KOTOR was not a great game. There, I said it. You move too slowly. Everything is too slow, but it’s very obvious in a couple areas, and it doesn’t show you where to go, so you do a lot of wandering. I have little respect for a game that does not respect my time. There’s also a bug where, during an encounter on Tattooine (the desert planet featured heavily in the OG Star Wars, and The Phantom Menace), you come out of a cave and a bad guy is waiting for you outside. You’re meant to walk up and that triggers the battle. Even if you don’t approach directly, you’re forced to engage as he has a wide hit circle. Enter it, and the event is triggered. Well, the circle does not cover the entire area. Hug the wall (I went below him) and you can avoid the encounter altogether. And he just stares at you disapprovingly. Look dude, I am a Jedi, I do not fight if I don’t have to, and if you’re gonna glare at me, that’s not a cause for me to draw my Lightsaber.
Avoiding combat with bosses isn’t a bug and shouldn’t be treated like one. OP’s avatar comes from Deus Ex (2000), a game where you can famously avoid boss fights. Walton Simons, the primary antagonist you can actually shoot (Bob Page is the real villain, but you can only indirectly attack him, and only in the finale) (and this isn’t a spoiler, the two of them are conspiring in the opening clip), can be avoided during the first fight (in the Ocean Lab) before the final fight with him (at Area 51). Even then, you don’t need to actually kill him, just get away. He’ll stay in his area if you run far enough. (Of course, the real OG DX players place a LAM — a proximity mine that can be stuck on walls — on the earth mover Simons spawns in front of, killing him before you ever get to him. He spawns, he dies, he continues to taunt you from beyond the grave (because that conversation is hard coded) and you walk through his bloody mess on your way out. Old games rewarded ingenuity like that, even if it wasn’t intended by the developers.
So anyway, despite all that, KOTOR still stands as a classic, because the story/writing is just that damn good. I would never play it again. I like that it’s been ported to modern platforms and I enjoy hearing about younger fans going through it for the first time, but I’d never put myself through the Kashyyyk (forest) level or the underwater level ever again.
Civilly expressed opinion. No annoying “if you like this you’re stupid and everything wrong with gaming today” ad hominem attacks, just an opinion. I’m fine with your comment and upvoted you, but I wonder if you are getting downvoted because this post was intended for fans and this is a Debbie Downer to them (not sure), or if because a lot of fans clicked and are reflexively downvoting things they disagree with.
I don’t care about votes and you shouldn’t either (you being the royal you, meaning everyone). Lemmy may be based around the concepts of Reddit, but we don’t need to adopt the bad parts.
The way mine is set up, I see the vote buttons, but I don’t see the numbers. At all. You could kinda set Reddit up this way, but most people didn’t. It works a lot better here. Don’t let the opinions of others tell you how to think. Only the words. Votes are easy. Having an opinion takes more work. I think that’s what we should build Lemmy on.
Anyway, no, I love KOTOR, I’m just saying it isn’t a great game and it had a lot of flaws, but the good parts make me look back on it more fondly. So it’s greater than the sum of its parts. And/or the writing mattered more to me over the years. Take your pick, either is valid.
I’m currently playing Mass Effect (also BioWare) and I’m seeing some of the same time-wasting tropes, but I think they’re done a bit better. To be fair I am playing the Legendary Edition, so those super long elevator rides can now be skipped, and if you don’t, they’re much shorter. And other fixes as well — the Mako vehicle is no longer ass to drive, and you get full XP for shooting things with it, no more taking a target down to a sliver, then getting out to finish the job so you get all your XP.
I wonder if KOTOR might do with a Legendary Edition. Were it not for the Jedi Survivor games, I’d say there’s room for a good Star Wars game. Right now we have those, the second one still being reasonably new. But we also have so few good Star Wars games (and fewer good Star Trek games, though some might say Mass Effect is unofficial Star Trek), it would be welcomed.
Yeah, Deus Ex is great in terms of flexibility. Although even when I first played it, I did wish the maps were much larger and that there were lore/world-building side quests.
No idea about KOTOR mods. I did play on PC when I played it. (I think it was also on PS1? PS2?)
Might be something to make it work better with modern hardware/OSes, but as far as how moddable the game is, depends on how it was made. Bethesda games, for example (and by contrast) are super moddable because the Gamebryo/Creation engine is super old and well documented — oh, and there’s an official tool to build for it. Same tool they use to make the games. And can be used to make entire games — Enderal being a case in point.
Deus Ex was moddable because we could unpack the DeusEx.u file and edit certain things. One mod I used reduced jump height by about 25% or thereabouts, making some traversal previously possible, impossible, so you had to find another way. I do not believe that mod allowed soft locking of the game (e.g. trapping yourself) but it did make things a little more challenging. Not sure what the point was now, though (it did other things). The best mod in my opinion was Shifter, which set out to fix a bunch of things. Most memorable to me were the unique versions of weapons, like the Magnum 10mm handgun found on Lebedev’s jet.
So I’m somewhat familiar with modding games (mostly as a user, though), and my answer for KOTOR is… it would depend. ;)
KOTOR was not a great game. There, I said it. You move too slowly. Everything is too slow, but it’s very obvious in a couple areas, and it doesn’t show you where to go, so you do a lot of wandering. I have little respect for a game that does not respect my time. There’s also a bug where, during an encounter on Tattooine (the desert planet featured heavily in the OG Star Wars, and The Phantom Menace), you come out of a cave and a bad guy is waiting for you outside. You’re meant to walk up and that triggers the battle. Even if you don’t approach directly, you’re forced to engage as he has a wide hit circle. Enter it, and the event is triggered. Well, the circle does not cover the entire area. Hug the wall (I went below him) and you can avoid the encounter altogether. And he just stares at you disapprovingly. Look dude, I am a Jedi, I do not fight if I don’t have to, and if you’re gonna glare at me, that’s not a cause for me to draw my Lightsaber.
Avoiding combat with bosses isn’t a bug and shouldn’t be treated like one. OP’s avatar comes from Deus Ex (2000), a game where you can famously avoid boss fights. Walton Simons, the primary antagonist you can actually shoot (Bob Page is the real villain, but you can only indirectly attack him, and only in the finale) (and this isn’t a spoiler, the two of them are conspiring in the opening clip), can be avoided during the first fight (in the Ocean Lab) before the final fight with him (at Area 51). Even then, you don’t need to actually kill him, just get away. He’ll stay in his area if you run far enough. (Of course, the real OG DX players place a LAM — a proximity mine that can be stuck on walls — on the earth mover Simons spawns in front of, killing him before you ever get to him. He spawns, he dies, he continues to taunt you from beyond the grave (because that conversation is hard coded) and you walk through his bloody mess on your way out. Old games rewarded ingenuity like that, even if it wasn’t intended by the developers.
So anyway, despite all that, KOTOR still stands as a classic, because the story/writing is just that damn good. I would never play it again. I like that it’s been ported to modern platforms and I enjoy hearing about younger fans going through it for the first time, but I’d never put myself through the Kashyyyk (forest) level or the underwater level ever again.
Civilly expressed opinion. No annoying “if you like this you’re stupid and everything wrong with gaming today” ad hominem attacks, just an opinion. I’m fine with your comment and upvoted you, but I wonder if you are getting downvoted because this post was intended for fans and this is a Debbie Downer to them (not sure), or if because a lot of fans clicked and are reflexively downvoting things they disagree with.
I don’t care about votes and you shouldn’t either (you being the royal you, meaning everyone). Lemmy may be based around the concepts of Reddit, but we don’t need to adopt the bad parts.
The way mine is set up, I see the vote buttons, but I don’t see the numbers. At all. You could kinda set Reddit up this way, but most people didn’t. It works a lot better here. Don’t let the opinions of others tell you how to think. Only the words. Votes are easy. Having an opinion takes more work. I think that’s what we should build Lemmy on.
Anyway, no, I love KOTOR, I’m just saying it isn’t a great game and it had a lot of flaws, but the good parts make me look back on it more fondly. So it’s greater than the sum of its parts. And/or the writing mattered more to me over the years. Take your pick, either is valid.
I’m currently playing Mass Effect (also BioWare) and I’m seeing some of the same time-wasting tropes, but I think they’re done a bit better. To be fair I am playing the Legendary Edition, so those super long elevator rides can now be skipped, and if you don’t, they’re much shorter. And other fixes as well — the Mako vehicle is no longer ass to drive, and you get full XP for shooting things with it, no more taking a target down to a sliver, then getting out to finish the job so you get all your XP.
I wonder if KOTOR might do with a Legendary Edition. Were it not for the Jedi Survivor games, I’d say there’s room for a good Star Wars game. Right now we have those, the second one still being reasonably new. But we also have so few good Star Wars games (and fewer good Star Trek games, though some might say Mass Effect is unofficial Star Trek), it would be welcomed.
I wonder what the mod scene is like for KOTOR.
Yeah, Deus Ex is great in terms of flexibility. Although even when I first played it, I did wish the maps were much larger and that there were lore/world-building side quests.
No idea about KOTOR mods. I did play on PC when I played it. (I think it was also on PS1? PS2?)
Might be something to make it work better with modern hardware/OSes, but as far as how moddable the game is, depends on how it was made. Bethesda games, for example (and by contrast) are super moddable because the Gamebryo/Creation engine is super old and well documented — oh, and there’s an official tool to build for it. Same tool they use to make the games. And can be used to make entire games — Enderal being a case in point.
Deus Ex was moddable because we could unpack the DeusEx.u file and edit certain things. One mod I used reduced jump height by about 25% or thereabouts, making some traversal previously possible, impossible, so you had to find another way. I do not believe that mod allowed soft locking of the game (e.g. trapping yourself) but it did make things a little more challenging. Not sure what the point was now, though (it did other things). The best mod in my opinion was Shifter, which set out to fix a bunch of things. Most memorable to me were the unique versions of weapons, like the Magnum 10mm handgun found on Lebedev’s jet.
So I’m somewhat familiar with modding games (mostly as a user, though), and my answer for KOTOR is… it would depend. ;)
Pretty extensive. I had a few gigs of kotor/2 mods at one points
Might have to try playing it with mods. I’ve never actually played KOTOR, but as a fan of CRPGs, I have of course heard of it.
the restored content mod for tsl is pretty great