Critical Fail: Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2 The Sith Lords Part 2

Part 2: I Wanted to Be Han Solo but the Part Was Already Cast

When last we saw the Exile she was reconnecting with the Force because of reasons. Kreia was being cryptic because of reasons. And droids were being killed because we need EXP somehow.

Anywho we come to a door and Kreia has this to say with her mind:

Kreia: “…but you have nothing to fear from this one… and he might yet prove useful…”

We walk in and the man in jail says this:

Exile: “I’d keep those eyes up, and tell me who you are.”

(Seriously, why do the developers refuse to give us pants?)

Man in jail: “Atton… Atton Rand. Excuse me if I don’t shake hands. The field only causes mild electrical burns.”

Exile: “This facility’s deserted. What happened.”

Atton: “The trouble all started when that Jedi showed up. But the story gets better. See, some of the miners get it into their ferrocrete skulls that since the Jedi’s unconscious, they can collect the bounty the Exchange has posted for live Jedi. Well, what passes for the law here didn’t like that idea, so the two groups started fighting. There was some big explosion, I was sitting here for a long time, then you showed up in your underwear and things got a lot better.”

Exile: “There’s a bounty on captured Jedi? Why?”

Atton: “Don’t know much about it. Maybe the Exchange wants one as a trophy, or somebody’s got something against Jedi and is looking to collect. Not many Jedi left… wouldn’t surprise me if the bounty’s pretty high.”

Exile: “Not many Jedi left? What happened to them?”

Atton: “The ones that weren’t killed in the Jedi Civil War ended up switching off the lightsabers long ago. Word is, there’s not even a Jedi Council anymore, but who knows?”

Exile: “The stories I heard were of the Sith, not the Jedi.”

Atton: “Yeah, Revan, Malak, and the Jedi that went to join them in the Mandalorian Wars. They turned against the other Jedi and had a scrap that almost laid waste to the galaxy. Heh. Where have you been?”

Exile: “I’ve been… away since the Mandalorian Wars.”

Atton: “Well, I wasn’t there, but like all Sith, Revan and Malak turned on each other. After they turned on the Jedi, of course.”

Exile: “I was led to believe that Revan saved the Jedi – and the Republic.”

(I’m going to canonicity right here)

Atton: “I guess… there’s rumors all over space about it. All I heard was Revan returned to pay Malak back for trying to kill her in the first place. You know women.”

Exile: “How long have you been in that cage? Revan was a man, not a woman.”

Atton: “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I just hoped Revan was a woman.”

Exile: “Enough history, let me ask you something else.”

Atton: “Look, not like your half-naked interrogation isn’t a personal fantasy of mine, but… Hey, wait a minute – you’re that Jedi the miners were talking about. Where is everybody?”

Exile: “Don’t you know what happened to them?”

Atton: “From my beautiful view in this security cage? Look, I heard some explosions, some emergency alarms, some toxic gas pouring out of the vents… Maybe none of them survived whatever happened. And if they’re gone… Look – hey, let me out, and I can help you. I can. I’ve gotten out of trouble countless times.”

Exile: “[Persuade] Tell me your plan, and we can go from there.”

Atton: [Success]”This facitilty isn’t a military installation, which means we may have a chance. You shut down this cell’s security field, and I can reroute the emergency systems so we can get to the hangars. We grab a ship and then we fly out of here.”

Exile: “All right, I’ll let you out.”

Exile: “All right. let’s go.”

After some technobabble about how they can’t actually use the computer because the main sever or something has been cut off or destroyed or something the Exile manages to contact T3-M4 (the droid from the Prologue) and we begin the biggest misstep of the entire game: Obsidian’s obsession with making you play as the secondary characters that you don’t particularly care about.

Now I actually like Atton. In this particularly long conversation there isn’t much to analyze. Just a few more frustrating references to the Exchange, and establishing the events of KotOR 1. The only real plot hole is how Atton knows this stuff, is on the station, and got thrown in jail. What I think happened, or should have happened, goes like this: Atton is the supplier for the station, and occasionally smuggles in some off-limits items for the miners. After an argument about prices, the law on the station figured out Atton was smuggling and threw him in jail. Then the whole Exile death business happens and someone makes off with Atton’s ship but crashes into the asteroids. Simple, effective, clears up several small plot holes and it could be taken care of in a few lines of dialogue.

Saving Throw:

I really don’t understand Star Wars’ obsession with droids. Yes, I get it, R2 is awesome (Nostalgia glasses talking), but T3-M4 is not. I’ve played my fair share of Star Wars Expanded Universe games and I think it is a Law of Lucas that the developers have to include a droid. Why? With a few exceptions (HK-47, R2) we get interesting ones, but more than half the time the droids are just machines with no real personality. And now instead of just leaving T3-M4 to sit in the team select screen the player is FORCED to play as him, for the second time if you played the Prologue. It is hard, not impossible but still very hard, to make me care about a non-human machine that is not supposed to have a personality! That is the way they are designed, to not have a personality (HK is the exception that proves the rule since he is an illegal assassin droid he can have a personality since the rest of him illegal you might as well make him interesting).

Critical Fail: Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords Part 1

Part 1: I am too Hungover for this Shit (now with 100% more nudity and 300% more droids!)

Here we are Act 1 proper. Surik, the Jedi Exile, just woke up passed out on the floor, in her underwear (what the hell is up with the skivvies in the Star Wars universe, are these the most unflattering things you have ever seen?), and on a cold floor surrounded by four dead guys, like you do after a night that has tequila involved.

So the Exile goes exploring and finds out that she is the only survivor of the people in the tanks, and decides to go check out the morgue since that is the only place that you can go. Inside there are two bodies, one is lootable for the first weapon you get in the game (a plasma torch) and when you do the other body arises from the dead.

AH! ZOMBIES!

Not really, although this game would get more interesting if there were zombies, but no this is one of the more important characters in the game.

She starts talking to us, “Find what you are looking for amongst the dead?”

I choose to respond with something like, “I thought you were dead.”

Woman: “Close to death, yes, closer than I’d like. You have the smell of the kolto tank about you… how do you feel?”

To which I respond, “Enough with the false concern – what do you want?”

Kreia: “I am Kreia, and I am your rescuer – as you are mine. Tell me – do you recall what happened?”

The Exile says, “The last thing I remember I was aboard a Republic ship, the Harbinger… what happened to it?”

Kreia: “Your ship was attacked. You were the only survivor… a result of your Jedi training, no doubt.”

Exile: “I am no longer a member of the Jedi order.”

Kreia: “Your stance, your walk tells me you are a Jedi. Your walk is heavy, you carry something that weighs you down.”

Exile: “The Jedi and I have a… troubled history.”

Kreia: “So it would seem. Keep your past – let us focus on the now.”

Exile: “All right – what’s going on? How did we get here?”

Kreia: “I do not know. I was removed from the events of the world as I slept. A survey of the surroundings may provide the answers we seek. The ship we arrived on must still be in this place. We should recover it and leave.”

Exile: “Care to explain why you’re in such a hurry?”

Kreia: “We were attacked once and I fear our attackers will not give up the hunt so easily – without transport, weapons, and information, they will find us easy prey indeed.”

Exile: [Awareness] “You seem nervous, worried. Is something wrong?”

Kreia: “Even as I spelt, I felt much unrest here – I saw strange visions, minds clouded with fear – now everything here feels terribly silent. I would find out as much as you can about this place quickly – I fear we will need to depart as suddenly as we arrived.”

Exile: “I’ll go look for our ship – and some weapons.”

Kreia: “You may wish to extend your search for some clothes… if only for proper first impressions.”

Then as the true Light Sider that she is the Exile says, “I’ll return soon to make sure you are alright.”

Kreia: “I will leave you to the explorations of this place… here I will remain and attempt to center myself.”

With that we are free to take the weapon we found to break open the door and move on to the next area.

I am going to stop the game here and comment on a few things.

I don’t understand why we needed the Prologue section with T3-M4. This section has some nice foreshadowing for what will happen in the rest of the level. The Exile still is a useless twat so far, but Kreia is delightfully cryptic about everything, but that will soon lose its appeal. Here we get our first real reference to the events that happened aboard the Harbinger. Now I still have issues with this. And with the “The Order and I have a troubled history.” It is not a good story telling device. This just alienates the player because it keeps calling back to a backstory that the player doesn’t know about. We know that Surik is an Exile from the Order but we don’t know why, but our character does. I am not saying that we need to know everything that our character knows but something that will be haunting and following our character around the entire game requires some foreknowledge on our part which simply isn’t fair. Plenty of characters in fiction that have a troubled past but there are two things that are probably happening: 1.) It is a subplot, probably an important one but still secondary to the plot, and 2.) not in a medium that requires the player to make decisions as the character that affects the story/world/other characters/etc. The problem with this is, depending on how you play, it leads to a certain amount of schizophrenia in the character. Keep this in mind when we come to the main fetch quest that the game is centered around.

Back to the game!

The Exile fights some droids and starts to encounter a whole bunch of doors that are locked because of convenient plot devices! Kreia speaks to the Exile with her mind in a few places, but they don’t amount to much, and The Exile finds more holorecordings of how all kinds of shit is going down and people are dying/getting hurt.

Then after a particular room filled with pointless droids that die in two hits this scene happens:

The Exile: “I feel strange… like the sedatives are wearing off.”

Kreia responds with her mind (!), “It is the Force you feel… it has not been so long for you to forget…”

The Exile: “It has been almost a decade – I had forgotten.”

Mind-Kreia: “Do not turn away from it. Listen… feel it echo within you. Come, I shall guide you down familiar paths – you will need it if we are to survive and escape this place.”

Yay reason to level up! You know what would reinforce just how much of a not-Jedi the Exile was for the last 10 years? I don’t know… how about not giving the player Jedi Force powers right away. Think about how awesome it was in the first Knights of the Old Republic when you got to level 7 and then you got your Jedi prestige class and became an ϋber-badass. It was awesome. We just literally got two whole conversations about the Exile’s trouble past with the Jedi (and we haven’t even gotten to the whole reason for the exile in the first place which would be nice to know now) than by having the first couple levels be that of a regular soldier. Then the moment when you finally reconnect with the Force is whole big deal instead of: “hey look, I made it to level 2!”

This is where I am going to end Part 2. Part 3 will pick up with the meeting of the second party member and more useless underwear times.

Saving Throw:

Is anyone else really confused as to why this game has the first forty or so minutes of you running around in your underwear? Why is this a thing? I bring it up because it is referenced like three times. What? Why? I don’t even…

Seriously, who at Obsidian decided this was a good idea? What does it serve?  Why can’t I just have pants? I really, really, don’t get it.

The Writer's Guild Nominees for 2012 Video Game Writing Award Suck

So the list for the Writer's Guild 2012 Best Game Writing Award nominees has been published. And needless to say it is extremely disappointing.

We have (in no particular order): Assassin's Creed: Revelations, Brink, Batman Arkham City, Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, and Mortal Kombat.

Now just to start at the top: no one thinks a Mortal Kombat  game deserves a writing award (they even have writers for this?), and while I loved Batman it wasn't breaking any story molds or breaking paradigms (although the ending was a seriously ballsy move for Rocksteady). If Batman  should get a writing award it should be for attention to detail (spoiler warning).

Then we come to Brink, wait someone actually played this? It is an online shooter that doesn't even have a Story section on wikipedia (which also says that the average ratings for the game barely made it over a 7 out of 10).

While I haven't played Assassins Creed 2.75 yet, unless they completely break with their previous story conventions and starting giving the player clear, concise answers this shouldn't win simply because instead of engaging the player with actual mysteries and questions the game makes the player confused and ask, "What the fuck was that? Why did I just do this?" (maybe I will have to do this series at some point)

I played most of Uncharted 1 and 2 I haven't gotten around to the newest iteration. Although a friend of mine assures me it is quite good.

But that isn't the issue. Besides Uncharted there isn't one game on here that I could actually hold up as a pillar of story telling in the 2011 gaming year.


Mass Effect 2 (while not my favorite of the series, doesn't get nominated, but Mortal Kombat does?!), Dragon Age 2 (see previous parenthesis), L.A. Noire, Catherine, Limbo, Bastion, Deus Ex: Human Revolution (seriously, how does this not get nominated?). None of them gets a nod. For shame.

Apparently you can only be nominated if you send the Writer's Guild a script. While this is stupid for about 12 different reasons (the biggest being that you don't READ a game, you PLAY it), something needs to change.

Maybe you should, as the Escapist says, write to your favorite developer and tell them that they should send out scripts to the Writer's Guild.

Source

Critical Fail: Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords, Part 1

Part 1: The Prologue to Horribleness, or At Least My Expectations Aren't Being Set Very High

This is the game I am going to be looking at for the foreseeable future. Now to jump right in:

(If I manage to figure out Fraps and youtube I'll put the opening cinematic on youtube, but for now you will have to read D;)

Normally you would have to sit through the character creator, but because I am playing and I get to do all the obssessing I'll post the short version:

Meet Meetra Surik (according the the cannon, i.e. Wookiepedia, that is the Exile's name). She is a light side Jedi Sentinel. If you care here are her stats:

The opening crawl is thus:

It is a perilous time for the

galaxy. A brutal civil war has

all but destroyed the Jedi

Order, leaving the ailing

Republic on the verge of

collapse.

Amid the turmoil, the evil

Sith have spread across the

galaxy, hunting down and

destroying the remaining

Jedi Knights.

Narrowly escaping a deadly

Sith ambush, the last known

Jedi clings to life aboard a

battered freighter near the

ravaged world of Peragus....…

Then we see the ship from the first game the Ebon Hawk. Now I will be playing this game like someone who has never played it, but I will be analyzing it like the Star Wars nerd that I am. So a newbie will play the Prologue. The Prologue is important. It severs several functions: combat tutorial, game mechanic tutorial, and hook for the entire rest of the game.

That being said: this is one of the worst tutorials in the history of gaming. This is how it starts:

To save you some more pictures the GPS navigation voice lady continues to say things like: "The Hyperdrive is damaged. Main power must be restored in order to bring the engines online and dock with the nearby Peragus mining station for much needed repairs. Meetra Surik's fate, and that of the Ebon Hawk, depend of T3-M4, a lone astromech droid."

The real taunting gets started right away with the option to skip the Prologue.

God I want to hit the second one. 

Instead I diligently play the prologue, and go about hacking into computers

opening crates,

doing stupid target practice,

and repairing everything.

Now the chief failing of this Prologue is that it doesn't function as a good enough hook. Does anyone feeling excited when the Prologue asks you to take over as a repair droid to fix a broken ship? And another thing: it doesn't make the player feel awesome when the character they just spent 2 hours 10 minutes making, personalizing, assigning feats and skills to is incapacitated from a fight that WE DIDN'T SEE. Also this robo-DM lady is super annoying. I don't know why we have this narrator lady, but literally never hear or see her ever again. She describes the dumbest things, it breaks the flow, and constantly reminds the player that they are playing a game. Not only does the Prologue take place after what looks like an epic fight that we aren't allowed to participate in, but we get to play as the useless secondary character. The Prologue or opening in almost anything is this big moment in the story, you have to draw in the reader, viewer, player, whatever, and this utter fails to do so. In Star Wars Episode 4 you get the crawl followed by a brief silence and then BAM! A blockade runner getting its shit creamed by a giant star destroyer, a princess getting captured over stolen battle plans, and a badass black robot evil bad guy voiced by James Earl Jones. In Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark we get Indiana Jones being a stone cold badass, disarming bad guys with whips, dodging sweet underground traps, taking ancient relics, and narrowly avoiding death about fourteen times. All of these openings (and probably about 325511343155678653246 more of them across all of fiction) have these super exciting moments that introduce us to the world, certain key characters, and set the tone for the rest of the movie, story, game, whatever.

What is the tone that we get from this Prologue? The Exile is rather useless, we missed out on the Civil War and the Purge, we missed the battle that broke the Ebon Hawk, and that T3-M4 is apparently the protagonist.

Screw that. I want to play as the Exile and I want to know why the hell I am floating through empty space in a broken ship.

The Prologue's only saving grace is this:

How awesome does that look?

Anyway, T3-M4 saves the day and the Ebon Hawk docks with the mining facility. The Prologue utterly fails to get the players attention or instill any kind of awe or sense of mystery into the player. Whoops.

Oh and this happened:

It looks ominous, but the reveal is stupid as hell.

With that what I am going to call Act 1 begins and so does the rail roading!

Our protagonist everyone! Arbitrarily incapacitated twice and currently passed out on the floor. I think I might pass out too.

Saving Throw:

[This little section will be the bonus section of the article where you can go to get back ground, flavor text, or things I feel are awesome but only tangential related]

For the development side of why this tutorial sucks so hard we turn to the best show on the internet: Extra Credits. If you haven't been watching it then get on it and come back. I shall not allow you back until you have watched all three seasons. Extra Credits is a webshow dedicated to make games better through sheer knowledge. And it is awesome. This is their episode on how to make a tutorial. Watch it and keep count on how many rules the Prologue breaks.

Extra Credits: Tutorials 101

Story Analysis 1: Roll For Initiative (a.k.a. The Foreword)

Roll For Initiative:

Goals for this round:

1. Analyze a poorly written game to show why it doesn't work

2. Offer solutions on how this could have been avoided

3. Offer advice on how to avoid this in the future

4. Gain fame and fortune

I've wanted to play this game for a while, but several issues came up: the last time I played it a glitched door remained unopened and I couldn't beat the game, and The Old Republic came out and it is awesome, and I finally got Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Anywho this is the background information of the game that I will be analyzing next week:

The Sith Lords was going to be the sequel to the first Knights of the Old Republic, a game that won several Game of the Year awards and was made by one of my favorite developers, BioWare. 

However the sequel is none of those things. BioWare crafted a nicely done narrative (that successfully pulled of the semi-amnesiac angle to great affect!) and an awesome game system, Obsidian, for several reasons that are not entirely their fault, failed on almost every conceivable level. As I will get into the plot of The Sith Lords makes zero sense. In fact it makes negative sense; it steals sense away from things that previously made sense.

The story of the game's development goes something like this: Obsidian was tasked with this game by Lucas Arts, and they actually had a really interesting premise: set the game during the aftermath of the first game (thar be spoilers ahead for KotOR 1 [which if you haven't played or heard anything about you are: in the wrong place; and living a life devoid of happiness and joy]). Revan has disappeared, the war is over, but the consequences linger and there is still a lot wrong with the galaxy that will take more than just time to fix. The Jedi's popularity is at an all time low, and the few remaining Jedi have disappeared or been assassinated by a secret group of Sith who want to kill all of the Jedi. It is a secret war fought with assassins in the shadows. You play the last known Jedi in the galaxy where they are hated, feared, and hunted.

How awesome does that sound?

Well, it isn't. Not only did Lucas Arts give Obsidian a ridiculously short development time (13 months! You can't even make a decent movie in that amount of time and that doesn't have to worry about technical glitches), but they also refused to allow Obsidian to release a patch that would give the world a bunch of content that had to be cut from the final project so it could launch before the holiday season.

So instead of the awesome secret war and dark post-war epic that we had hoped for we get a rushed, poorly paced, poorly explained, poorly written mess of a game with bugs up the ass. We could have been, wasn't.

Now before you get all angry at Lucas Arts you have to keep in mind one thing: this is Obsidian Entertainment. They haven't released a game that hasn't been buggy or broken as hell in a long time. Remember Neverwinter Nights 2? That was them. So was the much hated Alpha Protocol and the super buggy (but much better than 3) Fallout New Vegas. Not saying that it is all Lucas or all Obsidian's fault, it is, however, a combination of suck. And so we get this horrible mess.

How I plan on doing this: I will analyze this game as I play it and I will bring you all along via pictures and text. I will point out flaws, issues, a few things I like, and outside information I find helpful. I will attempt to do the canonical version: female, Light Side, with Handmaiden. Anyone who played this game will note that this is some what impossible as Handmaiden is the male only companion. I will be running a few cosmetic mods and one that will get me Handmaiden as a female. Other than that there will not be the famous Restored Content Mod, while I love it, it is horrendously unfinished and broken, and only fills in what the modders could find already on the disk. So this will be a mostly vanilla run. This is going to be the game that the professionals wanted us to play.

I hope someone enjoys this.