Blog #87 - I want your TOP 10 issues with the M4-78 EP

Sith Holocron

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I'll have to get working on the rest of the YouTube documentary eventually but I'm going to need your input in order to proceed.

  • I'd like you to list which version you played, either version 1.2 or version 1.3. This is very important as some issues may have been fixed in 1.3 that were present in 1.2 !  (However, I still want to hear them as the documentary will cover each version in chronological order.)
  • I'd like you to list where you acquired the mod. (Was it from here, MODDB, Steam?)
  • I'd like you to list up to 10 reasons each - and no more than that - of what were the most significant issues you thought were holding this mod back.  Throw your well-written walls of text at me.  If you can't think of 10 right away but can think of some more later to bring it closer (or all the way to) 10, you can update your entry at a later date.
  • One entry per person. (Hence me mentioning about the updates.)  

This shouldn't be considered a debate thread as I won't be defending the mod.  I just want to hear what you have to say.  Your quotes may be pulled from your entries below to show the perceived common consensus among players.

Thank you for reading.

PS: I'll be in Hawaii for about a week so I'll not be glued to the site.  I look forward to reading your comments when I get back.



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Here we go:

 Kaah and Vash both inevitably die. 

Both Vash and Kaah can both be killed by a DS player however in the Light Side ending of M4-78 the main archon M4-78 kills Vash himself and Kaah is executed by Battle Droids. This was done as a means to remove Vash so she doesn't appear in the Enclave where she has no dialogue for that scene. Kaah on the other hands was just a loose end which needed to be tied up, or was it? In TSLRCM, Kaevee the Padawan is able to survive the encounter with the Exile and live on so why couldn't Kaah? Maybe because the developers chose to oddly build up the final Kaah scene as a "recruitment" however no recruitment takes place as he is killed at the last minute. This could be seen as a really big ruin for some players who do SO much to get to Vash and Kaah only to have them both die and offer 2 hours of extra frustratious gameplay complete with lag and bad VO in pre 1.4 versions, the XP for playing the mod and the loot.

 

Sith Locker at the end

This is my personal taste coming out here, I do not like the reward at the end of the mod which is a "Hurrikaine" crystal or something of the like. It is a blue Bondar crystal with unstoppable 8 damage which is found on Malachor V in the cut rooms meaning TSLRCM is required to find this. As this mod requires TSLRCM there is little reason to restore this item this early on as it provides a weapon buff before the player gets overpowered.

Environmental Droids

In the Environmental Zone, this could be a result of using Stoney's mod as a base, the enemy droids all have unique textures like Brown, Black and Beige for example. The names of the droids are like 'Environmental Droid Mark 1' and 'Mark 2' for example, but their textures don't match their names. For example, a brown droid may be a Mark 1 droid then you'll encounter a black Mark 2 and then a brown Mark 3 and a black Mark 1. This may sound odd but play the game, and look at the name tags of the hostile Environmental Droids and you'll see the names are meaningless with the textures.

 

 The Sith Officer

In one of the earlier scenes, we see a tape of a droid closing large doors. This droid is fired at by a fleeing Sith Officer who is killed off by the radiation soon after, the droid loses a piece of its memory core from this shot and plays an important role in the story. My problem is that if this Sith Officer died about 2 days ago outside the large door... where is the body? You look around the area near the door and find a Sith Soldier body but not a Sith Officer's body. If I wanted to fix this I'd make the Sith Officer a Soldier and try to play it off as if the nearby dead Sith Soldier is from the recording.

 

The last puzzle

More of a nitpick, but I am terrible with puzzles so it is no wonder why I spent about 40 minutes at this final puzzle before realizing what I had to do. Something this mod has in common with normal TSL is that I need to google up the answers to a puzzle, except only with this one it's a pattern I can easily remember from here on out and not a maths question like in TSL.

 

The lag and poor VO
This one is an obvious thing to hate upon. Basically, some droid VO is terrible and the Industrial Zone has so many NPCs it lags horrifically. We all know this problem all too well so here is my alternate issue. When developing the mod, how did the developers react to all of these issues? Did they know the VO was bad and went along with it as they were short on actors? What was the reaction to the lag? This I feel would be an interesting topic to bring up in your documentary. 

 

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Disclaimer: Haven't run through M4-78EP in about 9 or so months.

Other disclaimer: I like this mod so all my bitching comes from a place of love.

I played both 1.2 and 1.3. Two times I ran through 1.2 and only once for 1.3. The reason I've only played 1.3 one time is a fantastic lead in to my number one complain with the mod:

-Extended Enclave does not work with it. Understandably it's rather unorthodox that my biggest issue with M4-78EP isn't with the mod itself, but with incompatibility surrounding it. Here's the thing with me: Incompatibility issues are my number one turn off when it comes to mods, it's why I've yet to even bother trying the genoharadan restored mod. Now, EE takes what's essentially the most impactful and well written scene in the game and makes it even better. What I'm saying is that I'm not going to trade EE for M4 even though it's a whole planet. There is a compatibility patch that makes M4-78EP play nice with EE and it works perfectly with 1.2, but not with 1.3, even after I went through the trouble of manually moving files around to "un-steam-workshop" it.

Nine more complaints in no particular order:

-Voice acting still isn't great (to put it politely), though it's miles and miles ahead of 1.2. I'm not expecting any new voice acting for whenever I get around to trying 1.5. (I'm likely going to wait until the Korriban Expansion mod sees the light of day before my next playthrough so maybe I'll see a surprise or two) I'll still hold out the ghost of a chance hope that somebody will make a "beep and boop" companion mod that replaces some of the more generally agreed "not that great" voice actors with droid noises.

-In 1.3 specifically I somehow got the Assassination Protocols for HK-47 from a random drop at some point in the game before M4-78 and it prevented the quest that results in acquiring it from triggering entirely. Kind of a critical bug that slipped by somehow.

-So, this complaint is about the aforementioned Assassination Protocol acquisition quest. The whole thing revolves around a handful of security droids talking to each other when you get to the confrontation part of the quest. As they all use the same voice actor using the exact same infliction for all his lines, it just comes off like a guy talking to himself, and I find myself losing track of what droids are "good" and which one is the "bad one" as he doesn't even look different. That quest is just a mess. Granted this could have been fixed in 1.3 as I didn't get the privilege of being able to play it in the first place in that version.

-The black market droid that sells you droid parts starting at 10k credits, going down by 1k after each purchase, is really badly implanted. He only seems to sell... uninteresting shit mostly? Nothing special, just droid parts that can be found anywhere. It's seriously not worth the investment. Also his prices reset if you leave the conversation, which is pretty annoying as well. He just needs to go honestly.

-Lt. Grenn's voice splicing for his new lines is absolutely abysmal. I specifically go out of my way to avoid giving fuel to Telos from M4 just so I don't have to listen to that auditory abortion. (What I'm also saying is that I didn't hear him in 1.3 so this could have been fixed I suppose)

-Having the giant environmental droid (I think it's an environmental droid at least) as the most difficult "boss" of the area is just really dumb. It's not even an interesting fight as it's mostly just a damage sponge.

-The "new" party dialogue when you first land on the planet, bad (not as bad as Lt. Grenn) voice splicing aside, is just really unnatural and awkward. The lines your party say just come off as forced and redundant. Thankfully that's the only time we need to deal with it, but it kind of makes me wonder why even bother with it. If you're going to put in a meager thirty seconds of spliced voice acting, then it should be good. If it's not good then don't even put it in as it's going to make the product weaker as a whole. All in all a bad first impression when you land on the planet. I guess it's "fixed" in 1.5 but I haven't played it yet, so I can't give my two cents on it.

-Droids that are involved in quests should have had more specific names. There is nothing less interesting than having to go find an NPC with a name that's two random letters and numbers. Sure it makes sense in universe and in context, but it's annoying to deal with as a player.

-Having an entire large area of the planet (Environmental Zone) function as one long running firefight is just not fun. It's uninteresting and feels like padding.

Edited by Bovolt

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