KoTOR On iPad For 10th Anniversary

[Flagg]

Anyone check it out yet?

[Aaron MkII]

It's installing.

[Aaron MkII]

The movement controls take some getting used to, swipe up and hold and they'll keep walking forward but everything else you just tap.

[Flagg]

Against my better judgement I'll get it tonight when my check hits. Ten bucks is a lot though for a ten year old tablet game lol.

[Stark]

Now you can fill that 'play shit bioware game on the toilet' need that's been ruining your life!

[Flagg]

Now you can fill that 'play shit bioware game on the toilet' need that's been ruining your life!

I do tend to get diarreah when I play Bioware games, so maybe it's a good stool softener. On iPad!

[Vendetta]

Now you can fill that 'play shit bioware game on the toilet' need that's been ruining your life!

But they already did Baldur's Gate on ipadz. And let's face it every bioware game since has just been trying to figure out which bits of Baldur's Gate were the good bits and replicate them.

(Hint: It wasn't any form of D&D combat mechanics, and the D20 system renders Kotor terrible)

[Flagg]

Now you can fill that 'play shit bioware game on the toilet' need that's been ruining your life!

But they already did Baldur's Gate on ipadz. And let's face it every bioware game since has just been trying to figure out which bits of Baldur's Gate were the good bits and replicate them.

(Hint: It wasn't any form of D&D combat mechanics, and the D20 system renders Kotor terrible)

You play world of tanks so you calling anything terrible is hilarious.

[Stark]

Renaming 'helmet' 'visor' was brilliant game design, buddy.

It looks like they didn't uprate the textures or anything, so it looks a bit ass; kind of a waste of a 2500x1400 screen really. But then I play boardgame simulators...

BTW Vendetta I would totally buy Warhammer Quest if it wasn't Warhammer, and I didn't realise how lame I found all the Warhammer stuff until it came out. Change 'irishman' to 'conan' and 'elf' to 'man of dale' and game improved.

Flagg WoT is a terrible game and I hate to see it destroying more lives every day... but it wouldn't be ruining families and destroying the gaming industry if it wasn't really, really good at what it does. And really, Steam started it. :V

[Flagg]

Renaming 'helmet' 'visor' was brilliant game design, buddy.

It looks like they didn't uprate the textures or anything, so it looks a bit ass; kind of a waste of a 2500x1400 screen really. But then I play boardgame simulators...

BTW Vendetta I would totally buy Warhammer Quest if it wasn't Warhammer, and I didn't realise how lame I found all the Warhammer stuff until it came out. Change 'irishman' to 'conan' and 'elf' to 'man of dale' and game improved.

Flagg WoT is a terrible game and I hate to see it destroying more lives every day... but it wouldn't be ruining families and destroying the gaming industry if it wasn't really, really good at what it does. And really, Steam started it. :V

VICTORY!

[Vendetta]

Now you can fill that 'play shit bioware game on the toilet' need that's been ruining your life!

But they already did Baldur's Gate on ipadz. And let's face it every bioware game since has just been trying to figure out which bits of Baldur's Gate were the good bits and replicate them.

(Hint: It wasn't any form of D&D combat mechanics, and the D20 system renders Kotor terrible)

You play world of tanks so you calling anything terrible is hilarious.

True, but at least I can critically analyse terribleness and why I put up with it in tanks and not in kotor any more even if I've tried.

(NB there are plenty of things from World of Tanks that other free to play time vampires should totally steal but don't because they don't realise why they have the effect they do on the player.)

[Vendetta]

BTW Vendetta I would totally buy Warhammer Quest if it wasn't Warhammer, and I didn't realise how lame I found all the Warhammer stuff until it came out. Change 'irishman' to 'conan' and 'elf' to 'man of dale' and game improved.

I don't think WHQ's failings are anything to do with Warhammer, which is only tangentially relevant anyway in that it gives you big tables full of monsters to thump. They're more structural than that in that it attempts to be both a single play session game and a monster thumping dungeon crawler with persistence and the two elements strain against each other. The quintessential dungeon crawling boardgame has not yet been written, and not for lack of trying. Of course, the things that WHQ was attempting to do as a boardgame have been iterated a million times on computers as q diabls, the boardgame provenance is almost irrelevant, WHQ is a q diabl that happens to also be a board game.

[Stark]

I just really hate the fluff; the HO HO Holy Roman Empire, the stupid sewer rats, the blue Irishmen, soccer orcs, etc. I'd play a good board game dungeon thing, but not if I roll my eyes this much just reading the description. I even have a fucking hero quest clone!

And seriously it appears to have a lamer meta game than necromunda. An achievement!

[xthetenth]

(NB there are plenty of things from World of Tanks that other free to play time vampires should totally steal but don't because they don't realise why they have the effect they do on the player.)

I'm curious, what's your list of reasons? I know mine is that I like shooting games but run around until you see someone else and then try to click away his HPs faster than he does yours is painfully boring, so making aiming and maneuvering a greater focus during a fight, making disengaging an option and spending more time managing risk forgives most of the other sins in game design.

While kotor is a game with bad combat mechanics 'livening up' an already stale story with no thematic interest or anything beyond what the original trilogy did vastly better.

[Vendetta]

I'm curious, what's your list of reasons? I know mine is that I like shooting games but run around until you see someone else and then try to click away his HPs faster than he does yours is painfully boring, so making aiming and maneuvering a greater focus during a fight, making disengaging an option and spending more time managing risk forgives most of the other sins in game design.

I was mostly talking about the time vampire design rather than moment to moment gameplay. (WoT has a bit of a weakness there in that tier 1 is actually the least varied and interesting to play, so it gives a poor first impression)

Free to play games work by giving the player reasons to keep coming back to one game over and over again for a long period of time, and WoT's way of doing that is the design of the tech tree. The way the tech tree granularises into vehicle and module research means that as a player you always have short medium and long term goals, (short: Get a new gun for my tank, medium: get the next tank in line, long: Get this tank three or four tiers further up). Also the next piece of progress is never too far away. This also makes the progress the user is making is directly obvious, a number goes up on your tank and you can see what you need the number to be for your next short/medium term goal. It also makes your long term goals related directly to your short term goals and play experience, because most of the tank likes play similarly over at least the medium term you get a continuity of experience in that the thing you are aiming for as your long term goal is the biggest bestest version of what you are doing right now in actual games.

Contrasting that with War Thunder, which is its closest competitor, the WT tech tree is less granularised and your progress is less obvious, you get some XP for a nation and when you level up in that nation you can have some different planes from it, but that means that the link between goals and gameplay progress are less clear, and there are essentially only long term goals. Gaining XP on an individual plane is a very long term goal because the amounts required to get new ammo belts/new engine/polished fuselage are quite large, and it's harder to care about the short term goals because it's harder to see your progress towards them when it's just a bar going up and levelling up now and again.

Likewise with Hawken and Warframe they have mostly flat progressions, so you can basically get the last things you'll ever need as soon as you're ready to make any progress at all, so you don't have the multiple level of goals at all, that means there's less imperative to keep coming back to get the Next Thing.

It's also pretty soft sell on the monetisation as well, you can play quite a long way into the content before feeling the pinch in terms of XP or credits and start looking enviously at a premium account and/or vehicle, and the only real money transfer options in the UI are in those places where the user is already buying something with ingame currency. That means that by the time you're thinking about paying you're already sold on the game itself and have sunk a significant amount of time into it. It's a little like most free to play MMOs that don't try to monetise until the player has reached the traditional endgame, when the player is already max level and has spent lots of time in the game. It's all about making the user willing to pay before asking them to, or even not asking them to and letting them reach the decision to do on their own.

The biggest contrast there is Mechwarrior Online, where as soon as you launch the UI you're presented with a screen full of monetisation for premium accounts and robits outside of the context where you normally buy robits and it's actually quite difficult to decipher where your actual current robits are and how to do anything with them, it tries to monetise you right from the start and actually does so at the expense of letting you experience the game at all. War Thunder is a little better, but it's still right in there with the monetisation, most pages will have a "pay to have this now" option, whether it's crew levels or faster repairs.

[Stark]

WoT's balance between the bait (the reward cycle, the tanglible changes and benefits from grind/pay) and the hook (the long term view, the competition, the monetisation) is probably the best in any F2P. It's not just that it has a million small steps to constantly give reward; its that those steps are inter-related in logical ways and often have a real impact on the way you play. Games can be like Warframe or MWO and have flat progression, but then slowly grind you up levels that do nothing but give you +1 something instead. In the long term it helps that WoT gives players actual information about how they performed and what they did; other games (like Blacklight or MWO) just give typically useless 'you killed a mang and also shot a mang' which doesn't help players feel value from their progress. Look at the sad WoT thread; people get a thing, and then often immediately see in their results the impact of that thing in their damage delivered or whatever. This helps the reward cycle again and feeds right back into the small cycles that run the long cycles, unlike other games where it's 'grind in a boring fashion for a long time', it's 'grind for a long time through a series of meaningful steps that will each have tangible effect and possibly long-term benefits'.

The money/ui issue is just sad, because games like MWO actually hurt themselves and their flow with a shit UI full of ads. The focus should certainly be on making playing and managing your play as easy as possible, and the game itself compelling, before you ask for money - and arguably if its done right you don't have to ask anyway. Blacklight's hilarious 'YOU WON THE MATCH NOW RENT NEW STOCK FOR $2' thing notwithstanding. :V

[Carinthium]

I can see reasons to hate KOTOR, but I can't see any reasonable explanation for why it should be a bad game by the standards of current Ipad games. Surely given it's competition it wins out, even if it isn't quite worth its price?

[Zinegata]

I was mostly talking about the time vampire design rather than moment to moment gameplay.

WoT's balance between the bait (the reward cycle, the tanglible changes and benefits from grind/pay) and the hook (the long term view, the competition, the monetisation) is probably the best in any F2P.

It really is, and some in the industry are startng to pay attention. Gamasutra had a couple of articles covering WoT's Free-to-Play model.

[Aaron MkII]

I can see reasons to hate KOTOR, but I can't see any reasonable explanation for why it should be a bad game by the standards of current Ipad games. Surely given it's competition it wins out, even if it isn't quite worth its price?

It wins out because it has nostalgia appeal for older nerds like me, and we're the ones with money. Its fucking boring as hell. And not just because of the clunky pause, issue orders mechanic or having to go into the actual inventory screen to swap weapons. The plot is boring, theres no tension, no sense of desperation, nothing.

[Aaron MkII]

And while they updated the controls, the AI, especially your party members is just fucking awful. I realize thats because its an old game but when you go from ME3, DA2 or even FO:NV (games that at least don't have your companions stuck behind a door frame or something all the time), its very jarring.

Yesterday my Revan ran right up to an enemy, stopped and then chucked her grenade, poisoning herself and her target.

I don't have to deal with that in say, StarCommand Game.

[xthetenth]

I like how KoTOR's plot when flowcharted is basically literally the same thing as Spoiler

the original trilogy

Bioware is so original.

[StarSword]

Somebody charted out on another board how BioWare has used essentially the same plot in every game they've written since Baldur's Gate. For the record, the biggest deviation from "the BioWare plot" comes from Mass Effect, and Neverwinter Nights has the smallest.

As for KOTOR on the iPad, pass. I've already got it from Steam in the event I lose my hardcopy, and if they port KOTOR2 I don't see how anyone would be able to add the TSL Restored Content Mod to make it playworthy.

EDIT: Dang it, that's supposed to be NWN1, not NWN2.

[xthetenth]

KoTOR 2 is at least playworthy the first time because it's thematically interesting, but with the restored content mod there's no reason not to do that on PC.