Knights of the old Republic - Discussion Thread

[Usul]

So here I come with my all-time-favourite game. Has anyone here on CWF tried this awesome RPG from Bioware?
If yes, please feel free to post here your favourite characters, combos, force powers, quests or planets or post here if you're looking for help or want to share funny moments, easter eggs etc.

I must admit I made a dozen runs through the game, the plot was really sweeping:

Set 4000 years before the STAR-WARS-movies, the Republic is once again threatened. Five years before the game starts, the Mandalorians have begun to attack planets in the outer rim belonging to the Republic. Grown in strength they seemed to overrun the Republic completely helpless. The Republic turned towards the Jedi Council in search for help but saw help refused. Though, some Jedi with Revan and Malak as their leaders, rejected the Coucil's attitude and decided to help the Republic...

Revan - apparently a leader - joined the war with the renegate Jedi and achieved a draw with the Mandalorians due to his strategical abilities before battling them back and destroying them in the final battle on Malachor V. Revan and Malak were the heroes but instead of returning to the main worlds, they left with an unknown goal.

Months passed and people feared the two Jedi had died in the realm beyond the known galaxy, but they returned...
Indeed the two heroes had turned to the Dark Side and had become Sith. Heading a huge starfleet, they began to attack the Republic they shortly had saved.

The weakened Republic had no opposition and Darth Revan was about to take over the galaxy when the Jedi Council decided to put Darth Revan into an ambush. Bastila and two other Jedi tried to capture the Dark Lord of the Sith.

When Malak, Revan's apprentice noticed the ambush of his master, he fired on Revan's ship, Darth Revan was betrayed by his pupil and died. The Jedi ambush-commano somehow escaped and reported to the Council of what had happened...
But Revan's death didn't change anything, Malak became the Dark Lord of the Sith and continued the war with even more brutality.
The Republic is about to collapse when the game begins...

[Scythe]

I've played through the game once with every starting character class, of each gender, and several more times with a male scout. I, uhm, like seducing Bastila... Seducing Juhani with female characters was also neat. I have now reached the point where I feel that there's nothing left for me to come back to, though.

My favorite way to play the game is to pump all my skills to maximum all the time, so I always go for max Intelligence.

I always keep my starting level at a maximum of 5, so I can do, uhm, neat things later in the game. Non-spoiler?

Some good things about this game:

-Two distinct paths. Sometimes it's GOOD to be BAD, though generally speaking I prefer the high road.

-Epic. Star Wars should be epic.

-Quality production. Speech is excellent, graphics were consistently good for the time, script awesome.

-Customizing lightsabers was a good idea, though crystals were imbalanced.

Points of badness:

-Interaction with your party was too limited. It seemed promising, but amounted to "speak to me each time you level."

-Set an even longer time ago... No stormtroopers. Star Wars without stormtroopers is... less Star Wars. A Star Wars RPG during the Rebellion/Empire era would really make my heart flutter. The shooters (Jedi Knight) are decent, but RPGs are better!

-Lightsabers and Jedi completely obsolete every other weapon/class in the game. Sure, lightsabers are superior weapons, but I thought it a design problem that whenever I tried putting non-jedi in my party, I soon realized I'd be much better off with the real thing. Pumping Zaalbar's strength could make him a very good melee fighter, but that was just a jedi without force powers, so still inferior.

-The endgame was tiresome, one prolonged battle session.

To be perfectly honest, I much prefer KOTOR II, since it improves on most of these points, good and bad, plus it's much darker. Dark always makes my toes tingle. Pity it was a bit rushed. I haven't played it as much either, but I intend to... at some point.

[Usul]

Interesting to hear that. I never took a female char, as in RPGs I always choose male chars. When I started the game for the second time I simply couldn't imagine playing a female due to the storyline so I haven't seduced Juhani or killed Carth in the end yet.

My first run was with a horribly unbalanced Scout/Jedi Sentinel. I really had trouble finishing the game and the fights against Darth Bandon or the second level on the Star Forge were quite hard.
Of course with every run experience grows and my preferred char was a pure Jedi Consular with maxed Wisdom, as I used the Padawan Mod who leaves out the Endar Spire and makes you a jedi since the beginning.

It's good to be bad, yeah sometimes it really rocked , remember that Shakespeare-quest on Dantooine or to be a Sith apprentice on Korriban? Some nice commments coming from HK-47 or Canderous made it work very well too. The best combo imho was Jolee/HK-47.

I don't agree concerning the limited party interaction. I find the party members credible. Each of them has his story and personnal quest (except for T3, but he grew in strength in the sequel). I even try to get every char-combination possible, as there are hidden dialogues between the party members triggered i.e. Canderous blaming Bastila for having lost her lightsaber on Taris or Carth and Canderous having different opinions about being a soldier.

Did you play the English version? I tried both, English and German version and I found that the German version was even better spoken, fully professional, just like a movie.

I still play with some couple of mods (played as Master Uthar, or take Bastila on Korriban with hidden dialogues). You can find most of them on www.pcgamemods.com

As for KotoR II, I also liked the much darker atmosphere, everything turned out to be more mystic. Kreia manipulating everyone, five hours before the end of the game you still didn't know whom you could trust and whom not. The influence-system was promising although not integrated to end and the fact of training new padawans was a good move too.

Unfortunately, LA put pressure on Obsidian and they didn't have time to finish the game. You certainly know that there was a lot of content cut from the end so it didn't make much sense anymore.

Somehow the sound files and video scenes are still in the sold version of the game, so the TSLRP (The Sith Lord Restoration Project) has nearly finished to reintegrate the cut content.
http://www.team-gizka.org/

I definitely will play KotoR II again when they release the content-patch (who will be available for all versions), you won't believe your eyes what happens really at the end of the game.

[Scythe]

I know about all the character interaction, whenever I was merely walking from point A to B, I kept a new party combination to trigger some of the scenes. I still found it very limited, compared to other games in the genre. The influence system in KOTOR II was much more to my liking.

Pure English. My German is too rusty to even attempt playing it in that language.

I haven't had any trouble completing the game with any class combination.

I don't like to mod my games, unless we're talking about making the games actually playable, or adding content that was already there. The only game I've modded to any extent is Vampire: Bloodlines, simply because the unofficial patches make the game run more like it really should. Besides, I play KOTOR on my XBox, so no mods. A jedi-from-the-start mod would suck my enjoyment of KOTOR, I think. It's just not meant to play that way, so I'd call that cheating. My opinion, obviously.

Anyway, I really enjoyed Jade Empire's characters better (soon you PC folks will have that too, finally), and am looking forward to Neverwinter Nights 2. Hopefully that'll have even better NPC interaction. It should be similar to KOTOR II in that respect at least.

I know they're unlocking content from KOTOR II, well, I knew about it a year ago or two but had forgotten. So they're still not done yet?