18th August 2004, 8:02 PM
(This post was last modified: 18th August 2004, 8:44 PM by A Black Falcon.)
Don't bother, it's just OB1 acting like a moron like usual. Can't admit that a game he loves might have flaws in it even when they stare him in the face constantly.
On that note, I've been playing some more and it fully supports my position on parties and close cameras (first or third person). Party cohesion is dramatically harder to deal with. Yes, in a isometric game characters might get way behind or go wandering off. But if you're paying attention, that won't happen much because you have a view of all around. But in a game like this, where most of the time you control just one character, it can be a major irritation! The other characters most of the time trail well behind you. This means that while character one is in range of enemies, the others are well back and can't target them yet (this like many of these things is a game design flaw, not a flaw intrinsic to third-person cameras). So you need to either beat a hasty retreat with character one while making the others catch up as fast as possible (trying to minimize damage done to the main one, though it can't all be avoided) or just start attacking with character one while you switch to the others to catch up. This is a problem because you aren't moving them all at once. You're moving just character one and the others are following, so you have to rely on the AI. And AI is hard so of course it's not perfect. So you run in to unavoidable issues with a camera choice like this. Not game-killing by any stretch of the imagination, but it leads to you taking more damage than you would like and not having quite as much control over battles as would be ideal (since you need to spend a bunch of time running around with people instead of managing what the other people are doing). As well as having one character enter many fights well before the others can -- you can't see behind you so unless you frequently switch while moving (which would lead to major confusion with the changing perspective and delays as you switch between the people), after all, so you can't see the others falling behind... or passing and setting off some enemy across the room while your attention is focused on the ones in front of you. That's not something that would happen much in an isometric game but it's already happened multiple times in this one.
As you can tell if you read my posts, I don't have huge problems with KotOR. It's a great game. But it's got a whole lot of little issues that annoy and make it not as fun as it could be, which is why I feel that I have to mention them.
On another note, a good thing and a bad thing. On the good side, I got by first 'You must gather your party before venturing forth' message. On the bad, it didn't have the voiceover from BG1... :) ... okay, so that got incredibly annoying. But I got used to it and it's kind of a GOOD annoying, you know? At least, in a game like this where you don't see it much... it definitely gets really irritating when it keeps repeating it while you're trying to get people to the exit area like it does sometimes in BG.
On that note, I've been playing some more and it fully supports my position on parties and close cameras (first or third person). Party cohesion is dramatically harder to deal with. Yes, in a isometric game characters might get way behind or go wandering off. But if you're paying attention, that won't happen much because you have a view of all around. But in a game like this, where most of the time you control just one character, it can be a major irritation! The other characters most of the time trail well behind you. This means that while character one is in range of enemies, the others are well back and can't target them yet (this like many of these things is a game design flaw, not a flaw intrinsic to third-person cameras). So you need to either beat a hasty retreat with character one while making the others catch up as fast as possible (trying to minimize damage done to the main one, though it can't all be avoided) or just start attacking with character one while you switch to the others to catch up. This is a problem because you aren't moving them all at once. You're moving just character one and the others are following, so you have to rely on the AI. And AI is hard so of course it's not perfect. So you run in to unavoidable issues with a camera choice like this. Not game-killing by any stretch of the imagination, but it leads to you taking more damage than you would like and not having quite as much control over battles as would be ideal (since you need to spend a bunch of time running around with people instead of managing what the other people are doing). As well as having one character enter many fights well before the others can -- you can't see behind you so unless you frequently switch while moving (which would lead to major confusion with the changing perspective and delays as you switch between the people), after all, so you can't see the others falling behind... or passing and setting off some enemy across the room while your attention is focused on the ones in front of you. That's not something that would happen much in an isometric game but it's already happened multiple times in this one.
As you can tell if you read my posts, I don't have huge problems with KotOR. It's a great game. But it's got a whole lot of little issues that annoy and make it not as fun as it could be, which is why I feel that I have to mention them.
On another note, a good thing and a bad thing. On the good side, I got by first 'You must gather your party before venturing forth' message. On the bad, it didn't have the voiceover from BG1... :) ... okay, so that got incredibly annoying. But I got used to it and it's kind of a GOOD annoying, you know? At least, in a game like this where you don't see it much... it definitely gets really irritating when it keeps repeating it while you're trying to get people to the exit area like it does sometimes in BG.