Well, GTA:SA is ETA 9 hours.
Man. It's almost 4 AM and I've been playing KOTOR2 for hours! I have so many Light points now that I can drown kittens in a bag and still be a good guy, heh. No, but seriously, I don't think I was ever obsessed with, and consumed by, an RPG, ever since Neverwinter Nights came out (however, I was quite disappointed with its add-on sequels; those were too formulaic). KOTOR2 does not suffer from this problem since (other than a given recycling of a few SFX and basic locations), a lot of work was done to improve upon the KOTOR1 gameplay model.
On the most basic level, there is a lot of humour involved and also many references to sci-fi and Star Wars trivia; in one instance, I could've sworn that the developers were paying homage to Hypercube. At other times, it's "Aliens and Droids Say the Darndest Things." ;)
For instance, I am very excited and pleased by all the new Force capabilities, especially the tangibility of realignment towards the Light or Dark side and party influence. As well, side quests and party intrigue has been increased (though I wish the Ebon Hawk were a different ship, for variety's sake). Otherwise, KOTOR2 really deviates from the typical "good vs. bad" RPG schemata, since it implicitly admits the gray areas between the Light and Dark sides of the Force, the universe and everything. Indeed, after I am done playing with my Jedi Watchman, I will play a dark side character, to see how things will turn out (a different ending is rumoured to exist for each alignment). I this respect, KOTOR1 was a bit weak on character development and it is obvious that the KOTOR2 team, having learned from the advantages and shortcomings of NWN and KOTOR1, have produced one hell of a game.
Unfortunately, KOTOR2 has a surprisingly high amount of bugs, ranging from simple sound and video glitches, to cutscenes loading for five minutes and playing jerkily (even with my bitching, new videocard;!I suspect this is an issue with precaching or memory allocation). As well, I am experiencing a lot of problems with gameplay logic: most notably, even after having defeated one character and gotten another to join my party, a second copy of both appears on the Nar Shaddaa map!
Similarly, a guy I killed at one point reappears as if nothing happens and lays a long, drawn-out ambush for me. A number of times opponents did not attack me or their AI was confused by objects in their way and once I got force points twice by clicking on a character before they had a chance to disappear and thus replayed an entire dialogue all over again.
Finally, one of the biggest problems of these new games, like NWN, KOTOR and HL, is that the maps are huge, there is a ton of complex objects to render and so there is an inevitable loading screen now and then. KOTOR2's screens are simply enraging in this regard, the Save-Load sequences before major cutscenes, and the annoying interference of background music between the loading of pre-rendered cutscenes, makes the entire experience reminiscent of the best games of the early 1990s...on floppies. Does "Insert Floppy #1," "Insert Floppy #5," "insert Floppy #7" sound familiar? Despite being a wonderful game, Another World once pissed me off in this manner for hours on end. Thank god they invented hard drives, heh.
Finally, KOTOR2 is one of those games that randomly hate certain features of certain videocards; mine, for instance, won't render Frame Buffer Effects or Soft Shadows; however, while trying to sort this out, I've found out that everyone is in the same boat as me. Being in a dire need of patching, I've gotten the latest 1.0b (if memory serves right) update; however (the EXE being allegedly protected by the new Securom 7) there are no cracked EXEs available yet and I had to resort (scroll down) to installing the update with the old EXE and then using the old cracked EXE. *sigh* Where are those brave men and women of the cracking world, when you really need them?
Well, GTA:SA is ETA 4 hours now; Azureus always tends to overshoot its estimates for the first half an hour or so.
Hey Mike, I haven't played KOTOR2 but did you hear all the online furor about it?
Apparently a large chunk of the game was cut to rush it for release, and there's even an alternate (better) ending script floating around somewhere online. Maybe do a search and see :-)
Do you mean a different ending apart from the supposedly-different light side/dark side endings? Well, the game is hurriedly-made, to say the least; compared to the perfection of KOTOR1, KOTOR2 is actually shit, but the new features it introduces almost counterbalance poor level and preloader design, wacky cinematics and all kinds of graphics issues. This is all to say, I wouldn't be surprised if a large chunk was cut out.
Mhumm. After a little research, this seems to be true! However, the uproar was about four months ago, so all the links are broken.
Ah, there we go: KOTOR2: The Sith Lords - Restoration Project; apparently, some people are using found audio clips and scripts from Obsidian to fix and make the game complete by building a patch in mod form. And here's all the missing content! AHAHAHAHA, oh, man, listen to Atton cracking jokes.
Wow, it seems that Obsidian got into financial or contractual problems but still recorded and included all the missing content on the game discs (perhaps to enable later via patching?). Well, this is totally awesome.When I'll be playing with a dark side character the next time, it'd be like playing a brand-new game! Hey, thanks for bringing this to my attention!
how do you get light side version of kotor 1 story to continue on kotor2 or any other versions
"Continue"? What do you mean?!