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.