KOTOR2: The Phantom Plot

Knights of the Old Republic was an excellent variation of the StarWars Franchise and an engaging role playing game.

The sequel though is clearly a milking project and a bitter dissapointment. Clearly I am not strong in the force when it comes to making plot-leaps. The “introduction” sequence takes so long that by the time you are done, your characters are so far advanced that the other characters the game tries to introduce are merely a nuisance. In addition, some of the plot is so carefully spelled out from the beginning that the game winds down about part way through your second planet.

Early on you notice that many of the microscopic levels you explore are very familiar, over half of them seem to be copied directly from KOTOR1 with some retexturing here and there. That started to eat into my willingness to forgive.

The force powers are abysmally balanced – I walked thru the last 8 hours of the game without getting hit. The same bugs from KOTOR1 including dreadful NPC pathing and the tendency of teammates to run in unpredictable directions and agro new and unexpected enemies are all still there. The few fights that provide an actual challenge are simply a matter of working out what exploit to use to get past them. And honest, it really really looks like that is what they decided to rest it on. The first “fight” that challenged me was simply a matter of figuring where my enemies could get stuck so I could lob grenades at them. Actually engaging them was impossible, I would die in less time than I could pop a medpack.

And the ending sequence is second worst only to the old games of the 80s that would just print “Game Over”. The dialog is rushed and verges on incoherent (“He couldn’t know but I would have joined her if only we had know that she was going to need her” – and no, the surrounding dialog doesn’t help).

On the XBox, at least, about 1/3rd of the game appears to be missing – some of the plot twists are so extreme, some of the leaps so dramatic, that I can only conclude that stuff got pulled out or wasn’t finished in time for the xbox release. The loading times will discourage you from doing anything that might result in the need to load. Most of the items in the game are tat – not appealing in either a “min/maxer” or “role play” sense.

And instead of the gaming having an exciting new system for affecting the lives of your traveling companions, the influence system makes the game arguably more restrictive.

KOTOR2 is NOT a new game. It is a KOTOR1 MOD that needed another 3-6 months of development time.

It’s pretty evident how the storyline was QAd, and that the ending wasn’t QAd at all. I have to admit, the last fight took me about 8 retries (taking me about an hour of real time thanks to the stupid loading times and dialog reruns). I actually figured out how to win the first time, I just hoped there was a way to do it that didn’t feel like cheating. I’ve read around a few web sites, spoiler sites and cheat sites since, and just about everyone else came to the same conclusion.