zbyl2

Obsidian designed a map and there's no known way to edit area models and get them working again. Plus I think the areas are cool looking. No. I guess I might release more detailed version of his storyline at some point if enough people nag me about it. Biggest difference is the story; Old M4-78 only has a basic, "recovered" story that Obsidian set in place - simple droid quest, talk to an Archon, talk to another Archon, kill Kaah on your way, find Vash, with combat in between, while for M4-78EP, a complete storyline was written around these few plot points developers left us, side quests were added and combat was reduced in true KOTOR2 style. That's what we're doing She had lines in .tlk and she was completely separate character that also claimed to be Vash's Padawan, I guess she was an early version of Kaah but they decided to change his gender as Kaah is the only one Vash ever mentions. Though that makes you wonder when they had time for all that seeing how early M4-78 was cut.

We're both preferred, so yeah, we sub every now and then Last time we subbed was when we bought Makeb. And well, we do NMs of classic ops (EV, KP) easily, the new ones (TFB, S&V, even EC) are a bit out of reach for our guild atm : P Still, it is perfectly possible to do those as preff.

Go to companion window (by pressing "N"). Your crew skills are listed at the top of it, you can unlearn them by using X icon next to them.

NM = nightmare, and there are always operation passes on GTN on Red Eclipse when I look. Guess they don't sell as well on JC.

I barely log in nowadays, but when I do, it's for an operation You can easily get ops passes from GTN for about 150k, and it doesn't take long to get this kind of money (and if I'm too poor to buy it, there's always Hassat with his gazillions of credits). Sure, in order to go for harder ops you need to get artifact equipment unlock as well, which is tad more expensive... but it's very much possible to do endgame as preferred : )

You don't need to group with others at all. You can finish majority of the game solo as long as you're right level for the planet you're doing. You will only be unable to do group quests, which are marked as such (heroic/flashpoint) and aren't required to hit max level, as f2p or otherwise.

My own retrospective look - or even a review, if you will - of M4-78EP. I don't know if anyone is even interested in reading it, and it's LONG, but here you go. Some of my own thoughts (and critics) of my own (well, I say "own") mod. M4-78 Enhancement Project retrospective. M4-78 is the droid world Obsidian planned to include in KOTOR II. You were supposed to find living Master Vash there. Unfortunately, it never made it far in the development. We were left with seven areas (although the models were not fully finished and many walkmesh issues are still present) and some bits of dialogs and notes. You could figure out few main plot points of the planet – talk to two Archons in order to reactivate planet’s main AI, meet Vash’s Padawan, and talk to the Jedi Master herself. Many of the puzzles designed for M4-78 were moved to other areas, mostly G0-T0’s Yacht. Stoney originally released M4-78 Restoration mod back in 2008, but since it was based mostly on Obsidian’s storyline with some combat added in between, it seemed lacking. He soon started development of M4-78 Enhancement Project – M4-78EP for short – which was supposed to fix many of the issues with the first version as well as introduce brand new, interesting storyline for players to explore. I was very excited to work with a famous modder like Stoney when I joined M4-78 in late 2008/early 2009. When I joined “to help with scripting”, the so called “droid quest” was already in place and I was assigned to work on the first quest where you play as the Exile. I received a description of the quest and some dialogs and was told to run with it. I recall I finished it pretty fast and then we had few weeks break as we were waiting for our busy at a time dialog writer to deliver some more dialogs as we couldn’t do much without them. That was the time we started working on TSLRCM which put M4-78EP on nearly 3-years-long hiatus (and the dialogs we were waiting for were never delivered anyway, which is pretty hilarious when you think about it). Once we were done with TSLRCM (or “done enough” to be able to focus on the droid planet, anyway), Stoney wasn’t so excited to work on KOTOR as he was few years earlier so he asked me to take over – I guess he trusted me to get the job done (and hey, I somehow did!). From there, with the help of others (just look at the readme to see how many), I worked on getting many of the plot elements finished, dialogs written, content designed and implemented, bugs fixed. Old leader was still around, helping from the shadows, but most of the responsibility was on me. And it was fun at times. With the back story out of the way, let’s take a closer look at what M4-78EP was meant to be, what it could have been, and what it turned out to be… WHAT WENT RIGHT - Integration with the rest of the game – this is one thing I’m confident to say we did right. M4-78 doesn’t randomly appear on the galaxy map. You find out about this mysterious planet on your search for Jedi Masters. You have to talk to your companion (T3-M4) to be able to go there at all. There are also few references to M4-78 spread through the game, which most people won’t see anyway. Using droid’s planet as alternate source of fuel for Telos is the obvious one, but how many of you knew that you can mention Vash’s death to Zez-Kai Ell? - Making the planet feel populated and alive – there are just so many droids walking around, going on about their business on the planet. You can see repair and cleaning droids trying to fix the planet up after the radiation accident. You see MANY droids working on the very advanced stuff in R&D and other sections; we even created some brand new animations specifically for this mod. It just doesn’t seem empty, and that’s good. And you can talk to many of them, even though they don’t always offer any useful knowledge. - Polish – I’m sure some would argue with me here, but it’s a fact that there are very few bugs in the mod (OK, one game breaking one, but it’s hard to trigger unless you know what you’re doing ). There are many cut-scenes, often with fancy animated cameras and many animations, too. So yeah, I think we delivered a pretty polished mod, which won’t need as many versions as TSLRCM to reach the same quality. - Writing – I wasn’t sure if I should include this one in here as it’s really objective. Overall, I think we had a decent plot for the planet and some characters turned out pretty fun. But there are two things I’m especially proud of when it comes to the writing (other than the fact I managed to write, like, 80% of these dialogs myself, which let me tell you, took some effort – even though they often needed some serious correction, but in my defense many of them were written in late night hours). One were all the subtle hints to planet’s origins, original colonists and how the droids came to have their own colony. Obsidian never left any clues as to what M4-78’s origin story was supposed to be but we came up with few ideas. I liked two of them in particular, so I kind of mixed them together. I won’t talk about them here and now, though. The origins are never fully explained in the mod, but you can kind of figure it out with high intelligence skill and some knowledge of Star Wars EU. It kind of leads me to the second thing I’m really proud of, the dialog with the construction droid in the Industrial Zone that just asks you bunch of questions about this planet. But you as the exile don’t know much either, so you can ask questions back, and you two can speculate on how the colony came to be. I had a lot of fun writing this one and I think it turned out pretty well, though you need high intelligence/awareness skill to get the most out of it. I also liked what we did with the ending. The M4-78’s admission that he started reprogramming and controlling droids on the planet*, the revelation that he created Archons to make it easier to control others. I wish we could play around with this concept some more, but we were basing it on Obsidian designs, which suggested “you find Vash, talk to M4-78, leave”. And since you already completed your main task of finding the Jedi Master, well, there shouldn’t be any other major conflict still holding player on the droid world. * there’s even a scene I’m sure most people never saw, when you try to tell one of the droids that M4-78 is controlling him, and the AI wipes droid’s memory on the spot, making him forget ever talking to you before. I thought that was a nice touch on my part even though I knew maybe 1 out of a 100 players would see it. - Puzzles – even though I heard many people complain about it, I like what we did with the puzzles. I thought the power core puzzle at the end was pretty clever (even though one can argue it was a bit pointless – and looking back, I should have added an alternate way to get into Main Archon chamber), but not as hard as some people make it out to be. At one point in the development, I worried that people may miss some power cores and just not have enough to do this puzzle, so I added few more in rather obvious places. You can currently get… seven I think, and you only need four, so I find it funny how some people still have trouble gathering required amount. I think reason some people didn’t like or were frustrated with the puzzles (and sometimes quests in general), and this is only a speculation on my part, is that games nowadays don’t require that much thinking (arguably they didn’t in TSL days either… although KOTOR2 did, a few times). Pretty much every new game has a detailed map with bunch of quest markers so you always know where to go. On M4-78, you have to listen do what characters tell you and sometimes, think on your own, as they don’t always know everything. It’s very similar to how KOTOR2 itself plays out. Then again, I’m sure some of the confusion was caused by my (or others’) not perfect writing and I understand how there may be some confusing parts in the mod. Anyway, I’m going a bit off-topic here… - Reactivity, non-linear design - multiple solutions to go through quests, characters commenting on quests you’ve finished, commenting about other droids, asking you about your opinion on others after you’ve talked to different characters, unlocking new options with characters in previous zones after gaining more information… It’s all there, on M4-78. I think we did OK job with the reactivity, though it could be so much better. More on that in “what went wrong” section. - Voice acting – I made at least a few good casting choices. There is some good voice acting to be found on the planet. WHAT WENT WRONG - Voice acting – on the other hand, a lot of it was just plain bad. Getting voice actors (especially female ones - really, that’s a horror) is not the easiest thing in the world, getting good ones is super-hard (keep in mind they have to be willing to do it for free, from their homes). - Many side quests were unclear or just uninteresting – and they really stand out from the main plot, too. Reason? When I took over, I was all “lets get the main plot done, then we’ll add side quests on top of that”. My advice to anyone ever designing RPG area, plan your side quests ahead, along the rest of the planet/area. Adding them at the very end just makes them look out of place half the time, and it’s much harder to come up with something interesting when your main plot already uses most of the good ideas you had. Another problem with designing side quests so late, especially when you’re making a fully-voiced game, is that you can’t always have your “main” characters react to things you do in side quests because their dialogues are already written and it’s not always as easy to change them as it seems. It’s even worse when voice over for a dialog is already recorded because voice actor may no longer be available for any number of reasons. - Linearity – yes, I covered non-linear quest design earlier. But still, even with few ways to do most quests, each playthrough still ends up very similar. You do the droid quest, you find a memory core, you build I1-02, you meet an Archon, you do the next zone, you do a puzzle, over. What I wanted to do – but came up with this idea too late to include – was to make a new side-quest where you’d be able to cut off power to the force field blocking the Environmental Zone, allowing you access to it without ever talking to IS-24. So you could meet Archons in a different order, having their conversations go completely different. You could even potentially get Kaah’s help throughout the Industrial Zone! How cool would that be? And if he helped you... he knows that he reprogrammed the turrets and all the other stuff that happened in this zone. Some droids could blame him for not being able to talk to an Archon now (I can imagine R&D leader would have some comments on that). - Way too much walking – I think it’s a number one complaint about a mod and rightfully so. Even with all the escort droids I placed on the planet, there is still a lot of walking involved. It can get tedious. In the late beta, I was thinking about ways to remove some of the walking elements. Unfortunately, it would require redesigning many of the quests from the ground up, with the walking concern in mind (and designing quests in a little-walking-as-possible mindset would just hurt the plot, as it would keep player going forward, not visiting the same zone nor talking to the same characters twice; it would also make planet much shorter than it currently is). Other way to fix the walking issue would be spamming Escort Droids all over place – not the best option either, especially since Industrial Zone is already laggy enough. Adding more droids to it would just hurt the performance even more. At one point, when you reached the ziggy-zaggy rooms of the Industrial Zone, you had to go all the way back to the Landing Arm (you can stay in the super large Industrial Zone in the released version). Wonder what player response to THAT would be! More on that in cut content chapter. - Industrial Zone laggy as hell – what I mentioned above. Too many NPCs in the area, but we can’t have any less, can we? The area is huge. Probably one of the biggest in the game. What I should have done was to split this zone into two separate modules. Of course by the time I started to worry about the lag issue, I already had bunch of local variables set up for the area and I couldn’t just split it without breaking half the planet. There were many more objects in the Industrial Zone at one point, too. I removed pretty much all of the unnecessary ones, until the place started feeling empty. So I re-added few, started removing droids instead, haha. Lesson learned from it? Test the engine you’re using before designing big-ass areas you want it to run, kids! - Ending and cut-scenes – well, mostly ending’s cut-scenes. I liked what was done with the ending as I explained earlier. I thought whole conversation with M4-78 himself was pretty cool. Vash’s and Kaah’s deaths, though, were not. KotOR’s engine just wasn’t made for awesome cut-scenes (Obsidian devs agreed! ) especially if you try to have characters shoot or otherwise fight each other. So that’s one of the reasons why it ended up so... bad. Other is that I probably should have come up with better ways for Vash and Kaah to die. Vash had to die because her being silent at the Enclave would be unbelievable and she has no lines there. Looking at the way she’s written in her cut conversations, she actually sounded like she would defend the Exile this time around. I also wanted to show that we live in the dangerous times. Not every Jedi is going to survive to live happily until Dantooine. In case of Kaah, I didn’t want another random Jedi running around the galaxy. The “killed by M4-78” bit was written by Sharen Thrawn back in the first version of the script, I believe, and reading it all these years ago I liked how unexpected it was. It had completely different plot around it back then, though. I also never liked the fact how M4-78 doesn’t explain properly why he killed the Master. “You wouldn’t understand”. And if Exile tries to investigate, he’s interrupted by the guardian droid. That’s just lazy writing (and yes, I wrote the whole thing, so I’m basically calling myself a lazy writer now. Well I deserve it). Maybe I should have gone with something more obvious instead. Like Sith Assassins, since on Korriban Sion orders them to follow you and you never meet one again. I don’t know. - Droid society could have been better explored – I just feel there is more we could have done with the whole droid planet concept. As it is, the whole society isn’t really explored except for few key characters. Looking back, I think the planet could have ended up better if instead of whole opening doors, building droids and just trying to get in touch with the Archons by doing bunch of different things, we instead focused on exploring the droid world, how it works and how they behave, as well as dwelling more deeply into the whole colonists aspect of it, possibly making a whole “droid religion” out of it. The planet is all about talking anyway, let’s at least make themes more interesting. Maybe one would have to learn enough about it to be able to persuade IS-24 into helping you reach the Environmental Zone. That could be fun if executed well. Who knows, maybe I’ll get another take at it someday (M4-78 for KOTOR 3!). - Use of party members – opening scene was nice, even if some VOs were obviously reused from other parts of the game (or maybe it’s only us, die-hard fans who played the game seven times that notice it). Then we had this other party member landing pad scene near the end of the planet… which ended up being something very different that what our design document suggested. What did it suggest? Kreia and Visas were supposed to sense a death of the Jedi. Kreia was supposed to be confused. “The Exile didn’t do it, but there is nothing else alive down there…”, she’d wonder, reference to a fact that throughout whole game she can’t sense droids the way she can humanoids. Then the landing arm droid would disappear and Atton would make a comment on that. Kreia would just go “Droid? Ohh…” and turn back, realizing how she can’t predict and manipulate everyone and everything on this planet as she could on other worlds. That’s another interesting concept to play around with, by the way. Not like we ever could without kidnapping Kreia’s voice actress, though. The scene that ended up in game is quite different mostly due to VO limitations. We couldn’t get party members to say exactly what we wanted them to say, unfortunately, and I feel that maybe I should have cut this whole cut-scene. Some party members seem pretty quiet on the whole planet, too, which is especially noticeable with HK-47. They have random lines every now and then, but we just can’t have them comment on all the planet specific things, however cool that would be. - Encounter with Kaah – I was never satisfied with it. One of the ideas was to hype Kaah up as some sort of villain, and you, in fact, keep hearing about “the saboteur” and what he’s done. Then you make your way through the Environmental Zone and every few steps you have a chat with him, and when you finally meet him… I think it’s a bit disappointing. Thing I hate the most about Kaah’s encounter is that you have to kill him if your persuade skill isn’t high enough. At the end you just get two [Persuade] options to literally win the dialog. Not only I dislike the Persuade-as-win-the-dialog-button, I also dislike how players focusing on other abilities are screwed. I also wanted Kaah’s dialog to have much more branching depending on options player selects, similar to how IS-24 and M4-78 had, instead of few options, all eventually leading to exact same finishing lines (and sometimes even looping – now that’s a disaster). I think conversation with Kaah was one of the worst ones I wrote for the mod. MAJOR CUT CONTENT We’re talking “cut due to plot changes during the development”, not the well known “cut to save time” kind that TSL was full of. Whole second part of the Industrial Zone was completely rewritten (twice) when I took over. Actually, it was Stoney’s last decision as the lead before I took over to cut out the Sith Survivor character which forced me to get some re-writing started. At one point, that Sith Survivor – we used to call him “Saruv” – was crucial to the plot. You were supposed to find him in nearly dead state in a Kolto Tank in the rooms that currently serve as the Design and Testing departments. He was dying and there was this huge quest where you’d have to get better medical equipment for him, or something like that, I don’t remember all the details. There was this nice moral choice – give him just enough medicine to make sure he survives, but barely (after all, he is a Sith, and he would kill you, given a chance) or make sure he fully recovers. Seems like an obvious LS choice, but seeing how he’s a Sith and he will kill others if he lives… is it really so light side? There would be of course a character in game raising this point so player would have to consider it. This idea never went past a design document, though. Whole healing Sith quest was largely tied to Manaan. I remember there was supposed to be a hologram of Selkath – I don’t remember if it was supposed to be live conference with Manaan or just a recording in some vessel. I’d have to dig up old design docs. You also had to co-operate with Landing Arm supervisor to get all the kolto into the colony… some ideas from this part were re-used in the “Interstellar Transport” side quest in the released version. At the end, during or before M4-78 conversation, Saruv would show up again. Idea was to have Darth Maul like duel with him, where halfway through the fight force field shows up between you two and you have mid-combat chat during it. I think there was also this idea that IS-24 gone rogue to serve the Sith Survivor, same way ES-05 decided to help Kaah. Kaah was also supposed to be captured by Saruv, I think. That’s basically what M4-78EP’s plot was supposed to look like at one point (though our ideas back then were much more detailed I just forgot a lot of it, it was written five years ago after all). You can rightfully blame me for 95% of “what went wrong” part of this retrospective, but I can’t take full credits for all of the right parts. Funny how things worked out. Overall though, I am proud of how what we've accomplished and hope people will continue to enjoy the droid planet!

No, there's nothing to do on Tython space station if you don't own a ship. Straight to the Republic fleet and then off to Coruscant is a good way to do things.

Playing as F2P is the same as the sub, gameplay-wise. There's lack of sprint at level 1 (which I admit, can be really annoying) and lower XP gains but if you decide to do all the content, it won't matter that much. Still, I would recommend to spending minimum amount of money, even for something like one month of subscription (depending on where you live, you can get it for as low as $10), just to get "preferred" status - you'll never have to spend money again, but it's worth it just to get sprint early in the game Other thing I'd suggest getting is someone to play with - only reason why I still play this game every now and then is because of people I know that play the game and that I enjoy hanging around with. If I didn't know anyone playing it, I would have un-installed it by now. Other than that - pick class that sounds enjoyable to you and have fun with it! I recommend Imperial Agent for his class story, and I suggest getting Imperial class first as they're generally more interesting than the Republic ones.

Feel free to report everything, we'll just ignore the engine-issue reports I get it that you may not know engine's bugs as well as we do.

Reporting engine issues is not worth it since they're unfixable. Reporting missing lines or other issues in the mod itself is certainly welcome Just because we don't reply to each report doesn't mean we don't see them.

Are you installing TSLRCM into the right folder, as in, the game's MAIN folder (where swkotor2.exe is located) and not any of the sub-folders?

Changing 500OND_DarkSide_Iziz to 0 in KSE *should* make the game think you sided with Talia and let you save Kavar. I don't remember if there were any other globals involved, though, so I can't guarantee you won't get some funny stuff in the palace later on.

If it updated after talking to the droid near the Environmental Zone's entrance, then you may still be able to complete it. I don't remember off the top of my head which dialog options with ES-05 completed this quest, but they may still be available - go talk to her again, see what happens!

You can complete it but it's a little bugged, yes. If you pick it up too late, or finish the Industrial Zone without updating some of the entries for this quest, you may be unable to complete it.

This ending is currently bugged, unfortunately, and it is something that patch will correct whenever one comes. Sorry Zhaboka, you'll have to kill her : (

Not really. VP isn't talking about final-final fight with Kreia (I hope so anyway), just the party members vs Kreia posted earlier. TSLRCM is the same - they all attack her, except they do it in a cut-scene. With MVI, you control the fight. Now it's arguable which is better - having it as gameplay railroads you into losing, which can be annoying (think Malak fight on Leviathan in K1 - you kick his ass easily, then "lol, cut-scene, you lose"), which is not as jarring in a cut-scene. Also, I'm looking forward to seeing what VP and bead do in the Trayus Academy itself; since TSLRCM's academy is pure combat broken up by some scenes of party members, I hope MVI does something more interesting with it.

Fantastic! One thing I noticed though was missing Atton's "now I come in, saying something suitably heroic" - that line is too brilliant not to include and would work perfectly when he just goes out of stealth and attacks Kreia like he does now (that was nicely done by the way).

Yes, a few. Why?

It was hard enough to organize as is, with all the conflicting schedules, four different time zones and everything else that got in a way. Trying to get everyone from that podcast in one place would be a nightmare to try to set up.

Re: My accent. I didn't even know I sound like that before the podcast - when I first listened to it, I just went "wow, my accent is hilarious". As for what it is: I'm Polish, only proper english-speaking city I've been to is London, a couple of times. I don't know what it tells you about my accent. It's funny how Fair Strides asked if it's Irish. I'd never consider THAT one, haha.

So fast? I wonder what's in it... and hope some stuff isn't EDIT: damn, gotta get my mic sorted. Sorry.

You weren't there in the final minutes of a podcast - you might find "wildly off-topic" to be quite an understatement.