Perscienter: KotOR is just below great. It would be working really well, if they sorted out all the inconsistencies.
It crashes regularly between regions or when I set up droids no matter the settings. The AI and path-finding are dumb. Characters regularly lack behind, though you can only take two with you, without a proper explanation, by the way. Don't use corners in fights, the AI can't handle it. Other bugs occur regularly, like losing your cloak ability after loading a save-game. In one of the first boss fights, you could abuse a faulty design of the environment and stay safe in a corner where the boss couldn't catch you. It was also completely immune to laser fire and didn't try to attack the targets, which were reachable. Again, the AI fails.
You don't have a lot of freedom in your decisions. First of all, all 'bad' decisions are stupidly childish. You can't sabotage your allies or opponents, rip them off or torture them or anything more delicate. No, usually you could kill them. Only the 'good' decisions offer lots of variability and are differentiated. If you do make a 'bad' decision' usually another NPC follower steps in and just stops you, so your light/dark bar is lowered, but your choice does have barely another effect. 'Bad' decisions are also not lucrative. You could sell something to the market for 1000 credits at a point where you already own several k. So what's the point? Dialogue, like in other RPGs can also repeat endlessly and characters just act the same and the same and the same all along.
A part of the controls can't be configured, thanks to consoles I guess.
You can't command droids to a location. They just use their given paths. It would help tremendously to be able to take them with you. I already mentioned the two NPCs, which doesn't make sense. Some NPCs have tight bounds and lived together a life. It can happen that you just cut their bound and one of them stays behind in the apartment.
The alien talk is annoying. I don't why they separated aliens and humans at all. Shouldn't humans be alien in a SW world, too? Usually aliens are scum or outcasts and humans are characters. That's bad writing.
Apart from all of these issues it's a good straight-forward Action RPG with a pause function. Just definitely not even remotely the best RPG.
I'm confused; a few questions if you don't mind.
Do you have an updated version? Occasionally I've had people lag behind but it's actually pretty rare. And I've NEVER had a crash.
And I'm a little confused about "set up droids". I play it constantly and I don't remember that. Do you mean reprogramming droids? I only ever do that second hand. I solve the problem (puzzle) 1st and get XP. THEN I boot up the droid and guess what, MORE XP. At that point it doesn't matter where it goes, you don't need it anymore.
Cloaking? Cloaking is overrated. When you actually need to be stealth to accomplish something the game allows you to do so without a cloaking belt. Piss on cloaking! Spend you cash on something better like a better weapon.
Lastly, I've played as pure good, pure evil, and inbetween and I think all the choices keep the game VERY open. It just requires you do things differently. And if someone in your party tries to stop you from being mean then keep them out of your party, or try harder to talk them down. Jedi in your group can be talked down but everyone else can if you keep at them.
The version is 1.03.514077, the up-to-date version on Steam (XP, 32-bit, old PC). I repaired one droid in the Black Vulcar Main Base and set it to patrol. Even without shield or weapons upgrades, it was able to do decent damage while tanking quite a lot for me. KotOR crashed once when repairing a droid. It usually crashes every 20 minutes when entering another region. They are very common.
There are also many other people which experience crashes in the forum. Is this a Steam-exclusive problem?
http://steamcommunity.com/app/32370/discussions/0/#
Perscienter: The alien talk is annoying. I don't why they separated aliens and humans at all. Shouldn't humans be alien in a SW world, too? Usually aliens are scum or outcasts and humans are characters. That's bad writing.
F4LL0UT: As much as I dislike the game, personally I appreciate the alien talk - after all, it's supposed to seem alien to you, not the characters who IIRC don't seem to have any problems understanding it, at least in the common cases. And that humans and the English language dominate the Star Wars universe has pretty much always been the case. Even in those scenes and scenarios where people are a minority the "alien majority" consists of many different races unless of course we're talking about a certain race's homeworld like Kashyyk where you and all your buddies are outcasts. So I really can't complain about KotOR's way of presenting alien races and alien language etc..
They've put a lot of effort into these languages. It's definitely well done. It's so well done, that when I'm finished with some really nasty real world problem under time pressure and turn KotOR on I'm asking myself what the heck I'm doing there. For SW fans it must be a boon. I just think humans are over-represented and overly important. Aliens are mainly gang-members.
F4LL0UT: That's just odd. I've played the game on three different systems over the years and not ever did I encounter major technical issues. I have no idea what's up there.
grviper: There's that recent updated re-release of KotOR 1 and 2. I don't know if the original build is that fucked up, but a nocd based on that particular version is unstable. It crashes everywhere, if you can get the game running at all. At the same time the final original patch version is perfect, if treated with imagecfg.
Yes, the collection which was re-released with Vista / 7 support is known to have many issues.
Regarding the AI, I can't rely on my followers. For instance, they like to trigger mines when enemies are in front of them and the mine in between. I have to do a lot of baby-sitting. Sometimes they pursue enemies, which are behind obstacles and the pathfinding sends them the other way around through a big group of enemies. There are many illogical faults like Rakghouls just poisoning you, never infecting you. Hostile mines are triggered by any one else except your own group. The starting sequence has no time limit I guess, though it is supposed to be a big battle.
