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Ahh, KOTOR. I still consider it one of the greats for this era, but... In hindsight, it’s also where the BioWare Standard Party trope really started to solidify with the rest of their RPGs going forward. That, and... Well, without getting into spoilers, the morality choices are fairly on the simplistic side (though not quite to the extent as, say, the Bethesda Fallout games).
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Dec 22, 2019 09:05
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The real explanation is that the PC went beyond blackout drunk with smuggled booze after they got off of their last shift, which explains why they need to have stuff that they should already know explained to them. 
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Dec 22, 2019 10:10
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Agreed on the Dark Side choices for most of this game being one of the things that aged the worst about it. As it turns out, being a dick for the sake of being a dick makes for a not particularly compelling character.
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Dec 22, 2019 22:22
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nine-gear crow posted:It kind of took BioWare till at least Mass Effect 2 to make the Dark Side of its morality slider interesting. Largely because it let you be a funny rear end in a top hat instead of just a complete rear end in a top hat. I mean, I do think that even this game has at least one genuinely decent (albeit completely optional) moral quandary later on. But that’s for another time, and I still agree that most of the rest of the Dark Side options are just being blandly evil.
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Dec 23, 2019 00:18
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“The Carth” of BioWare games, as I’ve come to codify it, is typically: -One of the very first party members. -The “gruff (youngish) veteran, but still good at heart” type. -Has some dark and tragic past that the narrative treats as mysterious... but the character feels like they’re practically tripping over themselves to spill the beans to your PC. -Widely derided for having a relatively shallow character development arc, usually as a consequence of having already experienced it during said dark and tragic past. Regalingualius fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Dec 27, 2019 |
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Dec 27, 2019 18:14
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And as it turns out, Atton has very good reasons (for him, at least) to want to stay on your PC’s good side regardless of what you choose to do.MightyPretenders posted:-Implying dealing with past tragedy isn't a good enough arc in itself. I don’t really disagree with you that in a vacuum, Carth isn’t the worst character by a long shot. It’s more that he’s the most visible example to a lot of people of how BioWare loves to keep reusing the same character archetypes for your party members with only the setting-specific details swapped out.
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Dec 27, 2019 20:21
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Granted, wasn’t this game also basically declared non-canon after the whole Legends dustup? Or is it “canon until it contradicts something more recent”?
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Dec 28, 2019 02:52
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BioWare didn’t get bought by EA until some time before ME2 (I forget if Dragon Age 1 was their last game pre-buyout). Though I could definitely see them doing a re-modernization of KOTOR as a way of trying to rekindle some goodwill after how badly Andromeda and Anthem flopped.
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Dec 28, 2019 22:15
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Holy poo poo, yeah, I legitimately had no idea he got that frisky with a female PC.  That’s... another bit of writing that really aged poorly.
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Dec 30, 2019 04:38
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*Cue techno remix*
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Dec 31, 2019 17:34
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Oof, I remember trying to save all of my levels on Taris for one run of this, but wound up having to give in a few dungeons from now when it turned out that having my party effectively down a person wasn’t particularly viable for some spots.
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Jan 1, 2020 17:22
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Actually, mechanics question: can you potentially lose out on an attribute point if you unlock your prestige class at a weird level? I know D&D 5th usually doles them out every 4 levels in a class, but I don’t know off-hand how frequently you get your points in this system.
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Jan 1, 2020 19:56
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...you know, maybe that really would explain some things. I remember not doing much of anything but spamming Critical Strike my first time playing through as a kid who had no clue what all of the feats and skills did, and I still managed to more or less breeze my way through. Ironically, Taris was probably the only point where I faced any actually significant difficulty.
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Jan 2, 2020 07:03
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I don’t mean to sound like I’m making GBS threads on this game, but... Yeah, it admittedly does have a lot of warts with the benefits of hindsight and close to 20 years of improved RPG development practices. And with a screenshot LP, you’re also missing out on the “alien speech” NPCs just playing a loop of the same one or two sentences of gibberish.
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Jan 4, 2020 05:31
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Cooked Auto posted:I remember them bragging hard about inventing a new language for Jade Empire and speaking to experts about it and so on. I’m reminded of the Pandaren from Warcraft. In-universe, their language is pretty clearly based off of Chinese, and there’s even a kind of poignant bit of background lore explaining that it isn’t actually their language, but the language of their ancient enslavers who violently suppressed any of their subjects’ culture. In-game... Any chat in Pandaren appears as “om nom nom nom” to anyone who doesn’t understand it. 
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Jan 4, 2020 17:51
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To be honest, I love Peragus’s horror atmosphere. I’m not gonna defend Telos, though.
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Jan 5, 2020 21:28
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And here’s where everything starts really going to hell with Taris. This whole sequence of dungeons within dungeons that lead to other dungeons, combined with the sheer amount of annoying-rear end enemies before you get access to the really good combat options, really marks the nadir of the game to me. If KOTOR were made today, at a minimum I’d figure that this whole Undercity area would be left on the cutting room floor, and you’d be streamlined directly from the Lower City to the sewers where Zaalbar is being imprisoned. And I guess Bastilla’s story would be minorly rewritten to something like “she was badly wounded in her crash landing in the Upper City, used the last of her energy to escape to what she thought would be a safe place to recuperate away from prying eyes, and had the horrendous misfortune to run into the Vulkars while she was half-dead and running on fumes”. Maybe also include a bit about how she still managed to take down half of her attackers before she was finally overwhelmed to establish her credibility as a highly-skilled Jedi that your party wants back on their side ASAP.
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Jan 7, 2020 04:53
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Taris still takes a good few hours even if you just bum rush it and only do the barest minimum to advance the plot, IIRC, but it’s not even close to half the game. It just drags on for so long that you wouldn’t be blamed for thinking that it does.
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Jan 7, 2020 06:15
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If I remember right, you also have to put the grenade in first, because the moment you put in the scent, you trigger the flag for the cutscene.
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Jan 7, 2020 19:27
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Are they still on
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Jan 8, 2020 09:47
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Well, Carth’s 2 for 2 for planets getting glassed by orbital bombardment by his mentor. But yeah, now that it’s no longer a spoiler, this is why I have so much difficulty with doing a replay of this game: you now have the knowledge that not a single thing you did beyond freeing Bastila mattered one iota, because everyone you met is dead. Even the people you helped in the Undercity only had their deaths prolonged and dragged out, going by the MMO’s canon.
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Jan 11, 2020 22:48
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By TOR’s accounting, they did! It’s just that (I forget which) either the bombardment irreparably damaged the Promised Land, or they got through it just fine, but it turned out that the reports about how plentiful it was were unfortunately exaggerated. Either way, the survivors ended up succumbing to a resurgence of the rakghoul disease.
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Jan 12, 2020 03:24
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Night10194 posted:I don't think the Jedi ever once say what they think should have happened to stop the Mandalorians. They just kinda go 'Well see, Revan and Malak happened! So we were right to do nothing!' without a hint of thinking about it further. Yeah, it doesn’t really get looked at too much beyond what we’ve already seen in this game, but it’s one of the major themes and driving questions of KOTOR 2: did the Jedi massively gently caress up by deciding to sit back and wait even after the war finally got started, or were they really correct to wait for the “true threat” to reveal itself to them? And though it’s kind of set dressing in this game, the Mandalorian War is practically a character in and of itself, with how much it continues to affect the entire cast.
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Jan 12, 2020 20:27
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Xarn posted:You can be a gun jedi in KotOR 2. Ergo, it is a superior game poo poo, you can be an outright unarmed monk and still do pretty decently with the right feats and powers.
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Jan 12, 2020 21:26
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Doc M posted:I'm sure I'll take Burst of Speed soon enough, I've just been prioritizing other stuff (speaking of which, god help you if you forget to take Force Immunity like I did once JJ was a blaster Jedi. IIRC, the build’s capstone was dual-wielding a particular pair of pistols that already had a higher than average crit range, and were then further modded to meet the crit cap (somewhere around 75%, I think?), and then just used whatever the equivalent to Flurry for ranged weapons is called.
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Jan 12, 2020 21:51
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). While the default slow running speed does get annoying when you're trying to get things done, it's never really bothered me that much. I guess I just don't mind a more leisurely pace.|
Hell, this thread’s gotten me to develop an itch to dust off KOTOR 2 and do something off the beaten path. I know that I mentioned that unarmed builds are more or less viable in that game, but... would anyone happen to have any pointers for it? 
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Jan 13, 2020 02:46
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:It's a shame how lame all the dark side options are. A manipulator like Sheev? A bruiser like Vader? A sneaky assassin like Maul? There are some side quests where you can get a bit creatively evil, including one on this very planet, but by and large you’re basically constrained to being a dickwad for no particular reason.
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Jan 13, 2020 04:06
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Night10194 posted:The thing I always took away from Star Wars is that the Jedi philosophy makes people insanely emotionally brittle. They seem to fall and redeem at the drop of a hat outside of the original trilogy. I’m starting to think that these Jedi guys kind of suck at living up to their overly-strict ideals. Really, though, it’s not hard to see why they’ve been having so many defections from their ranks, considering they’re basically expected to be emotionless robots who have the power to single-handedly change the battlefield. If anything, it’s a wonder that they haven’t had to contend with a Revan/Malak kind of rebellion any sooner... Though I’ve admittedly never been much of one for SW Legends lore.
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Jan 14, 2020 00:20
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And as we’ll see later on, the Sith creed (at least on it’s face reading) is all about self-affirmation. Sure, in practice it winds up being used as a justification to be an unrelenting dickhead, but it’s easy to see how it appeals to vulnerable Jedi who think that they’ve committed an unforgivable taboo for not being as arbitrarily perfect at all times as the Order impresses upon them from a young age.
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Jan 14, 2020 05:25
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zakharov posted:I have never managed to persuade the dads to get along in this quest. Must be one hell of a persuade check. Yeah, this is one of the few side quests where you can be a real devious bastard if you play your cards right. If you bullshit it just right, you can wind up driving the lovebirds apart, then start a chain reaction of the families killing each other until only the droids are left. Though, yeah, I usually just wound up with the mostly good ending where the lovers hosed off to the Enclave while leaving their fathers to stew in their feud.
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Jan 14, 2020 21:52
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I’m also reminded of the central concept of Fable 3, where you find out that the reason the evil, tyrannical king was behaving that way was because he was attempting to prepare the kingdom for an invasion from a far worse evil... Just as you get thrust into his throne.
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Jan 15, 2020 23:31
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To be honest, I figure that Zaalbar or T3 win at being the least memorable member of the party. ...Okay, yeah, T3 edges him out just because opening that one door on Taris is literally the only bit of plot importance that T3 has in this entire game.
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Jan 17, 2020 10:21
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CommissarMega posted:Yeah, for all that HK's a one-note character here, it's amusingly written, which I suppose is the best one can usually say about Bioware companions. It also provides a handy jumping-off point for how he is in KotOR 2, so there's that too! And in 2, he has some of the greatest serious and comedic companion dialogues across both games.
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Jan 18, 2020 01:31
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At least we can all agree that they had more personality and memorability than Jason from ME2, right?
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Jan 18, 2020 02:40
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I want to say that Dark Jedi are those who started with the Order but drifted away, while Sith were always Dark Siders from the get-go... But I’m 50/50 on whether something or someone from Korriban contradicts that definition.
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Jan 18, 2020 06:43
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Especially when they’re the same superiors who helped mold and create the two Sith lords responsible for the current state of galactic war.
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Jan 21, 2020 09:54
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Aww, looks like youtube finally removed the full video of my favorite bit of voice acting from Kevin Michael Richardson: the Guardian from Samurai Jack.
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Jan 24, 2020 21:41
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Yeah, the whole “single-biome planets” trope has always been one of those little things that bugged me with Star Wars as a whole. Like, I can at least buy this game’s explanation of how Tattooine got to be the way it is by obviously very unnatural means, but places like Hoth, Kashyyyk, and more just naturally being that way just strains belief in these stories about space samurai with magic powers.
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Jan 25, 2020 19:52
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Huh, and here I thought ME was basically dead in the water after how badly Andromeda went down.
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Jan 27, 2020 01:42
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Deadmeat5150 posted:I actually liked Andromeda, never understood why it got shat on so hard. I’ll be honest, I just never felt the same “spark” with Andromeda that I did with the trilogy. Just couldn’t rear end myself to care about it for very long. 
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Jan 27, 2020 02:41
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