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Let's play KotOR 2: The Sith Lords together - Week 7: Malachor.

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  • WybornWyborn GET EQUIPPED Registered User regular
    Take your stims before the fight, abuse pause menu healing, and finish of the final round with Force Wave or whatever

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  • GundiGundi Serious Bismuth Registered User regular
    What kills it is that Handmaiden, being essentially a battle nun, can be a romance option but I very much doubt she knows about sex or relationships because the Exile is her first mega crush. Everything revolves around combat to the point where she doesn't get while the Exile might be, urhurm, made awkward by underwear sparring. Like Best Friend's character Rage in their Def Jam LPs.

    CLOTHES RESTRICT BATTLE MOVEMENT. THEY ARE USELESS.

    SHOW ME THIS KISSING TECHNIQUE, IT APPEARS POWERFUL.
    Handmaiden totally understands about clothing and cultural modesty. She absolutely does.

  • ShortyShorty touching the meat Intergalactic Cool CourtRegistered User regular
    literally every lightsaber I've gotten has been a double-blade

    this game thinks I am way edgier than I deserve

  • TubeTube Registered User admin
    There are more than a few hints that Handmaiden
    is deliberately trying to keep you off guard and knows precisely what she's doing (it may be cut content, but Atton specifically calls her out and says that he knows how Echani etiquette works), but you know, they still wrote it that way and it's still kind of dumb.

  • PlatyPlaty Registered User regular
    Wait you can romance Handmaiden?

  • TubeTube Registered User admin
    To the extent that you can romance anyone.

  • OmnipotentBagelOmnipotentBagel floof Registered User regular
    Tube wrote: »
    To the extent that you can romance anyone.

    You mean in the game or is this Philosophy?

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  • ShortyShorty touching the meat Intergalactic Cool CourtRegistered User regular
    can't it be both

  • WhiteZinfandelWhiteZinfandel Your insides Let me show you themRegistered User regular
    Tube wrote: »
    To the extent that you can romance anyone.

    You mean in the game or is this Philosophy?

    Yes.

  • Casually HardcoreCasually Hardcore Once an Asshole. Trying to be better. Registered User regular
    edited January 2018
    They could've easily still gone that route without being dumb about it.


    womens-mma-bantamweight-champion-Holly-Holm.jpg


    Casually Hardcore on
  • WybornWyborn GET EQUIPPED Registered User regular
    The Restoration Project's restored content definitely gives Atton a lot more Han Solo lines.

    Also I just checked my time played for the game so far after getting to the polar regions. I want to apologize, again, for how long this week was. I thought the whole game was like 35 hours, but I've been almost ten hours just getting to the end of Telos. If I make threads like this in the future I will be doing more exact research on how long it takes to get through a given segment

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  • JedocJedoc In the scuppers with the staggers and jagsRegistered User regular
    Lay off the Handmaiden, she breathes through her skin.

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  • GundiGundi Serious Bismuth Registered User regular
    I mean really, why do ithorians even neeeed clothes?

  • manwiththemachinegunmanwiththemachinegun METAL GEAR?! Registered User regular
    Jedoc wrote: »
    Lay off the Handmaiden, she breathes through her skin.

    Nanoparasites.

  • DoobhDoobh She/Her, Ace Pan/Bisexual 8-) What's up, bootlickers?Registered User regular
    well, the handmaiden gang fight is a lot easier with a guardian

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  • OldSlackerOldSlacker Registered User regular
    Sprout wrote: »

    My first character managed to win the odd Victoria secrets lingerie wrestling match against he with ease being a pure combat character.. Though seriously, how come the female characters are wearing sexy lingerie while the guys character are wearing full body boxer briefs?



    Because video games are Bad.

    Huh. Must be one of the mods I installed, but my femExile was traipsing around Peragus in briefs and t-shirt.
    Which made Atton's "Well, helloooooo there..." a bit odd.

  • WybornWyborn GET EQUIPPED Registered User regular
    "Wipe the fear from your mind. You will not find blind obedience a difficult master. You chose it once. You will learn to embrace it again."

    This right here, the conversation that Kreia and Atton have while they are imprisoned, is the moment where you begin to understand what Kreia really is. She's a liar, a viper, a manipulator, who holds people like knives between her fingers and treats them as disposably as a blunted, replaceable weapon. Here we begin to have a better understanding of her relationship with Sion, her relationship with the Jedi, and her relationship with you, though perhaps not as simply as we might think.

    God, she's so great.

    That she speaks of Atris with a kind of admiration for her cunning tells us a great deal about who Atris is, too.

    That whole conversation is the beginning of the climax to the game's first act. Here things begin to line up; here we begin to understand what we're really up against, and how not all of our enemies are hounding us.

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  • GundiGundi Serious Bismuth Registered User regular
    Man when you go the bad route on Telos you get paaaaaaaid.

  • WybornWyborn GET EQUIPPED Registered User regular
    "Fine. I'll be your 'pawn.' But I still think you have the wrong man."

    "Perhaps. But someone has to fly the ship."

    AGH THIS FUCKING GAME

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  • GundiGundi Serious Bismuth Registered User regular
    Kreia(to Atton): "I don't talk to 'the help'."

  • ShortyShorty touching the meat Intergalactic Cool CourtRegistered User regular
    Gundi wrote: »
    Man when you go the bad route on Telos you get paaaaaaaid.

    yeah, I'm really glad they did that

    in a lot of games (especially Bioware games), the evil rewards tend to be about the same as good, or slightly worse

    which has never made much sense to me

  • TubeTube Registered User admin
    Sprout wrote: »

    My first character managed to win the odd Victoria secrets lingerie wrestling match against he with ease being a pure combat character.. Though seriously, how come the female characters are wearing sexy lingerie while the guys character are wearing full body boxer briefs?



    Because video games are Bad.

    Huh. Must be one of the mods I installed, but my femExile was traipsing around Peragus in briefs and t-shirt.
    Which made Atton's "Well, helloooooo there..." a bit odd.

    I believe the Exile has pretty sensible and modest undergarments. The Handmaiden is the one that wears lingerie.

  • OldSlackerOldSlacker Registered User regular
    Tube wrote: »
    Sprout wrote: »

    My first character managed to win the odd Victoria secrets lingerie wrestling match against he with ease being a pure combat character.. Though seriously, how come the female characters are wearing sexy lingerie while the guys character are wearing full body boxer briefs?



    Because video games are Bad.

    Huh. Must be one of the mods I installed, but my femExile was traipsing around Peragus in briefs and t-shirt.
    Which made Atton's "Well, helloooooo there..." a bit odd.

    I believe the Exile has pretty sensible and modest undergarments. The Handmaiden is the one that wears lingerie.

    Karmically, the only NPC I stripped (accidentally) was Atton since I haven't used him in party in a while so now all the cutscenes in the Ebon Hawk have that added hilarity of Atton just lounging in his undies around the ship while everyone is away. I keep thinking that I should probably put some armor on him, but then I forget until the next cutscene.

  • WybornWyborn GET EQUIPPED Registered User regular
    My Exile was wearing a one-piece that looked more or less exactly like the male Exile's, if I remember?

    Anyway I just did the Atris conversation, and holy Christ that might be the best conversation that any video game has ever had in it, full stop. Somebody in the thread asked earlier what the "win condition" is for that fight, because in a lot of ways the conversation with Atris is the big climactic boss battle for this section of the game. It reveals your past, pits you against someone with whom you have a shared history, and can spiral out in wildly different directions based on the choices you make. You can have a 10-minute conversation that is a completely optional branch that ultimately terminates in you coming back to the question she asks you to start things off, regardless of how you handle it.

    The writing here is so good. It's so confident. How many other games would ever put such a huge confrontation solely in the realm of its conversation system? And it's a conversation, a sparring match. One thing that's brought up about BioWare games a lot (credit to @I needed a gnome to post. for this one) is that conversations in them are really usually exposition dumps where the other character pleasantly relays information to you, the player. But that's not what happens here! The Exile interrupts Atris mid-sentence multiple times if you choose to argue with her, just completely fucking steamrolls her with the strength of her own convictions and the weight of the horrors she's experienced. She reveals her own personality more insistently than in the entire game up to this point, casting aside the need to be cagey about her past and her motivations because Atris already knows all of it, so why would you hide? Instead she debates, or capitulates, or has a fucking fight about it.

    It's a confrontation I found particularly satisfying as a Dark Side player because the Exile is not at all ashamed about what she's done or her reasons for going to war, and she plays out again the exact same character dynamic that caused Atris to doubt herself all those years ago.

    So what was my win condition? Making Atris angry, and then seeing that the reason she was angry was because she had been too afraid to follow me

    And her confession to the Handmaiden, that my own righteousness caused her to doubt all that time ago, was the payoff. She always does that, I think, but the revelation is lent weight by the conversation that comes before it, and that tooth-and-nail argument between this Jedi who values the Order higher than she does life and her former hero who valued life above the Order was everything I wanted out of it

    This is why I think Telos was the best place to end the first part of the playthrough. That conversation.

    Man. It's so good. Atris is so good. The Exile is so good.

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  • GundiGundi Serious Bismuth Registered User regular
    Apropros of nothing but I like making the Exile's lightsaber silver because it just completes Atris' whole visual design. (Which is a pretty great visual design, mixing grace with just this little backdrop of menace.)

  • JedocJedoc In the scuppers with the staggers and jagsRegistered User regular
    Jedok Porkins is a straight-edge light-sider who took Atris to the goddamn mat because she doesn't know what she's talking about. I'm the one who has been out there making hard decisions to save millions of people from Space Nazis, while every spare moment in between has been helping weird aliens with their gardening and freeing slaves. She's the one living in what looks like a literal ivory tower, raising a bunch of Force-blind clones to sniff her farts and execute the impious, comparing me to Space Hitler, and reveling in her dogmatic purity while worlds burn.

    I've seen the dark side, and if she thinks that's what I am, she's delusional. She represents the heretofore undiscovered beige side of the Force, the side that gets all prim and shitty about the possibility of getting sued if you perform CPR on a dying stranger. Fuck that, fuck her, and fuck this entire creepy Fortress of Solitude. I'm gonna round up the rest of the Council, shame them into saving the damn galaxy, and get Bao-Dur to make me a pair of gauntlets with lightsaber blades where my middle fingers are when I finally peace out of this Cromwellian shitshow.

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  • manwiththemachinegunmanwiththemachinegun METAL GEAR?! Registered User regular
    What makes that conversation so great, is you don't even have to argue with her! You can play, if you want, a completely broken Jedi who genuinely regrets going to the Mandalorian wars and the conversation will reflect that!

    It's way more satisfying to make her eat it over her hypocrisy, but you don't have to if you don't want to! Roleplaying!

  • SilverWindSilverWind Registered User regular
    It's funny because many of the options in the Atris conversation result in the same lines from her--but being able to choose means a lot, and it's being silently tallied to figure out her anger and dark side/light side tilt of the convo

    Part of why it's great that the exile's lines aren't voiced are that many options then have... more than one implication? It's a great ambiguity. (It definitely allowed them to put in more choices, as well--VA work woulda financially throttled the variables)

    I went Light Side, Wyborn did Dark Side, and yet we chose the same lines in many places.

    "Do you know what you've done?"
    "I doomed two planets." (or something to that effect) --is it spoken angrily, carelessly? Or is it simply a direct statement acknowledging you know the weight of your earlier actions? It could be both!


    Also I completely skipped the large debate tree because I chose "I'm not here to debate the Council's decision." Which in retrospect was more of a me-thing to do, and if I'd played Wyborn better I should have gone for her eyes. ...And, of course, Wyborn played the exact inverse when doing evil me.

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  • Mom2KatMom2Kat Registered User regular
    I am so behind on this. I’m still on Peragus and the ship just docked. Darn work and cadets and range team taking up my time. But I’ve got the weekend to catch up.

    Throughly enjoying what I have played so far.

  • ShortyShorty touching the meat Intergalactic Cool CourtRegistered User regular
    Jedoc wrote: »
    Jedok Porkins is a straight-edge light-sider who took Atris to the goddamn mat because she doesn't know what she's talking about. I'm the one who has been out there making hard decisions to save millions of people from Space Nazis, while every spare moment in between has been helping weird aliens with their gardening and freeing slaves. She's the one living in what looks like a literal ivory tower, raising a bunch of Force-blind clones to sniff her farts and execute the impious, comparing me to Space Hitler, and reveling in her dogmatic purity while worlds burn.

    I've seen the dark side, and if she thinks that's what I am, she's delusional. She represents the heretofore undiscovered beige side of the Force, the side that gets all prim and shitty about the possibility of getting sued if you perform CPR on a dying stranger. Fuck that, fuck her, and fuck this entire creepy Fortress of Solitude. I'm gonna round up the rest of the Council, shame them into saving the damn galaxy, and get Bao-Dur to make me a pair of gauntlets with lightsaber blades where my middle fingers are when I finally peace out of this Cromwellian shitshow.

    good god

  • Grey GhostGrey Ghost Registered User regular
    Okay so helping the Ithorians is clearly the good path and helping Czerka clearly evil

    I'm trying a dark side run, but is there any way I can help the Ithorians but be a dick about it? I really don't want to side with the corporation

  • DoobhDoobh She/Her, Ace Pan/Bisexual 8-) What's up, bootlickers?Registered User regular
    Grey Ghost wrote: »
    Okay so helping the Ithorians is clearly the good path and helping Czerka clearly evil

    I'm trying a dark side run, but is there any way I can help the Ithorians but be a dick about it? I really don't want to side with the corporation

    you got options, if I recall

    still gonna get a lightside point or two, I think

    but I've done it before to satisfaction

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  • Grey GhostGrey Ghost Registered User regular
    Okay when do I get some dang robes
    I'm tired of this miner's uniform

  • SilverWindSilverWind Registered User regular
    I found a pair stashed in a pillar in the cargo hold on the Ebon Hawk

    You should always check stores since they and item containers are at least partially randomized

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  • DoobhDoobh She/Her, Ace Pan/Bisexual 8-) What's up, bootlickers?Registered User regular
    you'll be balls deep in robes before you know it

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  • see317see317 Registered User regular
    Dubh wrote: »
    you'll be balls deep in robes before you know it

    Yeah, I'm pretty sure that was the idea.
    This miner uniform rides up like you wouldn't believe.

  • Grey GhostGrey Ghost Registered User regular
    Uh
    hmm

    Telos
    I just got completely curbstomped by Luxa and her goons after I killed Slusk
    like, that was a very short fight, we didn't stand a chance
    I don't know how I'm gonna crack this one

  • manwiththemachinegunmanwiththemachinegun METAL GEAR?! Registered User regular
    Turn on your shields
    Take lots of drugs

  • WyvernWyvern Registered User regular
    Oh, was this the segment where you end up on a featureless stretch of ice with one building and then you get thrown into a cell for a little bit? That's one of the most memorable parts of my experience with this game, not because I remember anything that happens in the story, but because I hit some wierd-ass bug where I slipped through some crack in the code and ended up in, like, a debug mode of some kind? Like, I'd see part of a scene from a janky angle, and then instead of dialogue my options were [GOTO SCENE 2753] or something to that effect. And I'd click one and it'd just jump me to a fixed camera angle of an empty hallway or something? After a few tries I ended up halfway through a conversation between Atton and Kreia in a cell and things proceeded normally from there.

    So yeah. This game was pretty broken!

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  • WybornWyborn GET EQUIPPED Registered User regular
    edited January 2018
    The difference that combat stims, a good shield, and force powers can make would be very difficult to exaggerate

    There's a mercenary base on the surface of Telos where my teammates got away from me, ran into the middle of another group, and got blown the fuck up in something like two rounds. I ran away, turned on an energy shield, shot up with one of every stim in my inventory, applied all of my buff force powers, and ran back in. I am not exaggerating when I say I killed every single enemy in that place in one round apiece and never took a hit. It was gorgeous.

    Stims are probably the most overlooked part of the combat system, and when properly applied can make a world of difference. The Battle and Strength stims alone...

    Wyborn on
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