lucasarts vp of marketing jar-jar binks had "no-sa comment"

[rone]

syringavulgaris and solipsistnation wanted more details regarding the LucasArts upfucking of KOTOR2.

• From RPG Vault, an interview with Lead Designer Chris Avellone and Producer Chris Parker where they talk about the game and the pressure to get it out and what needed to be cut.  They talk it up and try to spin it as a good thing, but c'mon, you and i can read between the lines.
• There's an online petition where fans are asking LucasArts and Obsidian Entertainment to restore the scripted ending that is actually in the game files that are installed (and there are accompanying sound files as well), which was extracted and reconstructed (BIGTIME SPOILER OF GAME ENDING) by two enterprising souls.
• A good summary of the above, and more, can be found at TheForce.Net editorial.

Maybe i should consider the lack of a Grim Fandango sequel a blessing in disguise.

Comments

[arian1.livejournal.com]

Maybe i should consider the lack of a Grim Fandango sequel a blessing in disguise.

Now you know why most of the upper eschelon of LucasArts left abruptly in 03. The word came down from their markenting department that they felt it necessary to focus only on SW titles. Thus scrapping Sam and Max, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango sequels. Also, they started to pressure developers into unbelieveably short development cycles. Hence the reason RavenSoft told them to take a hike.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

It doesn't make any fucking sense. Maybe Lucas is trying to tell us that he really is the model for Palpatine.

[deirdremoon.livejournal.com]

Hey, was that you quoted in the Miracle of Science comments? Wow, you're all famous and stuff! :) (Yes, so are some of my friends in Casey and Andy... still kewl.)

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Actually, they've quoted me twice (http://project-apollo.net/mos/mos241.html).

[palecur.livejournal.com]

Always two, there are -- a Kibo (www.kibo.com) and his apprentice.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Ack. I so do not want to be Kibo's apprentice. I don't want to dye my hair and i can't afford a leather wardrobe.

[arian1.livejournal.com]

It's not Lucas as in George at all. He concerns himself with a) the movies and b) advancing technology for film making. It's more like Sansweet who oversees most if not all of the license stuff. Lucasarts is a completely different animal from either JAK or ILM. They apparently are quite a pain in the ass to work with on *anything* not just SW stuff. So I'd place the blame more to that than big daddy himself. He's got EP III to finish up and then Indiana Jones IV to get moving.

As fot the game, the powers that be at Lucasarts were determined to get the game out for the holiday season come hell or high water. Now they're paying for it. I'm sure the guys at Obsidian aren't happy either.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

But you can afford leather-flavored perfume (http://www.adorebeauty.com.au/adorebeauty/viewitem.asp?idproduct=4274)!

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Tim Schaefer should be granted all the Lucasarts licenses. Because he deserves them.

[nothings.livejournal.com]

After Ep1, Totally Games, who made the X-Wing and Tie Fighter games which were reasonable hits (after people had thought there was no value in the SW games license), were told they could only make games set before Ep4, because they wanted to make sure all the games were linked to Ep1-Ep3, I guess for marketing reasons.

Totally went on to make... a Star Trek game, after dropping the license entirely. I like to imagine this was because they had about the same opinion of Ep1 as I did, and assumed older gamers did as well.

[marknau.livejournal.com]

One likes to believe in the freedom of games
But glittering prizes
and endless compromises
Shatter the illusion of integrity

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Okay, I just finished the game as it stands now, and, yeaaaah. I think I'd like some dangling subplots, please? The endless exposition of "what happens now?" "Okay, I'll look into the future for you" was kinda half-assed.

The whole influence system is a really interesting way to tell a story with branches-- you still have to end up at more or less the same place, but there's lots of potential there if the writers are careful. I liked how they did that, although it was really easy to figure out what helped and what didn't and go back and follow the same conversational paths and see where they went (with Mira in particular-- it took me a couple of times to figure out that I then had to actually take her back to Nar Shadaaaaaaaaa in order to train her as a Jedi).

Boy, the extracted and reconstructed scenes are pretty hefty-- there's a lot of stuff going on there. But, yeah-- SO MUCH missing, and so many dangling plot threads or things that just seem bizarrely truncated-- G0T0 in general, G0T0 and the remote, Bao-Dur, who doesn't have anything to say at to you at all after you build a lightsaber, Atton in general, the identity of Mandalore (which I'd guessed even before it was revealed at the very end), and all sorts of things. Plus there were some serious bugs along the way, and various quests that just seemed to not work or to have pieces missing. Plus the HK factory, which I'm guessing I didn't just miss along the way, right? Was that actually just not in there? I had HK pacifism software to download into... something.

Graphical bugs, too-- there's a certain spot on Dantooine, just coming out of the spaceport, where something happens and if I have the graphics turned up past low quality my system (Athlon XP 3000+, gig-o-RAM, 128MB Radeon 9800 Pro, and bonus blue neon for extra speed (http://www.gweep.net/~mute/Shuttle/Shuttle-Pages/Image10.html)), the same nearly hangs and suddenly I get something like 5-10 seconds per frame. I narrowed it down, in fact, to a certain direction I couldn't face without problems, but you can't strafe, so I was kinda screwed...

But, yeah. ALMOST a really good game.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

The identity of Mandalore is kinda easy to guess, and they used the same voice actor, too.

Bugs galore. When you're put in the force cages in Telos, and Lt. Grenn leaves with the two stooges, he doesn't always manage to leave before the doors close. So when the assassin comes along and opens the door, Grenn tries to leave, thus blocking the assassin from entering the room. The doors close, and no fight ensues because, duh, you can't open the door because it's locked. Reload and hope Grenn makes it out this time or at least doesn't block buttboy.

There's a huge swath of Master Vash dialogue which was wholly cut out. To call it a travesty is pretty accurate, i'd say.

Oh, and i played this on a P3-600, 512MB, 32MB GeForce2 with everything turned off. Still ran well except in scenes with lots of mobs, when my character did this weird sort of run in the wrong direction too fast. However, if i ran backwards (i.e., with 's'), it didn't have a problem.

I didn't figure out how to Jedi Mira; i ran into the hint while surfing for something else.

The Boy complains that playing Dark Side sucks because you can only do petty evil, not large-scale evil. Having not played DS, i'll have to take his word on it.