Where did K.O.T.O.R II fail your expectations and how should they fix
this in K.O.T.O.R III??

KotOR failed to meet my expectations in regards to the influence system and how party members would be affected by influence and alignment. I thought that we would get many more party NPC options with availability affected by choices made by the player.

Picture a DS PC on his way to taking over the Galaxy. He picks up an impressionable young force adept with real promise. Over time the apprentice-in-training decides that this isn't what he really wanted and bails. Meanwhile, you've finally pursaded another party member (ala palpy) that they've been given a raw deal and the only way to carve out their niche is to take what they want.

The next time you play, you choose LS and apprentice #1 flourishes under your guidance and apprentice #2 is just some NPC that you spoke to briefly in a cantina but never had the option to join your party etc, etc.

It failed me by the small amount of giant battles, the only two great battles was the mandalorian fight, and the onderon attack. And I wanted the characters when they die by a lightsaber or sword, would fall in half or decapitated or missin a limb depending on what move u do, like master critical strike cuts ur head off. And they give again another useless character, first one was mission, and now bao-dur. And u dont get to choose ur age,nationality, like 13 heads for 1 nationality instead of 2 or 6, height, , race, and a wider selection of class's, like soldier,scout,scoundrel,jedi sentinal,jedi guardian, jedi consulor, jedi watchman, bounty hunter, jedi master, sith lord, ect.

I'm with Achilles, that form of an influence system would have ruled!

yeah, the concept of the influence system had lots of potential, but they really didn't use it as well as they could have.

as for what i expected? a coherent ending.

i know, i know, we've all heard enough bitching about the end of the game, but everytime i see that scene with g0-t0 and the remote that doesnt go anywhere or make any sense it kinda ruins a lot. malachor just doesn't make any sense, and while i can accept that sometimes things get cut from a game, you need to do a good job cutting them. don't cut half of something and leave the other half in. they also did this with HK talking about how to find the HK50 factory, which never gets followed up on. so i realize that the remote's sequence on malachor was related to the HK factory which was cut, so the party where HK saves the day with his HK51s had to be cut, since the HK51s were cut, so why not have just cut the whole remote sequence in the first place, in stead of leaving it without an ending? especially since that part is chore to play thru in the first place. Also, an ending where the choices i made actually made a difference would be nice.[/rant]

however, i really liked the rest of the game. i loved every single moment of it, all the way up until i got to malachor.

Before playing the game I remember reading / hearing that the DS quest in TSL rocked. How far from the truth that was. You miss some important plot points, going DS just doesn't make any sense and you never feel like a Sith - there is no real DS storyline, just an LS one that you can happen to undertake as a Sith.

In Kotor 3 I want LS and DS to be more distinguishable from each other in terms of how the story unfolds. I want the DS quest to actually be worth playing in its own right and be coherent. And I want to feel like a Sith, i.e. be able to kick annoying goody-goodies out of my party, train dark apprentices who actually become evil, do more than just kill people for a few measly extra credits, and actually have a quest where you try to take over the galaxy - even if that means the PC has to die at the end if the Sith taking over the galaxy is incompatible with the Star Wars timeline or whatnot. And, like Achilles said, do some Palpy-style manipulating while you're at it.

However, despite the fact that my comments below sound pretty negative, I still enjoyed the game and I think it was well above the average game but after playing Kotor 1, I guess my expectations were just too high... (and after all, the title of the thread is Where did K.O.T.O.R II fail your expectations )


1. Party members and The influence system


I missed the party members side quests from K1. In K2, all you had to do is take your npcs out of the Ebon hawk a few times to get the proper lvl of influence and talk to them to turn them into Jedi or gain a few attribute points. In order to gain or loose enough influence on them to get answers other than " I don't have anything to say " , you had to do constant party swapping and always chose the same answers and get the same replies from the npcs. I also prefer not to have a full team of Jedi and have the feeling that Jedi are rare and not so common. 7 jedi, including the pc, was a bit too much IMHO.


Apart Kreia which was the most developped character in both Kotor 1 and 2, the other party members were pretty bland, especially Mandalore and HK, who lost all their personalities since K1 (I missed the K1 humor!). Visas may have a nice ass for you guys but she had nothing to say apart a few sentences and "my life for yours".

Also, having to go through the same dialogues 10 times or so just in case you could unlock one more sentence got pretty heavy. I hope they will fix that! A combined system of influence and level based dialogues could be the way to go.

I think K1 was on the right track with dialogue options such as convincing Mission to forget about her brother, bringing Bastila to break the Jedi Code (there is no love... :p ), and the only thing that was missing was the possibility to change your party members alignment. Achilles idea sound great too!


2. The story

I hope K3 will have a more cohesive story.

I think the ideas for Kotor 2 were very good but the writers were not as good as the K1 writers and it's not just a time issue.

The story started strong on Peragus but I soon got lost. Hehe there's the ending of course on which I won't comment as this have been overly discussed but I think that even if the ending would have been completed with the cut material, the writers were not as good as for K1. I liked the idea of Kreia manipulating you but I found that this continuous "wound " and "echo" in the force speech was kinda weird (a bit too "esoteric" to my taste if I might say). I also hated the fact that you could totally miss just about everything concerning the main plot if you didn't talk to your party members in a certain way. That's fine for side quests but for the main plot of a +-50 hours story driven RPG it doesn't make sense. You can say that K1 was simple but I just replayed it recently and I was amazed at how the writers were able to tie about every piece of the story together.



3. The areas

The areas were a let down to me. In K1, areas were lively, the cities full of people. In K2, they re-used two planets and cut them by half and there was almost nothing to do in comparison with Kotor 1. As for other areas, just compare Taris and Manaan to Telos/Onderon/Nar Shadaa/Onderon...the Kotor 2 cities felt quite empty in comparison to Kotor 1. I loved how Dxun looked but it was pretty linear.

They re-used just about everything from K1 (textures - which in many case have a lower res in K2-, npcs, placeables, items and even some areas. For those who mod this game, when you browse the game with Kotor tool, this is even more obvious).

Of course, I want more optional side quests that are not necessarily tied to the main plot! K1 had a variety of bounties, smuggling, assasination, investigation missions and that was good. I hope that for k3 they will give us a reason to come back to a planet once the main quest is finished!

And finally being constantly put in control of npcs I didn't chose, removed part of the feeling of playing a rpg and added to the linearity of the plot. I found that taking control of T3 for brief periods on Peragus was a nice touch at the beginning of the story. However, later on this kind of sequence started to bug me. On Nar Shadaa, once the meeting with the exchange was engaged, you were stuck in a sequence of events for a couple of hours over which you had about no control until the escape from G0-T0's ship... and the end sequence was frustrating: you go to Dantoine, you meet the Jedi Masters, you are sent back to the Ebon Hawk, which goes to Telos, then the Ravager and Malachor, all of this with no control at all and being unable to speak to your party members in the Ebon hawk. I wouldn't mind something like that in an FPS but not in a relatively short RPG like Kotor.


4. what to expect for k3

I don't know. For those like me who feel like the kotor games were are bit short and who would like to see more character development (I am not talking about having tons of appearances to chose from), longer storyline, bigger areas, I think we will see less and less of this. People seem to always ask for better graphics, sound (including hiring famous actors at $$$ fees), animations, etc and gaming companies seem to put emphasis on technology more than anything else. This is very expensive in terms of time and money. Also, the other thing is that consoles have a bigger audience (per example, 80% of the sales of Kotor 1 were for the xbox) which is understandable given that their price is much lower than that of a PC and people don't have to worry about updates: it's plug and play. The downside is that consoles have more limitations than a PC....

hehe I guess now I need to find a thread about what I liked the most in TSL :xp: I could write a lot in that respect too :D

Two major places that failed my expectations were:
1. The influence system. It's a great idea, but it doesn't work, at least not for me. Firstly, every time I get a load screen the NPC's alignment changes. Secondly, the NPC's don't react according to their alignment, only by a preset script that gives them only one reaction.
2. The storyline. The makers tried to create a much bigger game. When they couldn't get it done in the time allotted by LucasArts they cut pieces out. When they made the cuts they didn't fix the rest of the game they just left the plot holes. Besides that, the cutting left out story details that would have been very useful.

Darth333 summed it up for me :P

1. Party members and The influence system


I missed the party members side quests from K1. In K2, all you had to do is take your npcs out of the Ebon hawk a few times to get the proper lvl of influence and talk to them to turn them into Jedi or gain a few attribute points. In order to gain or loose enough influence on them to get answers other than " I don't have anything to say " , you had to do constant party swapping and always chose the same answers and get the same replies from the npcs. I also prefer not to have a full team of Jedi and have the feeling that Jedi are rare and not so common. 7 jedi, including the pc, was a bit too much IMHO.

I agree totally with this.

Also, having to go through the same dialogues 10 times or so just in case you could unlock one more sentence got pretty heavy. I hope they will fix that! A combined system of influence and level based dialogues could be the way to go.

This annoyed me very much, it really does need to be improved.

The areas were a let down to me. In K1, areas were lively, the cities full of people. In K2, they re-used two planets and cut them by half and there was almost nothing to do in comparison with Kotor 1. As for other areas, just compare Taris and Manaan to Telos/Onderon/Nar Shadaa/Onderon...the Kotor 2 cities felt quite empty in comparison to Kotor 1. I loved how Dxun looked but it was pretty linear.

I agree to some extent but I did think that Onderon was a good planet, the rest (especially Nar Shadaa which had lots of potential) could be improved IMO.

Darth 333, has everything that I want as well.

I pretty much agree with everything that was said as well, especially with the lack of differences between the DS and LS games. For me, it was disappointing that playing either way felt exactly the same.

I'd also like to see more interactions between the player character and the other NPCs and among the NPCs themselves. I think there needs to be more of a sense that you're playing within a "living world" were all the characters are doing something, regardless of whether they're in your party at the moment.

For instance, maybe the LS/DS aligned characters have disagreements among themselves about how your mission is proceeding and they decide to bring their arguments to you now and again. I just want to see something more than a bunch of NPCs sitting in a corner staring at the ceiling every time I re-board the EH...

The Influence System: I don't want to be blocked from learning huge chunks of NPC backstory because someone doesn't like the way I do business. Let me torture 'em, or get 'em drunk, or catch 'em in a weak moment, or whatever. It could unfold totally differently and maybe it's harder, but it should still be there. My party NPCs should not become untalkative lumps just because I decided give money to a beggar (or the like). I guess I really don't want my actions to have consequences that involve closing off parts of the game. Consequences, yes. Closing off parts of the game (including learning backstory), no. That just makes me want to dive for a walkthrough, and that's not fun.

KotOR I Tie-Ups: An important aspect of TSL was getting to see the KotOR I folks again. By being coy about this, they made it so I was playing for the "reward" of those breadcrumbs, instead of learning about the new NPCs. I DO want new PC/NPCs. However, it would also kick serious butt if I could pick 1-3 of the old boys (my choice of who, not theirs like in TSL!). They'd have to have new facets to uncover, of course. Then I'd be more interested in my current party -- I'd be focused on the new story and the new party dynamic because characters I know and love are part of it.

KotOR II Character Arcs: They really needed to be better. I really liked the sidequests and stuff in KotOR I. The fact that I could help each of them in a meaningful way made me care about them more. And not just, "let's talk about your personal angst", but something I could actually DO for them. I wanted that out of KotOR II, but it just never really materalised. This, combined with the last point, meant that I didn't care so much about TSL NPCs.

The Romance Crap and Endings: I'm a sucker for the romance stuff. Sue me. The lack of ANY resolution in the romance department SUCKED. I spend 80 hours (or whatever), and am just starting to finally become interested in the story, and then OMGWTFBBQ! The game is over, but the story didn't end. Not the party members' stories. Not the PC's story. None of it. Not even a suspense-filled cliffhanger ending! But we all know about that, so I won't gripe any more than this.

basically what Darth333 said... this might seem a bit odd but the thing which annoyed me most was that the Sith Marauders in the Trayus Academy were the same skins as the K1 Taris Cantina NPCs

Totally agree with everything chaleur said. Well exlpained

what anoyed me the most is that when i play ds i felt more like an uncontolable thug than a master manipulater which was kinda realy anoyin and the bit at the end with spolier



3 jedi dieing jedi wouldve had to question who bruaght u back from no force and then attack the sith i thought that bit was just gay