spire and a copy of Carth's message in your electronic journal, just in case we get separated.Right, we've got a job to do. Time to head to the bridge. Better get used to Carth as well, because we'll be seeing a lot of him in the near future.  This next door is also locked, but Sera's lockpicking skill (or Security, as it's called here) is as high as it can get at the moment and there's no need to switch to Trask again. I'm not actually sure how much Security skill you need to get that door open by yourself, but probably not very much. Even if your skill is low, you can use that security spike you found in the footlocker to help you out.   Exiting the dorms, we come across a Republic soldier trying to fight off a couple of Sith troopers with his poorly textured blaster rifle. There are about a million different texture mods for KotOR, but I don't usually bother with those.   Of course, the Sith gun him down. : These Sith must be the advance boarding party!   Here we go, the first battle of the game. The combat in KotOR isn't great by any means, but it's serviceable enough and the fights (especially melee) looked pretty cool when this game was new. While you can move around freely during combat, the system itself is turn-based and you click on the various buttons above enemies' heads to select your attacks. If you don't select anything, your character auto-attacks until you give them a different command or until the enemies are dead.  If you take damage in this first fight, Trask automatically tells you to use a medpac and gives you a couple of them. I managed to avoid getting hit, so I had to talk to him here to activate the dialogue.   After killing some more Sith troopers and looting a bunch of corpses (it's not like they need those medpacs or credits), we find a bigger fight between Republic soldiers and the Sith.  One of the Sith soldiers watching the proceedings decides to help out his buddy by blowing him and the Republic guys up with a frag grenade.  Unfortunately for those Sith, we also happened to pick up some grenades earlier and Sera has a pretty good arm. As you may notice, we found some armor for her along the way. That is very nice to have, since we still have a grand total of 7 HP and pretty much gently caress all in terms of defense. The Combat Suit at least gives a decent defense bonus, so we're a little harder to kill now. Defense is actually based on DEX and measures how hard you are to hit, so even though we only have 19 defense in total it's still more than Trask has.   A dark Jedi has managed to board the Endar Spire, but one of Bastila's Jedi protectors dispatches him before he manages to cause any further trouble. Unfortunately, she is killed immediately afterwards by a random explosion. Hey, maybe we can pick up her lightsaber! We're not Jedi so we can't really fight with one, but it could come in handy anyway.  Her lightsaber appears to have been destroyed in the explosion, so we only manage to find a vibration cell. That might still be useful, so we'll keep it.  When we get to the door leading to the bridge, Trask suggests switching to melee weapons because blasters at close quarters aren't such a great idea. But yes, what if they have lightsabers?  Ah, of course. Cortosis is this super-rare and ultra-awesome metal that, according to a bunch of terrible Star Wars expanded universe stuff, is capable of disabling a lightsaber on contact. In the KotOR games, it's just a metal that resists energy pretty well.  We take out the Sith on the bridge, but it turns out the crew members there are also quite dead and there is no sign of Bastila. Trask figures she must have headed to the starboard section of the ship where the escape pods are, so we're heading there as well. The Endar Spire is also spinning completely out of control since there's no one at the helm at this point, so we might want to keep moving.   Sera leveled up by killing the Sith, so I put a couple of points into Demolitions. We still won't be needing that anytime soon, but I didn't really have anything else to spend those points on (Persuade and Security would have been possible, but we have plenty of points in both) so Demolitions it is. Feats-wise, I opt for Toughness because we still don't have much health and every extra bit helps. Don't worry, I'm not going to show much of the levelup stuff in the future unless there's a particular feat or something that I want to show off. By the way, here is the stats screen for Sera:  Stupid Republic officials misheard her name and now the paperwork is all messed up.   Here's Trask's stat screen as well.  As we make our way towards the starboard section, Trask decides to check out this door for no apparent reason.  Oh. Oh dear.   Trask decides to sacrifice himself so we can get to the escape pods. That's very noble of him, although if he hadn't opened that door in the first place he wouldn't have needed to do the whole heroic sacrifice thing. The door was locked, and the starboard section is just through the other door in this same room.  Oh well. RIP Trask, you were kind of boring and dumb. By the way, if Trask hadn't opened the door with his override codes, would that dark Jedi just have stood there in that hallway until the Endar Spire inevitably blows up? It's not like there was another exit, the door behind him was busted. Whatever, let's head to the starboard section so we can get out of here.  Carth contacts us again when we get to the starboard section. At least Bastila made it out, so now all we have to do is wade through a platoon of Sith soldiers to get to the escape pods.  At this point, Sera isn't too great with swords and Flurry adds a negative modifier to the chance to hit, so we basically can't hit a barn door. Which is rather unfortunate, because according to Carth the next room after this one has a whole bunch of Sith waiting to ambush us and we're certainly not equipped to take them on. Carth suggests that we either hack the nearby computer to activate the defenses or repair the busted security droid next to it. I'm gonna do both because I want the EXP, but let's hack the computer first.  Yup, that sure is a welcoming party. Let's see if we can do something about it.  The better your computer skill is, the fewer spikes you need for hacking. The same goes for repair and repair parts.  Apparently, the Endar Spire's security systems include "blowing up the ship's power conduits." Can't argue with the results, I suppose. Fun fact: The Sith soldier/officer in the red uniform is not in the Xbox version of the game, he just has the regular silver uniform in that one. In any case, Carth is just behind the door that was guarded by the Sith, so let's mosey.  : Who are you? : I'm a soldier with the Republic, like you. We're the last two crew members left on the Endar Spire. Bastila's escape pod's already gone, so there's no reason for us to stick around and get shot by the Sith. Now come on - there'll be time for questions later!   Frankly, I don't like escape pods. They're so cramped and uncomfortable and UGH FINE I'LL GO VIDEO: Escape pod launch & crash landing      And we're probably dead. Well, that was fun. Next time, if we're still alive, we'll go explore Taris and look for Bastila. DMorbid fucked around with this message at 06:17 on Dec 12, 2015 |
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Dec 11, 2015 05:43
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Yeeees. I've been craving a KOTOR SSLP. You are the best.
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Dec 11, 2015 06:24
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I think you're starting this off on the right note, though I do wish you'd shown off the official stat screens. I did not know that the Red-armored enemy wasn't colored differently in the XBox version. I guess they decided later that he needed to stand out. Shame about Trask. I always hate losing party members, and I had the sense that he was smarter than he acted. The fact that he's Neutral on the karma meter raised my suspicions as well.
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Dec 11, 2015 07:33
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MightyPretenders posted:I think you're starting this off on the right note, though I do wish you'd shown off the official stat screens. .I can add that to the update. I admit didn't take a screenshot of Trask's stats because he's so forgettable, but yeah, I probably could have put that in there. EDIT: Both of the stat screens are now included. DMorbid fucked around with this message at 11:47 on Dec 11, 2015 |
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Dec 11, 2015 07:44
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Part 02: Carth Conversations .We seem to have survived the crash landing despite some jerk putting a building in the path of our escape pod. Found a bed too. Sera, however, isn't sleeping very well and keeps thrashing about.  : Don't worry, we should be safe here in this apartment. I gave you something to help you sleep. Just get some rest and let the kolto packs do their job.This little bit with Carth here is our first instance of restored content. I'm not sure why it was cut, but I guess the scene flows better without it. VIDEO: A strange dream  As Sera falls asleep again, she has a strange dream -- or possibly a vision.  A vision of a Jedi woman locked in a lightsaber battle with a dark Jedi.  One could possibly chalk this up to the drugs Carth gave Sera to help her sleep, but that's rather unlikely. We should probably mention this to him nonetheless.  After an unknown amount of time, she wakes up. Carth is still keeping watch. MUSIC: Taris Apartments  : I'm Carth, one of the Republic soldiers from the Endar Spire. I was with you on the escape pod. Do you remember?: Right. I'm Sera Dakari, by the way. How did we get here?: Well, you've been slipping in and out of consciousness for a couple of days now, so I imagine you're pretty confused about things. Try not to worry. We're safe... at least for the moment. We're in an abandoned apartment on the planet of Taris. You were banged up pretty bad when our escape pod crashed, but luckily I wasn't seriously hurt. I was able to drag you away from our crash site in all the confusion, and I stumbled onto this abandoned apartment. By the time the Sith arrived on the scene we were long gone.Well, that was quite nice of him. Someone else might have focused on saving his own hide and left us to the Sith, but Carth obviously isn't that kind of person.  : You don't have to thank me. I've never abandoned anyone on a mission, and I'm not about to start now. Besides, I'm going to need your help.Fair enough, we do kinda owe him one so we might as well help him out. Let's hear it.  : I saw on your service records that you understand a remarkable number of alien languages. That's pretty rare in a raw recruit, but it should come in handy while we're stranded on a foreign world. By "a remarkable number" he means "pretty much every alien language in the galaxy." This explains how we can understand the various alien characters we meet throughout the game, as all of them speak their own languages. I'm not sure if we're really a "raw recruit" though, as we have been smuggling crap all over the galaxy for a good while now. You learn all sorts of things in that line of work.: There's no way the Republic will be able to get anyone through the Sith blockade to help us. If we're going to find Bastila and get off this planet, we can't rely on anyone but ourselves. Really, why is it so important to find her? I mean, she was our commanding officer at the Endar Spire, but that can't be all of it. There must be plenty of high-ranking officers from the Endar Spire who are MIA, so what's the deal with Bastila?  .: Bastila is the key to the whole Republic war effort. The Sith must have found out she was on the Endar Spire and set an ambush for us in this system. I believe Bastila was on one of the escape pods that crashed down here on Taris. For the sake of the Republic war effort, we have to try and find her.: How can one person, even a Jedi, be so important?: Bastila is no ordinary Jedi. She has a rare gift the Jedi call Battle Meditation. Bastila's power can influence entire armies. Through the Force Bastila can inspire her allies with confidence and make her enemies lose their will to fight. Often, that's all it takes to tip the balance in a battle. Of course, there are limits to what she can do. But from what I understand of her ability, it requires great concentration and focus to maintain her Battle Meditation.From what I recall, Battle Meditation in KotOR II involves your character glowing green for a while and buffing the party's strength and defense by about +3. It works just a bit differently here and is genuinely a huge thing.  : So what do you suggest we do next?: Bastila's going to need our help. Many of Darth Malak's followers can use the dark side of the Force, and the Sith have already killed more than their share of Jedi in this war. Nobody will be looking for a couple of common soldiers like us. And if we're careful we can move about the planet without attracting notice; a luxury Bastila won't have. She's going to have half the Sith fleet looking for her. They know how important she is to the war effort. The whole planet is under quarantine. No ships can land or take-off. So if Bastila's going to escape Taris, she's going to need our help. And we'll probably need hers.Well, when you put it that way, I can see why we might want to locate Bastila. So, do we have any leads?  : While you were out I did some scouting around. There are reports of a couple escape pods crashing down into the Undercity. That's probably a good place to start.The Undercity sounds like a pleasant place. Shall we? : But the Undercity is a dangerous place. We don't want to go in there unprepared. It won't do Bastila any good if we go and get ourselves killed. : Good idea. We can use this abandoned apartment as a base, and we can probably get some equipment and supplies here in the Upper City. Just remember to keep a low profile.I guess I could have asked Carth about the dream or vision we had, but that can wait. Right now, finding Bastila is the priority. We can talk about our weird dreams later.   Well, we should probably avoid getting caught then. I would prefer to keep my mind and identity, I'm quite attached to them.: But I figure if we don't do anything stupid we should be okay. I mean, after all, they're... they're looking for Bastila, not a couple of grunts like us. Alright, soldier, let's move out.That sounded a lot like Carth was trying to assure himself rather than me that we should be fine. Anyway, let's take a look around this apartment.  This place is actually pretty big, and really not looking too shabby for an abandoned apartment. Makes for a good home base for us. I wonder what happened to the previous tenants, though.  Here in the corner we have a workbench, and the game is helpfully doing my job for me. We picked up that vibration cell from the dead Jedi earlier, and we also happen to have a prototype vibroblade that can be upgraded.  There we go, now the blade has a +2 damage bonus instead of +1. We're still not too great at hitting things with swords and Flurry is going to whiff a lot, but this vibroblade is so much more powerful than our blaster that we'll largely be melee-focused from now on.  With that, we're about ready to go out and explore Taris. Whenever we leave our hideout, we get to choose our party members.  I was going to take him anyway because an extra gun is always nice (and he's got two guns, so that's even better), but okay then. Speaking of Carth, here are his stats at the start of the Taris section:  I'm not sure why his defense is so low considering he has just as much DEX as Sera does. Anyway, as we have seen, Carth is a pretty decent guy, which is reflected by his Force alignment meter there skewing heavily towards the light side and his picture being all blue and shiny. Companions have static alignments, so Carth will remain a good dude no matter what.  That is not the case for the main character. Acting like decent person gets you light side points, of course, and being a douchebag nets you dark side points. Technically, you don't earn dark side points, you just lose light side ones until you have none left -- alignment has a hidden 100-point scale, where 0 is Darth Hitler and 100 is Jedi Jesus. Going neutral is a bad idea in KotOR, because you get a fairly notable stat bonus if you're fully good or evil (as in, have 100 or 0 points). But that's enough of that for now, let's finally get out of this apartment.  I'm showing off the loading screen for the sake of completeness. Loading screens in KotOR always have some kind of tooltip, information about the area you're in, or bits of backstory. If you played this on the Xbox back in the day, you learned to appreciate the fact you had stuff to read, as loading could get pretty bad in that version. Load times were always faster on PC, and since I'm running the game on a modern system and an SSD they're basically nonexistent.  Oh, great. Of course we would run into the Sith as soon as we step out of the door.    This guy has great voice acting, by the way. He's obviously this smug dickhead who gets off on abusing his power (despite being a low-rank Sith soldier, not even an officer) and picking on those who can't fight back, and his VA nails it.   : They're Republic fugitives! Attack!MUSIC: Sith Guard Encounter And this day was going so well for us. Well, so much for keeping a low profile, I guess. Speaking of which, we still have grenades.  The Sith soldier actually survives the grenade explosion, but the Duros (the blue alien) finishes him off with his vibroblade.  Yeah, uh, sorry about the grenade. I don't think this Duros can die during that fight anyway; the Sith soldier always focuses on him and he always seems to end up with 10% or so health.  : This isn't the first time the Sith have come here to cause trouble for us, but hopefully it will be the last.: Won't someone come searching for this patrol?: Don't worry about the bodies. I will move them so it looks like they were killed elsewhere. That should throw the Sith off the track. With any luck, they won't be bothering us again for a while. Dickhead Sith was carrying some guns, grenades and drugs. Just like in Fallout, using all the drugs is a highly recommended tactic for harder fights. Sera also levels up, and I put two more points into Persuade and Security each. Both are now at 6, which is the max amount we can have at the moment.  We also get Sneak Attack II, which is kind of like a backstab skill that gives us a damage bonus when we attack from behind or hit a stunned enemy. We also get the bonus if we attack from stealth mode, but since I never really use stealth that's kind of pointless.  Right around the corner, we find this guy who appears to be running a store of some sort here. Gotta love those dialog options, by the way. Either overly polite or raging dick, no middle ground at all. Of course, we are still in the tutorial, but the dialog options do remain fairly black and white throughout the game. In any case, Larrim here is trying to sell us an energy shield, which would be pretty useful (absorbs up to 20 points of energy damage, I believe) but we're really short on credits even after selling some of our junk to him. He's also selling some weapons, armor and supplies, but we'll do without for now. Larrim also tells us that aliens are generally not welcome in the Upper City of Taris, and because no Upper City resident wants to live in these run-down apartments the landlord is illegally renting them out to aliens who normally wouldn't be allowed to live here. Taris is pretty openly racist, which was apparently the case even before the Sith took over.  We could explore the apartment building further, but for now I think we should just head out and see if anyone has any idea where Bastila might be. Honestly, the less time we spend on Taris, the better.  MUSIC: Taris Upper City Well, here we are, the Upper City in all its glory. The residents are about as friendly as expected. You know what, before we look for Bastila I could really go for a stiff drink. Let's find the local cantina, maybe someone there could even point us to the right direction.  Our escape pod is right here, being picked apart by salvage droids. There's nothing of interest in the pod, so we continue on. Except we don't, because Carth seems to have something on his mind.  : [Speak to Carth]: Yes? What's on your mind?: I'd like to know some more about you, Carth.Sure, might as well get to know the guy if we're gonna be stuck with him for the time being.  : But with all that, I've never experienced anything like the slaughter these Sith enemies can unleash. Not even the Mandalorians were that senseless. My home world was one of the first planets to fall to Malak's fleet. The Sith bombed it into submission, and there wasn't a drat thing our Republic forces could to to stop them!: I'm sorry, Carth. This must be very painful to you.  drat. Now I kinda regret asking.: I'm sorry, Carth. I didn't mean to upset you.: I know. Don't worry about it. I just... must not be making much sense. You probably mean well with your questions. I'm just not accustomed to talking about my past very much. At all, actually. Will do. Let's get going then, I still need that drink. I think Carth could use one even more. Most people who play Knights of the Old Republic don't like Carth very much, and conversations such as the one we just had are the main reason for that. A lot of the problem has to do with Carth's voice actor, who makes him sound whiny and annoying. Carth has plenty of valid reasons to be angry and the stuff he says is not poorly written or anything, but his VA just makes him sound like a kid throwing a tantrum. The same VA, Raphael Sbarge, also voiced Kaidan in Mass Effect. Kaidan has never survived my playthroughs of Mass Effect.  Equipment Emporium, huh? We don't have much money right now so there's little point in going inside, but we should probably keep the place in mind for later.  Here's the cantina, with a Sith trooper guarding the entrance. Let's just act casual and hope he doesn't ask too many questions.  Actually, he doesn't give a crap about us, so we're good to go.  This door is weird. You can see it has the Security icon on it, but trying to click the icon just results in the game telling you that the lock is impossible to pick. Actually, you just need to click on the door and it opens normally.  I think I'll end this update here because it's getting pretty long and there's still plenty to cover as far as Upper City goes, and this seems like a decent enough place to stop for now. Next time, we'll find out what goes on in the cantina and hopefully get some clues towards finding Bastila. DMorbid fucked around with this message at 06:18 on Dec 12, 2015 |
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Dec 11, 2015 18:20
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I never understood the hate for Carth, and I probably never will.
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Dec 11, 2015 19:15
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I don't really mind Carth, I just wish he had a less grating voice actor. Since he never stops talking in these early parts of the game, listening to him can get pretty old after a while. But yeah, he's not that bad. I'll be doing his personal quest and showing off all his dialog stuff, so there will certainly be plenty of Carth for everyone.  (Still not doing the romance, though)
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Dec 11, 2015 19:25
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I'm glad I'm not the only one for whom their distaste for Carth carries over to Kaidan.MightyPretenders posted:I never understood the hate for Carth, and I probably never will. Just wait until he starts hitting on the PC.
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Dec 11, 2015 21:17
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I went and added music links to the updates. This game has a pretty drat good soundtrack by Jeremy Soule, who you might remember as the guy who composed the music for the Elder Scrolls games starting with Morrowind. Admit it, the Morrowind theme started playing in your head just now if you're at all familiar with that game. While the KotOR soundtrack is good and fits the game perfectly, it's not as instantly catchy as something like the Morrowind theme and isn't something I've ever really listened to outside the game. I always found it to be more of a background thing, which might also have to do with the default sound levels emphasizing the SFX and dialogue rather than the music. Update-related stuff: I kinda want to get through Taris as fast as possible so we can get to the good parts of the game, so I'll probably be updating very often, at least once a day, during these early sections. I won't be doing every single sidequest on Taris, but I'll show off a few of them.
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Dec 12, 2015 06:31
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MightyPretenders posted:I never understood the hate for Carth, and I probably never will. HK-47's impressions of him in KOTOR II were hilarious and so correct.
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Dec 12, 2015 10:21
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Part 03: Scum and Villainy Welcome to the Upper City cantina. This is where all the fine upstanding citizens of Taris go to unwind after a day of yelling about illegal aliens or whatever the hell they do around here. Perhaps someone here knows something about Bastila's whereabouts, so let's go and mingle with the clientele of the fine establishment.  MUSIC: Pazaak - This is the track that plays in the Upper City cantina. I think someone made a mod that replaced it with the Cantina Band theme, but I might have dreamed that up. Anyway, this is a pretty nice and understated jazzy track that you may not even notice is there most of the time. Let's just chat up the first person we see standing around.  Uh, okay then. Not a very informative conversation, but at least she's having a good time. Let's try that guy in the corner and see if he's got anything for us.  Is Pazaak the only thing these people talk about 'round here? Anyway, this is Niklos, self-proclaimed Pazaak player extraordinaire, who speaks in a bad Russian accent for some reason. I'm sure there is a 80,000-word article on Wookieepedia explaining why that is. (Actually, I just checked and there isn't. I'm disappointed in you, Star Wars wiki spergs!) As you might expect, he wants to play Pazaak with us, but we turn him down since we don't have a deck. If you do play against him and beat him a few times, he starts to accuse you of cheating and eventually refuses to play against you entirely. There has to be someone in this place who talks about things not related to Pazaak. How about the old guy in the other corner of the room?   Okay fine, I give up, I'll buy your Pazaak deck. This is Garouk, who used to be a pretty good Pazaak player in his younger days but is now looking to quit. We pay 50 credits for the deck, which also comes with a free Pazaak lesson. Exciting!I will not bore you with a detailed explanation of Pazaak, but the gist of things is that it's space blackjack where you try to hit 20 instead of 21 and have your own side deck. The card game would be a nice little diversion (I've spent god knows how much time playing blackjack in Fallout: New Vegas, and let's not even get into Triple Triad in FFVIII) if it weren't for one thing -- the computer cheats like a motherfucker and seemingly always has the right card for the right situation.  Enjoy this screen, as it's the full extent of Pazaak we'll be seeing in this LP. (also, I have 25 because I had already lost and accidentally played the +3 hand card while not paying attention) Fun fact: there is an established card game in the Star Wars universe, known as sabacc. I see a lot of imagination went into naming KotOR's card game. In-universe, Pazaak is supposed to be sabacc's predecessor, although sabacc is more like space poker than space blackjack. Han Solo apparently won the Millennium Falcon from Lando Calrissian in a game of sabacc, which I believe was established in the ESB novelization (in the film, they don't mention which game it was).  Oh hey, we found a person who doesn't talk about Pazaak at all! Hold on... did she say military base?   : I don't wear my uniform when I'm off duty. It's not allowed. In fact, anyone in uniform is banned from entering the cantina. The officers don't even like it when we show up here off duty. Don't like us fraternizing with the locals, I guess. But it gets pretty stale hanging around the base all the time. Besides, the Sith don't own me. Being a soldier in their fleet is just a job, you know? A job with long hours and low pay, I might add.Yep, we are indeed chatting up one of the Sith. To be fair, talking to Sarna here makes it clear that not everyone in the Sith army is a horrible evil rear end in a top hat like that soldier at the apartment complex earlier. Some of them are just doing their jobs and trying to get by. That said, surely there must be better ways to earn a living.  : When I signed up I was promised adventure and excitement in exotic locales. Instead, I end up stationed at a military base on some backwater planet on the fringes of the galaxy."Join the army, they said. See the world, they said." For some reason, I doubt the Sith recruiters were promising "adventure and excitement", the Sith don't seem like the kind of people who would care about that kind of thing.  It seems like we might be able to convince Sarna to leave the Sith, but that doesn't happen. If we continue talking to her, she tells us she doesn't want to say something that might get her in trouble. Oh well, we had a nice conversation at least. This is actually something that was added by the restoration mod -- in vanilla KotOR, she completely brushes you off if you try to talk to her with a female PC.  After Sarna finally blows us off, we head towards the music room of the cantina. Doesn't seem to be too crowded, there's a couple of guys ogling the Twi'lek dancing girls and maybe also someone who's enjoying the band.  I can already see where this is going. Might as well be polite, though. : Pleased to meet you. My name is Sera Dakari. : What do you think of our local music? The band is quite good, wouldn't you agree? They're on the verge of intergalactic stardom, you know.  : Obviously you have an ear for music. Mark my words, they'll be famous soon enough. They were about to go on tour before this Sith quarantine stranded them here.I can barely contain my excitement.  Oh, this should be good. : How will you arrange that?: I have a standing arrangement with one of the Rodian bodyguards backstage. For the small sum of 20 credits he'll let me set up a meeting with you and the band.Just how stupid does this guy think we are? Maybe there's some poor soul somewhere who has been fooled by him, but we've been travelling around the galaxy more than long enough to know a scam when we see one. And for 20 credits? Really? What can you even buy with that?  : You sting me with your words! I merely thought I could offer you the rare opportunity to meet a celebrity before they were famous. But I see you're not interested. That's too bad. They really are charming fellows. Very well, then - I hope you enjoy the music. If you change your mind come speak to me again.If you pay him the 20 credits (which, as I said, is practically nothing), he runs off to "arrange the meeting." Afterwards, a woman who was fooled by him earlier comes up to you and tells you you were scammed. Anyway, in the opposite corner we find this fellow:  This is another Sith from the military base. I'll be honest, I didn't even know that he was here. I've never talked to him. I actually had to check if he was added by K1RP, but apparently he is in the vanilla game as well. : You're from the military base? You don't look like one of the Sith. : I'm off duty right now, so I'm not in uniform. My name is Yun Genda - junior officer first class with the Sith occupation force.: Nice to meet you, Yun. I'm Sera Dakari.: I'm actually surprised you're talking to me at all... most of the people here on Taris can't stand us Sith. It can make this a pretty lonely job.Well, uh, I wonder why they wouldn't like you very much.  : Oh, great... I can see where this is going: the Sith are evil; why did I join them; blah, blah, blah. I don't need a lecture from the likes of you.I guess he's just one of the guys doing their job, like Sarna. At any rate, maybe we shouldn't be too confrontational with someone who is with the Sith.  : Ah, it's okay. I might have overreacted a bit. But can you blame me? Everywhere I look I see one of you Tarisians glaring at me with hate in your eyes.Now, we could use Persuade to get this guy to open up to us immediately, but I want to see what else he has to say.  : You're an off-worlder? Huh, I figured you'd be even more angry, being stuck on a foreign planet and all.Another chance for Persuade, we're not taking it this time either. I want to do this the old-fashioned way.  : You know, it's like everyone on this backwater planet is in a permanent bad mood. Don't they know they have to make the best of things?Well, you guys *did* kinda conquer their planet and set up the blockade. I can see why they'd be slightly annoyed by that. : Everybody has their ups and downs... it's how you deal with them that counts.: Exactly! It's all about attitude. I didn't ask to be assigned to this backwater planet, but I try to make the best of it! It's pretty easy to get depressed on an assignment like this, but we do what we can to keep our spirits up.If this dialogue sounds familiar, this is the exact same script used for the conversation with Sarna on the male PC path. Since Sarna doesn't normally talk to a female character, Yun is here to serve the same purpose she does.  : That's true. It's nice to meet someone who understands what I'm going through. It's good to talk about this stuff - it gets pretty lonely up at the military base. But some of us junior Sith officers are having a party tonight to blow off some steam. I'd really like to see you again. Why don't you drop by the party? I'll show you where it is on your map. A party full of Sith, you say? We certainly will be there, and right after that we'll stroll into a rancor's lair while covered in rancor bait.  Well, I guess we might go check it out. Maybe one of them gets drunk and blurts out something that could help us in our search for Bastila. In the meantime, though, there's a couple more areas of the cantina we haven't checked out, so let's get on that.  This cantina is really big, by the way. Look at the size of this room. Wonder what's in there... or, well, we would if the game didn't spoil it for us by calling that guy "Duel Spectator". This is the Taris dueling arena. I'll tell you right now: I most likely won't be doing the dueling sidequest. I might show off a fight or two later, but I doubt I'll be doing all of it. We're not exactly specced for dueling in the first place because a light breeze can kill us, and pretty soon there's gonna be another thing that'll make the later fights even harder for us. I'll talk about that when it comes up, and some of you might already know what I mean.  Well, even though we're not fighting right now, we might as well go check out a duel. Looks like there's one starting now, featuring the most bombastic announcer in the galaxy.  : Ladies and gentlemen, I draw your attention to the dueling ring. Here, two combatants will battle for your viewing and gambling enjoyment.  Looks to be a proper clash of the titans here tonight.  MUSIC: Il Buono, Il Brutto, Il Cattivo (okay maybe not)        : Well, that was quick, wasn't it? So I give you the winner... Gerlon Two-Fingers!That was somewhat anticlimactic to say the least. And what kind of name is "Gerlon Two-Fingers" anyway? Whatever, let's talk to the spectators.  Uh huh. Twitch is apparently the Rodian in the corner, so let's go have a chat with him and see what's up.      Screw that, we're out of here. Let's go check out the one room of the cantina we haven't been to yet.  Oh hey, this is a nice-looking little lounge. Maybe we could grab a seat and relax for a while, maybe try some Tarisian ale or...  ...I hate everyone on this stupid planet. : Sorry, I'm not your waiter.: *whisper* Careful what you say. I get the feeling this spoiled brat could cause us more trouble than she's worth. : Why is the help here so incompetent? One word from Daddy and I could get you fired!  There we go, the first use of our persuade skill and a resounding success at that. We don't actually need to bring her anything, as the actual waiter shows up with the drinks in the next moment. Now, if you fail to persuade her or tell her to gently caress off, you'll run into a bunch of her hired thugs as you exit the cantina. Speaking of which, I've had enough of this place. Let's just get going. Undercity, right? I'm guessing that means we need to go through Lower City first, so let's find the entrance there.  On the way out, we meet this fellow clad in Mandalorian battle armor. This is Bendak Starkiller, the greatest duelist ever to live on Taris. He's retired now because there isn't enough murder going on in the dueling scene these days (as we saw, the duels are fought using stun weapons) and he killed all the worthy opponents in the now illegal deathmatches anyway. If we were to fight our way through the duel ranks and become the champion, we could challenge Bendak here to an old-school deathmatch. We probably won't be doing that. Anyway, I like how cheerful he sounds when he says all his fights were deathmatches.  Anyway, we have wasted enough time. Let's head to Upper City North. Actually, let's check out that door on the right first.  Inside, we find a medical facility. Zelka here can apparently cure anything except the rakghoul disease. Rakghouls, he tells us, are these horrible monsters that live in the Undercity that can infect you with the disease and turn you into one of them. The Republic scientists at the local military base managed to almost perfect a cure for the disease before the Sith took over . We offer to look for a sample of the serum, although that would mean either going to the military base or finding some on the Sith patrols in the Undercity. Well, Undercity is where we're going anyway, so we might as well be on the lookout.  Zelka also sells medical supplies. Something tells me that anti-poison implant would be really nice to have when we go down to the Undercity, but we couldn't use it even if we were able to afford it. We'd have to be level 8 to be able to equip level 3 implants. But enough about that, what's behind this Employees Only door?  These are Republic soldiers Zelka has been taking care of. Their injuries are so severe that they're probably not going to make it, but Zelka at least tries to make their last moments more comfortable.  Unsurprisingly, this makes Carth quite pleased. Zelka is taking a great personal risk by protecting these soldiers from the Sith, and if you were a gigantic dick you could blackmail him by threatening to snitch on him. We're not, so we swear to keep this whole thing a secret. That gives us our first light side points!    When we try to leave, Zelka's assistant Gurney comes up to us with a proposition. It's pretty easy to see where this is going, but let's hear what he has to say anyway. : An offer? What are you talking about? : Zelka isn't the only one who wants to get his hands on the rakghoul serum. Davik Kang will pay you ten times what Zelka can if you can get the cure.: Why do you care who gets the cure?: Look, Zelka can't afford to pay me much. If you sell the serum to Davik, I can probably get a nice finder's fee for directing you to him.Uh huh. This Davik character sounds like someone we should know more about, so let's see if this guy can tell us something about him.  : Davik isn't the kind of guy you can just walk up to, you know? He likes to keep his business at arm's length. The best thing to do is to take the rakghoul serum to Zax. He runs the Lower City bounty office, but everyone knows he also works for Davik. He'll make it worth your while.Well, we have no intention whatsoever of bringing the serum to Zax, but now we at least know who Davik is and also that Zax works for him. Let's just humor this idiot once more. : I'll keep your offer in mind. Jesus christ Carth you absolute moron  If Carth can't even figure out I'm bluffing to get information out of this guy, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't make for a very good smuggler either. A Sith patrol stops him and asks what his cargo is. "Spice and illegally modified blasters," he would say. Then they'd shoot him.  We make our way to the Upper City North entrance, just in time to witness a couple of thugs demanding money from some old man.    And Davik seemed like such a nice man from what Gurney told us.  : Sorry, you're out of time. Now it's all or nothing. Davik can't have people not paying his debts! This line always makes me laugh because of how it is. I don't know, it's just one of those things. : That's too bad. Davik's going to want to make an example of you! You're coming with us. The old guy seems kind of dumb, to be perfectly honest, but he doesn't deserve to get killed and/or maimed by Davik's goons. : Hold on a second. Looks like we've got ourselves a witness here! I get the sense Davik doesn't like much of anything unless it involves money and/or murder. : I don't like your attitude. I better teach you a lesson.: Guess we have to teach you to mind your own business! Welp, here we go. Maybe I should actually explain what Flurry does. Basically, it gives us an extra melee attack per round, with the cost of a -4 penalty to defense and attack (in plain English: makes us easier to hit and our attacks less accurate) for three seconds. We're whiffing a lot, but see that damage we've done to the thug? That's from the one Flurry we've connected with.   : Now I can't pay him back. It's not good to owe a crime lord money. He'll just keep sending more bounty hunters after me until I'm dead!At least his wife has some sense left. What did you think would happen? Anyway, you can offer to give him 100 credits to pay off his debt with, but as it stands we're a bit low on credits (because I just had to buy that stupid Pazaak deck) and can't afford it. The old man runs off, and we can finally go to Upper City North... hold on.  Davik's goons have 50 credits each, so had we given the old geezer 100 credits we would've made that money back right here. Shame he didn't check their pockets or wait for us to do so.  Finally! We almost accomplished something in this episode! Next time, we explore Upper City North, chat with some more upstanding citizens, party hard with some Sith, and get cockblocked by restored content. See you then! DMorbid fucked around with this message at 09:56 on Dec 13, 2015 |
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Dec 12, 2015 12:52
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I haven't played this for ages, but from what I remember you can cheese the last duels with shields and grenades even if your character is crap at fighting. Also, if you don't talk to the sith in the bar, you get an alternate scene later. I think many people have missed that, since the bar is such an obvious place to go in the beginning.
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Dec 12, 2015 16:21
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ChaoticGood posted:I haven't played this for ages, but from what I remember you can cheese the last duels with shields and grenades even if your character is crap at fighting. Also, if you don't talk to the sith in the bar, you get an alternate scene later. I think many people have missed that, since the bar is such an obvious place to go in the beginning. And yeah, cheesing the last duels with grenades, shields and savescumming is how I've usually done that sidequest. If the thread wants me to become the dueling champion of Taris and have a nearly impossible deathmatch with Bendak "please don't call me Galen" Starkiller, I can give it a shot.
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Dec 12, 2015 16:39
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I've always preferred power attack for combat feats, mainly because it doesn't have any defensive drawbacks like the other two. Still, flurry is good for when your weapons have added effects like a stun, and late in the game critical strike is basically a guaranteed crit with the right equipment loadout.
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Dec 12, 2015 19:39
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Speaking of Davik. You have to include an audio or video clip of the hanger scene. Davik's VA is purrty flippin funny
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Dec 13, 2015 05:19
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Part 04: Party Like It's 19 BBY Taris' Upper City North looks a lot like Upper City South, although you do get a nicer view of the sunset. If it wasn't for all the horrible people, the institutionalized racism and classism and the Sith occupation, this wouldn't be such a bad place at all. There will be plenty of time take in the sights later, though -- we need to get to the Undercity and find Bastila.  To get to the Undercity, we have to go through the Lower City first. The entrance to Lower City should be around here somewhere, so let's get a move on. We've spent enough time chatting up the locals. Of course, it wouldn't be Taris if we didn't find ourselves in yet another fascinating conversation on the way to where we need to be.   Looks like we've attracted the attention of a few gentlemen who have been hitting the old Tarisian ale a bit too hard. Just what we need right now. I do have to wonder how exactly we look like "shlummies", as these fellows put it. Our outfits aren't exactly shabby, and we are heavily armed to boot. Best case scenario from the drunks' point of view: we're soldiers who don't have time for their crap. Worst case scenario: we're criminals (possibly on Davik's payroll) who also don't have time for their crap and don't think twice about gunning these guys down. Luckily for them, we are the former. . Well, this is rich.I appreciate the contribution, Carth.  We have a few options to handle this situation. First one is a Persuade check where you offer to buy these guys a drink. The second one is another Persuade check, telling them they might be biting off more than they can chew here. The third is to fight them, which is something you should never do for reasons that should be obvious a bit later (I believe you need literally no Persuade skill for the first option, either. I've never had to fight these guys, even with 0 Persuade). We'll pick option number two. : You'd better think twice about what you're doing. This might be more than you can handle.Of course, we have no intention of hurting them, but they don't need to know that.    Crisis averted, and everyone lives to drink another day. The drunks shuffle off and we're free to get back to business, at least until the next weirdo comes along. Speaking of which, I think I hear ranting in the distance.  I have a feeling the "vermin invaders" this old kook is ranting about does not refer to the Sith occupation force.   : My name is Gorton Colu. Will you join my cause? We must band together if we are to stop the spread of vermin and scum throughout Taris!: Vermin and scum? What are you talking about?: I am speaking of the hideous looking aliens that walk the world of Taris! The Wookiees and Ithorians and Rodians and Bith - all of them! Listen, friend. These are dark times. That is why I, Gorton Colu, have formed the Anti-Alien League. The time has come for action! We cannot sit idly by while aliens blight our glorious planet!Oh hey, it's your racist grandpa in space. At least the locals don't seem to be taking his rants seriously at all, so maybe some people on this planet have some hope yet. Also, it took all of my willpower not to make any terrible jokes about real world politics here. Anyway, I don't feel like talking to this guy any longer, so let's just back away swiftly. : I see... well, good luck in your crusade. I don't think he quite noticed the sarcasm in that response. If you want to, you can try to tell him how he's a terrible ignorant hatemonger (as if that'd work) or go along with his nonsense by saying we should slaughter all the aliens.  The Lower City entrance is right around the corner. Looks like we need to talk our way past a Sith trooper, shouldn't be a big deal.   : It's obvious from the way you're dressed that you're not one of the Sith patrols, so unless you have the authorization papers you must move along!Hm. This might be a problem. I don't think sweet-talking this guy is going to work. Let's see if we can somehow get our hands on those papers. : Where can I get authorization papers?: If you were supposed to have them you'd know where to get them. Now quit wasting my time and move along.: I'll be going now.: Move along then.Well, I guess that could have gone better. Could have gone worse, too, that Sith guard was surprisingly cordial with us.  I don't think fake mustaches would cut it, we're gonna need something more substantial. Hm... what was it Yun said about the party earlier? Well then, I do believe we have a party to attend.  First off, though, we check out the northernmost part of the map. The only thing here is the Sith military base, but we don't have any business there. Even if we did, the door is locked and no amount of Security skill would get us inside.  Heading back to the main part of the Upper City map (the base is kind of separate from it -- I'll see if I can get you the full layouts of these areas so you get a better idea where we are), we find this apartment building right opposite the Upper City South entrance.  Right, let's find that party so we can show these Sith how we do it back down the Corellia way. I don't think it's behind that locked door.  Fortunately, the telltale OONTZ OONTZ OONTZ points us in the right direction. I wonder what we need to do to get their uniforms, I don't think they'll just give those up since they're kind of important and all that. Yun is right there to welcome us. Speaking of which, did the invitation extend to Carth? I'm pretty sure it didn't. Sorry, Carth.  : You have to try this Tarisian ale - it's fantastic! We should have conquered this planet ages ago!Well, that's kind of a lovely thing to say, but I do suppose these guys are pretty drunk by now.  Oh hey, Sarna made it too. If you're playing a male character, Sarna has Yun's lines and vice versa. : Who cares? We're not on duty tomorrow - let's live a little! Come on - drink up!  Judging by how these Sith handle their liquor, we should probably tell the Republic army to weaponize Tarisian ale. The war would be won in an instant.  No Sith armor here. I hope these guys didn't manage to lock up their armors after all, that would take us right back to square one.  Well, this looks promising. Is a Sith Backpack a regular backpack owned by the Sith or a special Sith-branded backpack?  Oh yeah, now we're in business.  The business of evil, that is.The Sith are still knocked out from the Tarisian ale and have no idea what's going on. The person whose armor we just, uh, acquired is probably going to be in huge trouble when they wake up.  All right. Now that we have our Sith armor we could go straight to the Sith guarding the elevator and get access to the Lower City, but there is something we absolutely must take care of first.  Namely, saying hello to our old inebriated friends here. Public intoxication and harassment ain't gonna fly around here, you know.     Ahahaha. That scene is my favorite thing in the world.  If you need to brush up on your Dan Ryckert-isms, "my favorite thing in the world" means "anything I find cool or good or funny."  We could walk around the Upper City in the Sith uniform, scaring small children and other random bystanders (we're banned from going to the cantina, though -- the dialogue about no uniforms allowed wasn't just fluff), but I'll just talk to this droid instead.  Obviously, the protocol droids that act as guides around the Upper City have been reprogrammed to be completely subservient to the Sith. They refer to their benevolent Sith masters and such when you talk to them without the disguise. Well then, the only thing left to do is to go back to the Lower City elevator, we should have access to it now. Let's just get through all the formalities and...  what  I... but... you... the uniform...  I'll just... yeah. I'll go... over there.  Not gonna lie -- at first I thought the game glitched out here. However, what actually happened is that the guard noticed Carth doesn't have Sith armor on. Which is obvious, yes, but in vanilla KotOR you don't need to give him Sith armor. One uniform is enough to convince the guard to let you through. Everyone always thought that was kind of silly, but shrugged it off as one of those videogamey things you shouldn't think too much about and went on with their lives. With the KotOR 1 Restoration mod, that is no longer the case. We NEED to get two suits of Sith armor in order to access Lower City. It's obvious why this was changed, as having to go out to find another uniform slows down the pacing of the game. Taris is already a bit of a slog where many playthroughs go to die, and the last thing Bioware needed was something that makes it an even bigger slog. Thus, a lot of content was removed in order to streamline things. Naturally, all of that content is now restored, and we get to enjoy Taris the way it was originally envisioned! Are you excited? I sure am!  As you may remember, Sarna mentioned wanting to "retire her uniform" but since she was at the party we can't do anything with her anymore. I assume that if you didn't get the invitation to the party, you could convince Sarna to leave the Sith and get a uniform that way once you know that you need one (in K1RP, that is -- she doesn't mention any of that in vanilla). I'm not sure that's the case, but she definitely emphasized the "retiring the uniform" part when we talked to her. Obviously, since those two paths seem to be mutually exclusive, there's still the matter of finding another Sith uniform somewhere else. Unfortunately, the magic of the Sith Backpack won't help us any further, but I do seem to remember there being something else in this apartment complex.  I wonder if that "nothing" has anything to do with Sith uniforms. Looking at the screenshot, I can't help but read that line in Officer Barbrady's voice. Also I'm one of your fellow Sith so don't tell me to move along, you jerk  Well, that Sith just said the magic words. Let's see what's going on here.  Looks like a situation that might turn violent any second. Maybe the guard can tell us something.  : A few of the Sith trooper uniforms have gone missing. We've got evidence that this alien knows something about them, so the commander's interrogating him. I guess these must be the Sith interrogation techniques I've heard so much about. : Uh-oh. I think the commander's losing his temper. I'm glad I'm out here - it took an hour to clean the blood stains from my uniform after the last interrogation.: Maybe the alien really doesn't know anything.: Then I guess we don't lose anything when the commander blows his head off. Anyway - what do you care?Okay, this has gone on long enough. These guys are firmly in the "horrible dick" category when it comes to Sith soldiers.  It's on.  The commander didn't like that response at all.  This is pretty neat, the commander has a special line if you come here in the Sith disguise.  We earn some light side points for helping out the Aqualish (that's what those walrus man aliens are called) and get to fight some Sith. There's two regular soldiers and the commander, although I'm not sure if the commander is functionally any different. I see they also teach kung fu at the Sith academy or wherever these guys are trained.  The commander doesn't last very long.  Another line you only see if you're wearing the disguise, obviously. : Why were those Sith interrogating you? I don't know if I quite believe this guy's claims that he's just an innocent traveler, something about him seems a bit off. The Sith said they had evidence of him breaking into the base, although for all we know that could have been another Aqualish. I doubt most Sith can tell one of these guys from another. In any case, even if he did steal the uniforms, he didn't deserve to get murdered by the Sith.  He didn't have any kind of reward for us, uniforms or otherwise, but I think we can take the armor off one of these Sith.  That'll do. Sorry about the blood, Carth.  Now that we both are properly disguised, we should be able to get past the elevator guard, so let's just run back there and...  ...oh god drat it Carth  The AI pathfinding in this game isn't always the greatest. Of course, if one of your companions gets stuck, you can always switch to them and maneuver them away from whatever piece of geometry they're stuck in.  Here's what crazy racist man has to say if you talk to him while in Sith disguise. I was hoping you could scare him off, but no such luck.  : You better watch yourself: those gangs will take a shot at anyone - even us! It's too bad we don't have the manpower to just sweep those slums clean. Down we go. We should probably change out of these uniforms when we get to the Lower City, as they don't offer much in terms of protection and something tells me we'll need quite a bit of protection down there.  And here we are. Next time, we'll explore the Lower City and see if we can find some way to the Undercity here. Hopefully we won't have too many gang members shooting at us when we go further in. DMorbid fucked around with this message at 16:09 on Dec 13, 2015 |
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Dec 13, 2015 15:27
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Since it's not really a spoiler because it should have already happened I'll just say it: Normally that alien admits to everything after there are no Sith-aligned soldiers around to hear him, and that includes who he works for. In the base game where only one uniform scene happens in a playthrough, he's presumably killed a bit earlier when the off-duty soldiers asked them not to let his screams interrupt the party. Yeah... In my opinion, there's no point in humanizing the Sith's minions.
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Dec 13, 2015 20:26
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MightyPretenders posted:Yeah... In my opinion, there's no point in humanizing the Sith's minions. But yeah, the Sith soldiers are basically Imperial stormtroopers and we probably shouldn't think too hard about them. I like that the game kinda attempts to show that not everyone in the Sith army is an irredeemable rear end in a top hat who eats puppies for breakfast, but a lot more could have been done with that.
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Dec 13, 2015 21:09
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No, it's not in the game. It's just the logical reason for why you can only get one scene per playthrough - the party happens after the interrogation is over. Then again, I also thought they both happened in the same room and I was wrong about that. But yeah, apart from the party, there's very little to say that the "Sith soldiers" aren't just evil for evil's sake.
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Dec 13, 2015 21:35
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I've managed to get in the elevator without a Sith uniform with cheats but I don't remember how. I think I just cheated for 99 security, put the turbo cheat on, and just forced the door open before the Sith guard could stop me.
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Dec 14, 2015 13:24
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That's pretty great, I didn't know it was even possible. I wonder if the same trick works with the Undercity elevator. Don't see any reason why it wouldn't, really.
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Dec 14, 2015 13:39
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I plan to continue this later down the line, maybe start a new thread if necessary, but for now I'm closing up shop. I just wish I'd at least have made it further than the last SSLP of this game.  [e] Closing this was, frankly, a bit of a knee-jerk reactionary thing on my part as I thought there genuinely was an issue with two KotOR threads. I've been told everything is cool, so this'll get going again pretty soon. DMorbid fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Dec 19, 2015 |
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Dec 14, 2015 15:10
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Glad to see you reopened the thread, at least. I was bummed when it got closed.
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Dec 20, 2015 07:03
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Hooray! As someone who only really consumes SSLPs, I'm extremely happy to see this up again.
Heir03 fucked around with this message at 03:27 on Dec 21, 2015 |
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Dec 20, 2015 08:19
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Agreed. What reanimated this baby?
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Dec 20, 2015 16:45
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I originally closed this because I felt like a dick for not at least asking GMArcturus (the guy running the VLP) if it was okay for me to start another K1 LP while his was going on. The PM I got from him implied that it wasn't, so I chose to bow out for the time being. Pretty soon after, I was told everything is cool and that the PM was sent while mad at video games, and there was actually no problem with this thread being around. I could've reopened this earlier, but decided I'd wait until I felt like updating again. Speaking of updates, the next one is going to be pretty big because I'm doing the entirety of Taris Lower City. Well, plot-wise anyway, there's still a bunch of sidequests I'm leaving for later.
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Dec 20, 2015 17:43
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Part 05: A Good Old-Fashioned Gang War And we're back! When last we left our heroes, they had just made their way to the Lower City by fooling the Sith guard with some convenient disguises. There's supposed to be a full-blown gang war going on down here, so we may want to watch ourselves. Might get a little rough. MUSIC: Taris Lower City  The Sith uniforms have served their purpose for now, so we re-equip our normal gear. Carth is actually still in his default clothing which provides no bonuses whatsoever, so the Sith armor would technically be an improvement but we really don't need people mistaking us for Sith around here. As we're about to see, the locals have itchy trigger fingers as is.  Right around the corner, trouble is already a-brewin'.   Meet the two swoop bike gangs vying for control of the Lower City streets -- the Black Vulkars and the Hidden Beks. Now, one would generally assume that swoop bike gangs would be riding, well, swoop bikes, but I'm not seeing any of those around.    Not that the lack of swoop bikes stops these fellows from killing each other. The Vulkars come out on top, and of course they decide to attack us next. If we were wearing our Sith uniforms, one of the Vulkars would go "Sith aren't welcome here!" before attacking.  So far, we've only been fighting random Sith soldiers and fairly pathetic thugs that even characters not specced for combat will take out without breaking a sweat. The first time you come here may be a bit of a rude awakening, because the Vulkars are far stronger than anything the game has thrown at us at this point (with the exception of a few optional duel arena fights) and like to attack in groups. You can thin out their numbers with a grenade if you get the drop on them, but on this run they managed to avoid my frag so I have to fight the whole group. Not good.  Getting mobbed by all these idiots is a bit of a rough spot for a squishy scoundrel such as ourselves, so I actually end up having to use a medpac for the first time in this LP. There is a consumable-related exploit I'm showing off here -- if you use a medpac or another consumable item from the inventory menu, it takes effect immediately (or at least at the end of the current turn, even when you already have an action queued up) and you don't need to waste your next turn healing. This is kind of a cheesy way to do things and I won't be relying on it too much, but it is a nice panic button.  The Hidden Beks are a lot more friendly than the Vulkars, and these random Beks patrolling the Lower City will also help you out against the many hostile Vulkars you'll run into. They're not here in the vanilla game, so you're fighting all those Vulkars by yourself.  Needless to say, their presence is quite welcome.  They also spout some exposition when you talk to them. Brejik and Gadon are, of course, the respective leaders of the Vulkars and the Beks.  As we make our way towards the Undercity entrance, we run right into a cutscene. Looks to be one of Davik's Exchange goons demanding cash from a couple of Vulkars. As far as I'm concerned, these guys might as well blow each other up and I wouldn't mind one bit.  Black Vulkar #2: Yeah, let's see the big crime lord come and get his money from the Black Vulkars!  Davik's thug isn't too impressed by those responses, so he summons some backup in the form of a gruff-looking man with a really big gun.  Black Vulkar #2: Yeah, we were just goofin' around here. We don't want no trouble with a Mandalorian. Here's Davik's cut. Exchange Thug: I knew you boys would see reason. Now get out of here. Well, if you need to collect some protection money from a bunch of low-life gang members, hiring a Mandalorian to back you up is not the worst plan ever. We'll learn a lot more about Mandalorians later on, but at this point all you need to know is that they are these really strong and proud warrior race guys who traditionally wear cool armor. Some years ago, they tried to conquer the galaxy in what's now known as the Mandalorian Wars, and would most likely have succeeded had it not been for the efforts of Jedi Knights Revan and Malak (before they turned to the dark side) and their followers. Despite their defeat in the Wars, Mandalorians still have a fearsome reputation and it makes sense that a couple of street punks like these Vulkars don't want anything to do with even a single Mandalorian warrior.  Exchange Thug: Maybe next time, Canderous. I better get this over to Davik. I'll call you if anyone else gets behind on their payments. Davik's goon walks off and Canderous turns to us to vent about the Vulkars.   : Gadon keeps his Hidden Beks in line, but Brejik's getting dreams of grandeur. If Davik's smart, he'll slap that young punk back down.: Who are you?: I'm someone you don't want to get on the bad side of, and I'm not one for small talk. I don't have time to stick around here, anyway. Davik's got me working on a special assignment.He did start the conversation, though. In any case, Canderous is pretty cool and he's voiced by Solidus Snake himself, John Cygan, so I don't mind listening to him talk about stuff. Somehow, I feel like Jon St. John would also have been a good choice for his voice actor.  At the end of this path is the Undercity entrance, so let's put our Sith uniforms back on and get moving. Speaking of the uniforms, as you may have noticed there is no female version of the Sith armor and you'll be using the male trooper model and animations for these parts even if your character is a woman. To be fair, this is really not a big deal, because you're spending maybe five minutes in total wearing the Sith armor.  Well, dammit. Looks like the uniforms aren't enough to get us past this guy unless we manage to convince him somehow.  Yeah, that might do it.  Or not. This is an auto-fail Persuade check, so you won't be getting in without the papers. I don't know what happens if you choose to attack him, but I'm gonna assume that's an unwinnable fight. There's five laser turrets next to him, and those would rip us to shreds in seconds. I'd rather not test my luck, so looks like we're gonna go find those papers.  I suppose the cantina might be a good place to start looking for information. Also, Sera seems to have morphed into Carth at some point when we weren't looking.  Javyar's cantina appears to have the exact same layout as the Upper City cantina, but I like the music here better. It's got a pretty good beat. MUSIC: Javyar's Cantina  Naturally, the first person we talk to wants to sell us Pazaak cards. We are not buying Pazaak cards.  In the central room of the cantina, there appears to be some sort of an altercation going on. Looks like a bunch of Vulkar thugs ganging up on some guy. Probably happens all the time around these parts.  He doesn't seem to be too worried, though.  Black Vulkar #2: Nah, this can't be Calo Nord. He's supposed to be tough. This guy's nothing but a runt!  Black Vulkar #1: One? What that mean? You be funny, tough guy? Black Vulkar #2: You know who we are, Calo? We're members of the Black Vulkar gang! You don't want to be getting funny with us, tough guy.  : Two.Black Vulkar #1: Me no understand. One? Two? Why he count? He trying to count how many of us is against him? Black Vulkar #2: It's three against one, Calo. What do you think about those odds? Well? You have something more to say? : Three.    *blaster fire sounds*   Well then. Make a mental note not to get on Calo Nord's bad side.  You can talk to Calo here and compliment him on his handiwork, but all that happens is that he starts counting to three again. In case that wasn't clear from the scene we just witnessed, letting him finish the three-count is a Bad Thing -- if you don't leave him alone, he guns you down and that's a game over. At that point, you kind of deserve it.  Meanwhile in the other corner of the room, another Vulkar crew shows up to harass a Twi'lek girl. I suppose they figured that she might be an easier target than the most infamous bounty hunter in the galaxy.  Well, she's got attitude. Maybe a bit too much of it for her own good.   Is there anything worse than teenagers with attitude? I think I'd rather have a chat with Calo Nord than listen to this girl for any amount of time.  They're not entirely wrong about that part, but I think we should probably do something before this turns ugly. I don't think talking back to Black Vulkars who already have some kind of a problem with you is the greatest idea, no matter how street-smart you are and...  : Just a sec, boys. Zaalbar... a little help here? I need you to rip the legs off some insects. : Quit complaining... you can finish eating later. Besides, you need the exercise so get over here. ...Oh. Well. That'll certainly explain why she's so casual about getting harassed by gang members.  : You got a problem with me, then you got a problem with Big Z. So unless you want to take on my furry friend, I suggest you greenies hop on out of here."Greenies?" I'm pretty sure that's racist. Black Vulkar: Little girl lucky she has big friend. The thugs know better than to start anything with a Wookiee who will happily rip your arms out of their sockets and beat you to death with them, so they wander off.  Aw, that's nice -- someone who doesn't immediately hate us. Maybe this girl isn't that bad after all, and since she apparently knows everyone around here she might also be able to help us get to the Undercity.  It actually is rather uncommon to meet a Twi'lek who speaks Basic (which is just the Star Wars name for English). Most of them speak Huttese, especially in this game. Zaalbar, of course, speaks Shyriiwook (which is the fancy name for Wookiee growls, and I'm a very sad individual for knowing that AND knowing how to spell it) with subtitles. I'm pretty sure this is the first time Wookiee speak is actually subtitled; Chewie's growls in the films certainly weren't and his family in the Holiday Special most definitely wasn't (which might have been a good thing, because I don't really want to know what Chewie's dad was saying while watching VR porn in that one scene).: It's not that strange. Most aliens can speak Basic, they just prefer to use their own language. But I grew up here on Taris so I just sort of got used to speaking the native tongue.: You showed a lot of guts dealing with those Vulkars, kid. You got a name? Not safe? You don't say. We kind of figured that out when we killed those fifty or so Vulkars on the way to this place. I'm sure we could handle a tour around Lower City, not that there's all that much to see.  : We just kind of fell in together. It ain't easy on your own here in the Lower City - everyone's always looking to push you around.: So we noticed. Still, you seem like an odd pair.: When I met up with Zaalbar it seemed like a good match. I knew we could look out for each other. With my street smarts and his muscle, we make a great team.Right. Let's ask Mission here some questions.  Let's just pretend I don't care about any of that stuff, I'd rather just find out how to get to the Undercity. Unfortunately, we can't ask about that, so I guess we could ask about Davik instead.  : I don't know much about space travel, but I hear that ship's fast enough to break the Sith blockade. Of course, this is all just second hand rumor.: Where would he keep it? Do you know?: If Davik does have a ship, he's got it locked in his estate. Nobody gets in there, except the people working for Davik and the Exchange.The Ebon Hawk, eh? If what we heard about the ship's speed is true, we might want to keep that in mind for later. Even if we find a way to his estate, I doubt Davik is just going to give us the ship so we can get out of here after finding Bastila, but maybe we can arrange something. I suppose we could ask her about the gangs next.  Alright, if they hang out at the Bek base it seems like we could also get in there and talk to this... Gadon, I think his name was. Maybe he could help us.  Gadon Thek. We'll seek him out, then. Mission also tells us how Brejik used to be a Hidden Bek and very close to Gadon, until he got angry about Gadon not stepping down after his accident and left the gang to join the Vulkars. None of this information is particularly relevant, but it's a nice bit of backstory at least. We don't bother asking about Calo Nord, because we already saw all we need to know about him. Since we can't ask about getting to the Undercity for some reason, let's just go and check out the Bek base.  No action? Mission, I'm pretty sure three people just got murdered in this room five minutes ago. That, and you yourself were just harassed by a bunch of Vulkar goons. Lower City, man. It's a rough place.   Yeah, about the Bek base? Could you maybe introduce us or...  ...Never mind then. In any event, our next stop is the Bek base, but first let's just see what the quest journal has to say. Might as well explore the rest of the cantina while we're here, too.  Okay. I'm pretty sure that's not supposed to happen. I hope the quest journal isn't going to be bugged forever.  Uh, sure. Moving on.  This charming fellow is Holdan. If you bother to sit through his  dialogue, he'll tell you that he works for Davik and that the Ebon Hawk is, in fact, a thing that exists. Looks like Mission was right. Holdan also gives us this bit of information. If what he is saying about those codes is true, getting off this planet just got a lot harder. Apparently, even Davik isn't able to get his hands on the codes, and it's pissing him off something fierce.  Bib here is an agent for an entertainment agency and is auditioning this dancer, but she can't do her audition without a dance partner. We'd help her out, but right at this moment we have more important things to worry about. If they're still here after we've found Bastila, I'll see what I can do.  That's enough screwing around, let's finally go to the Bek base and see if Gadon has anything for us.  Certainly not if we can't get past the guard. Lady, just a little while ago I killed a whole bunch of Vulkars right outside your base, and there is no way you didn't see that.  That's fair, I can understand why they wouldn't just let any yahoo walk in there. We eventually manage to convince the guard that we're not going to go in there to murder Gadon, so she lets us in.  Well, here we are. Gadon is the guy behind that desk on the other side of this room, and we make our way to him. You can talk to the random Beks walking around here, but they don't have much to say.  This, however, is Gadon's bodyguard Zaerdra, who makes sure nobody tries anything stupid.   : You're too trusting, Gadon. Brejik and his Vulkars want you dead. Anyone we don't know is a potential threat, and it's my job to make sure you're safe! : Do you want us to start attacking strangers on sight, Zaerdra - like the Vulkars do? I will never let it come to that! Now step aside and let them pass.: As you wish. [turns to us] You can speak to Gadon if you want, but I've got my eye on you! You try anything and you'll be vaporized before you can say "Vulkar spy"! : The problems with the Sith haven't helped things. Zaerdra seems to forget that I know how to look after myself! Now, how can I help you?.Hm. Gadon here is a lot nicer than you would expect a hardened biker gang boss to be. Speaking of bikes, I still haven't seen any around here, although some of the Beks have mentioned the upcoming swoop race. Anyway, we're going straight to business.   : They might be spies, Gadon! They might be working for the Sith!: Calm down, Zaerdra. If the Sith thought we knew anything useful they'd have a battalion of troops kicking down our door. No, I think this outworlder has her own agenda.Zaerdra really wants to get to shoot someone, doesn't she?   : I suppose I could tell you what I know. It's not like it could do any harm to me or my gang... but it might cause problems for the Vulkars, and that's okay in my book. The Vulkars stripped those pods clean within hours after they landed. It's too bad we didn't get there first, considering what my spies reported the Vulkars found.Surely he doesn't mean...?  We just can't catch a break today, can we? I guess we're going to break into the Vulkar base, kill everyone there and save Bastila, then.  : Normally the Vulkars would take a captured slave and sell them for a nice profit to Davik or an off-world slaver. But a Republic officer is no ordinary catch. : They still think Bastila's just a Republic officer. That could work to our advantage. Maybe she'll even figure out a way to escape from the Vulkar base on her own.: She's too valuable to leave with the Vulkar scum at the base. Brejik's probably got your Republic friend hidden away somewhere safe until the big swoop race. You'll never find her.: Swoop race? What does that have to do with it?: I'm afraid your friend has become a pawn in Brejik's game to take over the Lower City. He's offered her up as the Vulkars' share of the prize in the annual swoop gang race. By putting up such a valuable prize Brejik hopes to win the loyalty of some of the smaller gangs. Their numbers will allow him to finally destroy me and my followers. We've been doing okay against the Vulkars so far! But yeah, maybe Carth has a point.  I was afraid he'd say that. I can already see one minor problem with this plan.  Yeah. That. To be fair, from what I've seen no one else here has a swoop bike either, but there's at least a possibility they have those stashed away somewhere. To my knowledge, we don't. : I might be able to help you with this, if you'd be willing to help us. We both have something to gain here - and much to lose. : What are you proposing?: The swoop race is for the Lower City gangs only. I could sponsor you as a rider for the Hidden Beks this year. If you win the race, you'll win your friend's freedom. But first you have to do something for me. My mechanics have developed an accelerator for a swoop engine. A bike with the accelerator installed can beat any other swoop out there!So far, so good. What's the catch?  Oh. So, we're going to break into the Vulkar base which is most likely crawling with those idiots, kill everyone, and steal the accelerator back so we can prevent the Vulkars from cheating to win the swoop race and cheat to win it ourselves. I like this plan, let's do it. Except, well, there is another minor problem.  I mean, I doubt they'll just let us walk in there like you guys did.  : Mission? Gadon, you can't be serious! She's just a kid - how is she supposed to help them with this?: Mission's explored every step of every back alley in the Lower City. Plus she knows the Undercity sewers better than anyone. If anyone can get inside the Vulkar base, it's her. Last time we saw her, she was coming here.  : Your best bet is to look for her in the Undercity. But you'll need some way past the Sith guard post at the elevator.  We already saw how our meeting with the Sith guard here went, but for some reason the game doesn't let us acknowledge that.  Luckily, my gang ambushed one of the Sith patrols headed down to the Undercity. They never made it, and their security papers fell into my hands. Since we're working together now I suppose I could give them to you in exchange for your uniforms. With the security papers you won't need a disguise anyway.: What do you want with the Sith uniforms?: I like to be prepared. Eventually the Sith are going to try and drive us out of the Undercity. Sith disguises might give my people the edge we need in a crucial battle!So yeah, remember that walrus man who was being interrogated by the Sith about some missing uniforms? He works for the Hidden Beks, and he's supposed to tell you as much when you save him. I don't know why we didn't get that dialogue, maybe it was because we had the Sith uniform equipped or something.  Sure, it's not like we needed those anymore. By the way, this dialogue will mention uniforms in plural even in the vanilla game, where you only have one.  I think we're done here. We could ask him about the Sith, the Vulkars or his freaky eyes (which actually seem to have the exact same texture as Sera's eyes despite being cybernetic implants), but we've got more important things to do so we just say goodbye for now.  Oh, the journal's fixed. Good.  We can explore the Bek base, but there isn't much there. Just a bunch of locked doors and some underwhelming loot.  Before we go forward, we might want to check out these apartments. There are two apartment complexes in the Lower City, and exploring them is optional but quite worth your while. Now, I was going to try and fit the entire Lower City section in this update, but the text dumps with Mission and Gadon took up a good chunk of it and there's still so much left to cover that I'll cut it here. Next time, we will explore the Lower City apartments, kill a lot of people, and finally make our way to the Undercity. See you then. DMorbid fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Dec 20, 2015 |
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Dec 20, 2015 20:25
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If I remember right in the Calo Nord sequence, he throws the grenade and then the screen goes white. You then hear two shots and a second later three death groans. I imagined him icing the 3 Rodians with 2 shots. Also the dialog with the guy you get the uniforms from is different and so is the sith's If you aren't wearing sith armor. 
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Dec 21, 2015 00:40
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have you considered wooing the neko-jin character?
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Dec 21, 2015 00:50
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Up Circle posted:have you considered wooing the neko-jin character?
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Dec 21, 2015 01:00
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Doc Morbid posted:Oh yeah, they put that romance back in. I suppose I could show it off when we get there, it seems to be a fairly major bit of restored content after all. It'd still be an improvement over Carth. When was it removed? I suppose it was always a bit more muted and not as overt...but its not like Bastila had a sex scene either.
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Dec 21, 2015 01:10
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My understanding is that there was supposed to be more to it but Bioware cut it down to what we see in the released game. I may be entirely wrong about this. But yeah, we'll see how it goes once we get there in... 20 hours.
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Dec 21, 2015 01:28
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Nice to see this back. Lots of new character introductions here. Mission makes a good first impression here, giving the Black Vulkars exactly as much respect as they deserve. Zalbaar doesn't impress as much from a personality standpoint, but he's obviously a guy it's nice to have around. Canderous... okay, I agree with you on the voicework. But he never really impressed me for some reason. As for the Hidden Beks, it feels a bit odd that a group in their position could end up so cleanly the "good guys," but they definitely are. Is it possible to hash out all the details of what the plan is once you have the device now, or does that need to wait until later? I can't quite remember.
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Dec 21, 2015 02:36
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Just to be safe, let's discuss the full extent of the plan when we have the prototype accelerator. We've pretty much got all the information now as far as vanilla KotOR goes, but I don't know if K1RP introduces some wrinkles to the whole thing. Also, since the game doesn't show us any swoop gang war action, here's what that's supposed to look like:  The speeder bike level in the N64 Shadows of the Empire game was actually a swoop bike level as well. I'll have more to say about swoop bikes and their design in KotOR when we get to the big race.
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Dec 21, 2015 03:03
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Man, laying Taris out like this makes just how dull it is stand out even more. Also how convoluted. Get the thing to get the thing to maybe get a hint on what you're actually trying to do! Craziness.
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Dec 21, 2015 09:22
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You can actually keep the Sith armor, at least in the unpatched game, if you put it on Carth and remove him from the party before that conversation. It's totally useless for the rest of the game, of course, unless you want to go around looking like a Sith...
ChaoticGood fucked around with this message at 10:54 on Dec 21, 2015 |
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Dec 21, 2015 10:43
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CmdrKing posted:Man, laying Taris out like this makes just how dull it is stand out even more. Also how convoluted. Get the thing to get the thing to maybe get a hint on what you're actually trying to do! Craziness. Yeah, Taris is garbage. I like KOTOR and so do many people. I don't know anyone who actually likes playing through Taris, at least not more than once. even with the super-speed cheat, it's slow, it takes forever, and it's dumb. anyway Doc Morbid the arena and Bendak fights are cheesable - super cheesable - with grenades especially cryo grenades, if I remember right if you want to go that route. The only problem is the reward, uhh, isn't very helpful. But hey.
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Dec 21, 2015 19:49
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