Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2

mass effect maybe?

mass effect blew chunks according to everyone i know

not really diggin KOTOR 2 btw - it just feels kinda cheap and crappy compared to the first game

-the level design is awful - all samey cramped corridors no matter what the locale (except dantooine thusfar, and it's literally just the same environment from the first game with a lil gussying up)
-the characters are borrrring and unlikeable (so far none of them own as hard as Jolee or Canderous)
-it's pretty buggy and incomplete

the whole thing feels like half-a-game, like something the publishers rushed out the door to meet an arbitrary deadline (which is probably exactly what happened)

KOTOR 2 is totally a rush job - publisher wanted it out regardless. Just wait until you get to the end! However, I think the character interaction is better, though the character's themselves aren't as interesting.

yeah, the influence stuff is neat. if the first game had this system, it would've owned

Very true.

kotor 2 has more dangling plot points than like any narrative thing i've ever encountered. so frustrating. wish they could have gone back and fixed that game up.

wow, i ran into a bug on nar shadaa that won't let me progress. what a piece of shit fagfest of a game.

I fired up kotor1 in honor of this thread. I just realized this morning that I cant go back and finish some of the quests on Taris because it done blowed up. Ohwell.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-07-21-star-wars-knights-of-the-old-republic-2-gets-a-surprise-huge-patch

I'm super excited about this, never got round to starting it (despite owning it for years and LOVING the first game) just because talk of bugginess and unfinishedness always put me off. So I'm set to jump right into it fresh.

Same here - I think I did finish it, but I can always do so again, and they aren't kidding about how desultory a lot of the ending is.

that's awesome. i've had it in my library too, and haven't played it. nice that the fan patch is a Steam Workshop addition

Haha I can't get past the first menu screen because some resolution issue means I can only see the top left corner of the screen. Hopefully the patch will get a patch eh.

Hey, looks like this was just stealth released as an app (Apple and Android) like a week ago.

kreia is an all-time villain, if that's what she is

but i think this game is a failure tbh and can only really be appreciated as an autopsy. it's not, or not just, that it's unfinished-- the Restored Content Mod renders the plot and most of the character arcs complete if still obscure; and these days it runs much stabler than kotor1. (haven't played the recent rerelease but presumably that works too.) but the more you understand what it's trying to do-- link the story's themes of teachers/students/choices to the practice of a padawan-rearing CYOA-- the more you feel compelled to plan the narrative development of your character far in advance, exactly as if it were a mechanical "build".

the game wants you to stumble naturally across triggers in the plot and environments that develop, not just your character, but the (many!) characters in your party. this is normal enough and now in fact an obsidian cliche, but unlike fallout new vegas or the pillars games or the (not good) the outer worlds, your relationship w your companions is the primary theme of the game's plot and the source of most of its content; the triggers that shape them are unevenly scattered and easy to miss or lock; and reaching the end of the main plot without having properly developed your companions leaves you w a very strange feeling that you have been told a story that had a point which has been removed. so you play it again and this time you know what you're doing, and suddenly the game is about cycling people in and out of your party in order to get the game to tell you the version of its story you have decided you want to hear. instead of being a kind of narrative space you freely explore while listening to lectures about freely exploring narrative space, the game is at first almost impossible to appreciate and then on replay responds to appreciation by becoming a game where you are always taking arbitrary actions in the service of picking plot components like feats. meanwhile you are listening to lectures. (stand by my spoilery assessment of kreia above-- an extremely cleverly designed NPC-- but the circuitous bull-session avellone dialogue style where everyone says "perhaps" 9000 times a conversation is tested to its v limits w her.)

a noble failure tho, which would be still be better than kotor1 if its environments weren't so denuded and hasty. as it is they're both huge wastes of time lol

anyway just checking if pom's still up