No, I am not ‘freaking’ kidding you. I imagine it’s Final Fantasy syndrome, whereby if you’ve played the RPG the way the designers wanted you get by just fine. But if you develop your characters slightly differently, or don’t grasp every facet of the arbitrary combat rules, you end up getting completely stuck at a random boss battle somewhere down the line.

As with the rest of the game, I imagine the balancing just wasn’t finished. So lots of people would have breezed through it, while others hit crazy difficulty spikes.

“I don’t play RPGs for animation so I couldn’t give a rats…..”

I doubt people play many game genres specifically for the animation. You don’t play an FPS or a platformer for the animation. It just happens that those genres sometimes have games in which the animation is also really good.

So, no, I don’t play RPGs for the animation either. But it sure would be nice if developers put some effort into that area as well! I don’t see why it being in the RPG genre suddenly gives it a free pass to be crap in a bunch of areas, anymore than being an FPS means you’re allowed to have crappy, cliched writing. The elements might be more or less important depending on genre, but they’re still relevant.

re:KotOR2 characters lecturing
“Maybe, but I’d take that over a bunch of boring sissies having whiny conversations”

Fair enough, you can prefer KotOR2’s dialgoue to KotoR1’s. But that doesn’t stop it being horribly self-indulgent. If I wanted to read that much text I’d be reading a book. If I wanted to listen to that much spoken word I’d listen to an audio drama (although an audio drama would be better acted, I’d hope).

KotOR2’s characters were great on paper, I agree. The game is full of great ideas. But they (and the rest of the game) felt lifeless in their implementation.

“Like I salute anyone who could get through KotOR2’s terrible, long-winded opening”

Wow, I’d actually forgotten about that giant, rambling opening level. Bizarre. I seem to recall another very large space station-y type hub that hardly had anything in it, and which they hadn’t bothered to really light at all…so dreary.

skalpadda says:
Apparently the enemies were a bit too good with grenades, and tended to kill you, a lot.

Pshaw! To know real fear they should try Shadow of Chernobyl with the AMK mod. That impliments grenade throwing with terrifyingly realistic damage/radius and riccochet-ing shrapnel to boot.
Throwing one well in any conflict will either kill a whole lot of people or scatter the field of battle rather wide (including thrower and his mates if they don’t do it right).
And before anyone says it, I reckon it’s great fun.

Exactly. This is the same pattern as Mass Effect as Fallout 3 and Mass Effect. They’re showing the action stuff to get all the shooter types interested, but that tells us nothing about how good it is as an RPG. And if it’s anything like ME, we’ll see a bunch of reviews telling us that it’s a substandard shooter with boring talky bits.

/sigh

From the videos i got impression it’s going to be “spy” game in the sense of Sid Meier’s Covert Action crossed with Bourne novels. The “problem solving” part seems to come in form of decisions made by the player during the dialogue sections.

Yeah, the typical dialogue trees is what I mean by no problem solving. Picking one of the three dialog options isn’t solving of any kind. I was actually hoping Alpha Protocol would be something like a modern take on Covert Action, but it’s not looking like that at all. Covert Action had tons of problem solving. Decoding messages, who to tail, where to place taps, all done under time management. The combat in Covert Action was often the climax or the result of a screw-up, just like in a “spy” movie. Alpha Protocol is looking more like Jack Bauer. Combat serves to unlock the next piece of dialogue and story. In other words, you don’t participate in the story, you’re simply told the story in segments.

Anyway, what’s wrong with the grangde use in Clear Sky?

KotOR or KotOR2? I’d dare say KotOR2 had an abundance of great concepts and some really intriguing characters, but it failed in making much of it, where the first game was a well rounded and complete experience. Most of the more interesting ideas where lifted from the original game, like the failings of the Jedi, the nature of the force and a lot of other ideas that explored different aspects of the world.

Maybe, but I’d take that over a bunch of boring sissies having whiny conversations

I thought the story in the KotOR II was more evenly paced than the one in the first game. If you take out the twist from that one you don’t end up with something very interesting.

It’s just personal preference. I enjoyed the characters that Obsidian wrote much more than the ones BioWare wrote. I can look past the game being unfinished