Review KOTOR 2 review at Thunderbolt Games

[Vault Dweller]

Tags: BioWare; Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords

It looks like KOTOR 2 has finally reached the distant shores of England, prompting <a href=http://thunderboltgames.com>Thunderbolt Games</a> to write a <a href=http://thunderboltgames.com/reviews/viewreview/1100>review</a>. The score is 7/10.
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<blockquote>One of example of the game’s lack of difficulty comes at the end of the game during a climactic duel. The baddie was being trounced with no problems whatsoever, but then a cutscene came up and one of the characters said the enemy is too strong. It was humorous, considering my party had nearly full health and the foe was helpless, and this was on the highest difficulty setting.</blockquote>Happened to me in both games. Combat was ridiculously easy and ruined it for me.
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[Texas Red]

Happened to me in both games. Combat was ridiculously easy and ruined it for me.

Dont be too harsh. Everyone knows that hard difficulty kills the sales.

 

[roshan]

Neverwinter Nights was also ridiculously easy. There was a battle with a red dragon and a horde of giants that were killed by my party members AI alone, with no input from me or anything being done by my main character - and the AI in the game was crap. According to Obsidian, MOTB will be even easier.

Obsidian is building up a reputation for producing dumb games.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

Neverwinter Nights was also ridiculously easy. There was a battle with a red dragon and a horde of giants that were killed by my party members AI alone, with no input from me or anything being done by my main character - and the AI in the game was crap. According to Obsidian, MOTB will be even easier.

Obsidian is building up a reputation for producing dumb games.

Must have been just you. On my first playthrough, on normal difficulty, the giants repeatedly killed my entire party until I was finally able to defeat them through sheer luck. The dragon just walked all over me no matter how many times I tried to kill it. On my second playthrough, same difficulty, but with a better party, I was able to defeat the giants but the dragon still kicked my ass.

 

[Bah]

Must have been just you. On my first playthrough, on normal difficulty, the giants repeatedly killed my entire party until I was finally able to defeat them through sheer luck. The dragon just walked all over me no matter how many times I tried to kill it. On my second playthrough, same difficulty, but with a better party, I was able to defeat the giants but the dragon still kicked my ass.

I think it more likely that it's just you. I didn't enjoy NWN because combat was ridiculously easy. I don't remember a single challenging moment.

 

[Starwars]

I also had problems with the Dragon fight though I did win after a few tries. There were a few other battles where I got killed and had to reload as well. The Fire Giants, the place where you have to fight two dragons, one of the Shadow Reaver fights (I think the last one) etc. Of course, there have certainly been harder battles in other games.

I might just suck, but I think those battles were tough and enjoyable enough. The problem for me lies more with the areas where there are just endless waves of monsters in them, the areas that are seemingly just there to draw out the playtime of the game.

I also think that NWN2 was harder (by quite a lot actually) than either of the KOTORs which were, well... Probably the easiest RPGs I've ever played. Still, I liked both of them well enough. I like KOTOR2 more despite the lack of polish/cut content/blablabla though.

 

[fastpunk]

Well, better late than never I always say.

 

[Ismaul]

I actually didn't care about the difficulty. The combat was so uninteresting that I was happy it was over fast. I like my combat involving, be it tactical or twitchy, Fallout-style or Gothic-style. The systems in-between never seem to succeed in making the combat gameplay engaging. You feel like you're just passing through, but there's constantly some bothering thing in the way.

Where's my option to skip the combat? Don't the devs wonder that such an obscene amount of ennemies will bore the player to tears when he just wants to get right back to the juicy dialogue?
Yeah, I play for the story & dialogue.
Oh well, I might as well skip the game.

 

[Relayer71]

That's what killed the experience for me for both KOTORs and for NWN 2.
Much higher difficulty would have worked wonders for all 3 titles.

It's a shame too because KOTOR 2 had some good writing, decent quests and improved use of skills over KOTOR. With better pacing and higher difficulty it could have been above mediocre.

NWN was easy too but nothing could save that snorefest.

 

[themadhatter114]

The Dragon in NWN2 kicked my ass over and over again until I went back and got a different party so that I could use energy immunity on everyone. Otherwise it would just rape everyone.

 

[dragonfk]

That's what killed the experience for me for both KOTORs and for NWN 2.
Much higher difficulty would have worked wonders for all 3 titles.

It's a shame too because KOTOR 2 had some good writing, decent quests and improved use of skills over KOTOR. With better pacing and higher difficulty it could have been above mediocre.

You can always revert to mods in KOTOR 2. I remember that there are some AI improvements, health improvements and so on. After i tried it fighting became challenging. Challenging by big CH. I remember dying some 30 times in Peragus, whereas it never did happened to me when i was playing without mods( ofcourse always playing on hardest modes).

 

[Vault Dweller]

I killed the giants without any efforts (without spells, potions, tactics, or even a single reload). I simply clicked on them and they died. It was sad and boring. I cried because I thought that the giants didn't want to play with me, but then my mom told me that they were dead.

The dragon surprised me by wasting my party in 30 seconds and showing me the reload screen for the first time. I reloaded, cast some buffs, prepared some potions, and killed the bitch in 30 seconds, losing only a few characters.

 

[JoeDirt]

The only way to make NWN2's combat satisfying is by using Tony K's improved A.I. and setting the game's difficulty to "4", i.e. "D&D Hardcore". Otherwise the game is stupidly easy. I never did manage to beat the Red Dragon using Tony's mod, and I never reached that point in an un-modded campaign so I never got to see just what the hell was in the dragon's treasure horde.

 

[tardtastic]

Well, the problem remaining even with a lot of the mods is that really all it does is give the enemies buffs, in stats or in quantity, you know? But what would really be more strategically exciting are the kinds of things that would have to be designed into the levels from the start - environmental features playing a role in the battle, or requiring the use of particular items or item/attack juggling strategies, or the specific use of a particular class in a novel way, etc. Those kinds of things would make the real difference - as opposed to a lot of these kinds of difficulty mods, where the only difference is that you use more health potions/spells this time around. I haven't tried them all of course, for all the games for which they exist - but in my limited experience, they cannot overwhelm the disappointment of fights that are essentially stat-clashes.

 

[JoeDirt]

Tony K's A.I. mod for NWN2 is different from what you're talking about it re-enables a lot of combat options monsters/foes have at their command in the game, but don't use in the default campaign so that it's not too difficult. Kind of like how the Co8 mod for ToEE made spellcasters use, you know, their SPELLS, instead of closing in to melee/etc.

But yah, what you're saying is true of course. There is no arguing that games like NWN/KOTOR are inherently badly designed from the get-go.

 

[Grandpa Gamer]

What's wrong with you people?

So, you didn't have to reload as often as you would have liked? Big deal.
Complainging about a game being too easy is just plain silly. Try not using your best weapons, or refrain from drinking potions. Or put together a really unbalanced party. Making a game harder is easy. Just use your imagination...

I'd rather complain when a game is too hard. Especially if it's a game that won't let you save whenever you like. Like GTA San Andreas.

 

[Vault Dweller]

What's wrong with you people?

So, you didn't have to reload as often as you would have liked? Big deal.
Complainging about a game being too easy is just plain silly. Try not using your best weapons, or refrain from drinking potions. Or put together a really unbalanced party. Making a game harder is easy. Just use your imagination...

Role-playing in Oblivion is easy. Just use your imagination...

As for the difficulty thing, you are right. I should have played NWN2 with an incredibly charismatic, but terminally ill, lvl 3 fighter who made a vow to never use weapons or wear armor and never to level up again.

Vivid imagination can do a lot, but it can't fix poor design.

 

[Relayer71]

What's wrong with you people?

So, you didn't have to reload as often as you would have liked? Big deal.
Complainging about a game being too easy is just plain silly. Try not using your best weapons, or refrain from drinking potions. Or put together a really unbalanced party. Making a game harder is easy. Just use your imagination...

My common sense sometimes conflicts with my imagination.

 

[Balor]

Hey, you all sounds like a bunch of X-boxers who didn't get enough "HAWT AKSHUN!11".
You might as well complain about Planescape: Torment this way. Well, you can... and you will be right, but the game has redeeming qualities that just trample over sucky combat (pretty much the same with KOTOR2).
However, I think that is because my philosophy coincides with Avellone's, and I played the game 'the way it meant to be played'... as "edgewalker" type.
I never 'max out' stats, I didn't choose 'prestige' class (cause my 'alignment' stayed 'a bit goodish' though whole game), I loved the story and everything Kreia said, and even the ‘open ending’.
I can understand how people that didn't like Kreia and were expecting 'canonical SW plot' were disappointed - only thing that was left for them was combat, and it was 'filler' just like in P:T.
Well, I can but say: Fuck you, buddies. Plot and characters that would satisfy hardcore SW fans will bore me to tears. Yea, I'm egoistic allright .

 

[fastpunk]

Yeah, expectations of canonical SW totally fucked the game's reception (that and the bugs). As for Kreia, she can be annoying if you don't carefully consider what she says but if you do you'll connect easily with the game. That's what I loved about it and about her character, she made the player think about it and consider his circumstances and situation carefully. And yeah, it was a linear experience and the ending pretty chopped up but at least you could decide the fate of every planet you visited (except Peragus, which got destroyed anyway) and the ending reflected your choices in that final dialog with Kreia. Overall, I'd put this game's writing right up there with PS:T. Kreia was just brilliant and some of the other NPCs were also pretty good: Atton, Atris, Mira, Visas, Sion etc. They served their purpose well. It's just a shame about the tech problems it had. I don't mind the combat but it's just a damned shame. I just hope those gizka guys fix all the bugs and add back the cut content.

 

[Jedi_Learner]

7 out of 10? That would wrongly imply KOTOR II was above average...

 

[Claw]

I believe a 7 rating is pretty average, as far as game review score go.

 

[RK47]

that was actually pretty fitting, considering the lack of challenge and bad conclusion.

 

[tardtastic]

Hi Fastpunk -

Yeah, I loved the Kreia character too. As a matter of fact, she was the single best character I've ever encountered in any game - she even beats out anything in my all-time-favorite, "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream." But she was also what caused me the most frustration in KOTOR2. To me, what she was saying made perfect sense in the context of the game, but no matter what I did to build influence with her, to explore her back story, to make decisions that squared with her outlook, etc., the game kept forcing me to misunderstand or disagree with her -- it just didn't give me the choices that I wanted. Like the first game, the whole gimmick was "light versus dark", but when faced with a prominent character so obviously in-between, it was just shitty to be stuck playing the game black-and-white, it really took me out of the game to HAVE to be a dumbshit every time dialogues came up.

Anyway, KOTOR2 ranks a 7, sure, if KOTOR1 ranks a 5.

 

[Zinc]

KOTOR 2 was released here about 2 and a half years ago. We aren't that far behind.