I was playing the ROTS game for playstation and I hate to say it but I found the saber combat more... engaging because of the awesome manual blocking.

This is something that is missing from JA/JO and I was wondering if anyone feels the same.

I will admit that I never had a problem with it until I played ROTS and believe me, I'm a staunch PC gamer so I was even a little mad at myself for liking it.

I messaged Kurgan before posting this thread and he said that RazorAce was developing a mod for JA that changes the saber combat, I believe I read a thread on this a while ago... Kurgan was saying that Razor added manual blocking then took it out...

I guess I could PM him and find out though he is more than invited to join the discussion on what I find missing in JO/JA lightsaber combat.

Yes, about that.

OJP and MotF before that spent a lot of time on the saber system problem. In fact, you'll see several tome-sized threads in both of those forums about the saber systems.

Anyway, about manual blocking, my experience has been that it just doesn't work very well in JKA/JKO's fast paced saber combat simply because the player could have manually dodged the attack if they had the forsight to react. My work with OJP experimented with both manually directed (like in MB2) and button timed based parries/blocks and I didn't like the results for either.

Currently, OJP uses a autoblock/movement-based parry system, where the blocks are automatic, but players can do parries by moving into the attack while walking. I think that's the best solution I've seen so far.

If you're interested, you can download the latest OJP Enhanced beta from ojp.jediknight.net. OR if you want to try a manual blocking system, try www.moviebattles.com).