johng Blog

I finished Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2 last week after playing it on and off since its release. This game is truely awesome and has the best roleplaying and plot elements I have ever seen but unfortunately its marred by bugs and a rushed ending. I was pleasntly surprised when I found I could train up my companions to become Jedi - and this is isn’t forced apon you it just happens naturally through the course of the game depending on how you act and treat everyone. From what I could tell at least two out of your many companions can get the Jedi training (although I only trained one - hey I am not running an academy here!) and move away from their orignal class. All this natural character development is great but its tarnished by the ending.

Without revealing what happens its safe to say that not all of the plot is tied up. You spend thirty-odd hours of game time building these guys up only to be left on your own when the final curtain falls. Your companion’s stories are not resolved and you are left to guess what has happened to them. This just reeks of a Lucasarts rush job, they needed this game out for Christmas on the Xbox and the direct PC port suffered as a result. One of the benefits of having the first game in the franchise developed by Bioware was they wouldn’t let Lucasarts pressure them into releasing early but clearly this time around with new developer Obsidian at the helm the big LAE felt it was time to squeeze.

Not only do we get a rushed ending but it is highly buggy. If you have an ATI graphics card prepare to go on a mad driver hunt. The only way I could get the game to run was to extract the OpenGL driver that comes with the Catalyst 4.2 package and put it back in with the 5.2 release. It appears this is a problem with ATI not maintaining their OpenGL drivers properly to the extent that the older ones worked better. Another issue with has annoyed many audiophiles I know is the music quality. For some bizarre reason someone made the decision to encode a low bit rate mono soundtrack that is highly noticeable. You’d think when they goto the effort of hiring a composer and orchestra that they could at least encode it at an acceptable level. Back when I was playing Tie Fighter and Jedi Knight with CD quality soundtracks I didn’t think in 2005 we would have stooped this low.

That sounds way to negative because most of this game is excellent from the varied worlds and characters to the elegant combat system and superb graphics. The fact KOTOR2 can outshine these problems is a testament to how compelling and rewarding it is to play. Is it better than the original, through characters and story yes it is but in pacing and overall quality maybe not. Ross Atherton from PC Gamer summed it up the best so I will just quote him

“KOTOR2 is a better role-playing game than its predecessor, but it is not a better game.”