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Thursday, December 23, 2004On my list: Obsidian EntertainmentI just finished KOTOR2, and I must say, it was a HUGE disappointment. Frinklin has already weighed in on this. He seems to have enjoyed the game much more than I, but even he had a hard time getting over some of the game's faults. Let me start by saying that this is clearly 20 gallons of game dumped into a 10 gallon engine. I'm sure Obsidian did the best they could with the time constraints they were under and the technology they were operating with. They did manage to put together an excellent story, and for the most part the gameplay is intact and as fun as ever. BUT, they failed miserably in just about every other facet of gaming. First and foremost, the technical glitches are unbearable at times. Right off the bat you're going to notice chug in the frame-rate every time there's more than 3-4 characters on the screen. The original had similar frame-rate problems, but it's twice as bad here. Oh, the clipping! There's the normal hands sticking through walls and feet falling through the ground that you see in most games (and expect in RPGs). But there are far worse examples that can make the game unplayable at times. At one point I actually got stuck in a table on the planet Korriban. Stuck in a table! I couldn't get out, and I couldn't move any of my other characters far enough away to re-spawn my trapped avatar. I had to load my last saved game. The scripting errors are too numerous to list here (which is unacceptable for a story-driven RPG such as this). There are problems with nearly every in-game cutscene, ranging from dropped animations (causing characters to slide across the screen rather than walking) and disappearing characters (yes, that's right- they just disappear into thin air), to major errors that cause you to restart the game. One instance that comes to mind is the twin Twi'lek bounty hunters fight in the canteen on Nar Shadaa. The first time I attempted this fight only one of the twins became an enemy after the cut-scene. I dispatched that one while the other just stood there looking on. There was no way to kill the second one, and the door wouldn't unlock, so I was stuck. I encountered similar errors twice more through the course of the game. The graphics speak for themselves. They just don't stand up anymore - not even in the RPG genre (not after Fable showed us what RPGs can look like). The modeling is pretty good, but the characters' faces are completely expressionless and the level design is bland an uninspired. The game also has anti-aliasing problems that can become disorienting as the camera moves. The biggest disappointment was just the fact that the visuals have not been improved over the original as promised. If anything, they got worse. All that being said, I still had a blast. The gameplay is still there (other than some annoying targeting problems) and it's still fun. Obsidian was wise not to mess with the basic play mechanics, deciding instead to just tweak and add - more customization, more powers, and more strategy. Here's hoping that whoever is charges with creating the third installment starts from scratch and uses a modern gaming engine. |
