f13.net

It's 2007, and I just played through the original Knights of the Old Republic for the first time.  Between my well-founded disdain for the Star Wars "expanded universe" and the initial disgust I felt years ago upon hearing that the game would use those terrible hoary old Dungeons & Dragons mechanics for combat, I just never got around to it.

Yes, it was awesome, etcetera.  Rather than heap praise upon a game everyone else got over years ago, I'll just ask a couple questions of anyone who feels like replying, for the sake of comparison.

A)  First time through, light or dark?
B)  Most disappointing aspect?

I ran toward the dark side so fast that the inability of the Jedi to notice that I was a black-clad mass murderer with a red lightsaber became comical.  And I was really, really, really disappointed that I didn't get to murder Carth.  Seriously, I end up butchering half of my own party, and Carth survives?  I decided I wanted to kill him after the first thirty minutes of play.

Anyway, this concludes me catching up to four years ago.  For the moment.

There's a moment of comic brilliance from HK in the sequel where he mocks Carth and whoever your pain in the ass girl sidekick was.  Pure gold.

You can turn Carth Dark tho, can't you ?  I seem to remember doing that.

That's much worse than killing the fucker.

KOTOR was an above average game that was made exceptional merely by the inclusion of HK-47.

:)

I would suggest light myself, since dark requires dogged determination to keep being the asshole in the top hat at every opportunity.

KOTOR2 is amazing until towards the end when the games incredible writers decided to go vacation and leave the end for an intern to wrap up.

I disagree, I think KOTOR2 was worse than the original at every stage but really, really, really blew chunks towards the end.

Light first time through - the game doesn't give you enough excuses to go dark.

Combat toward the end was just too trivial.

5 minutes of exposition around how awesome splendid this battle is going to be, then 'Flurry' 'Flurry', oh, villian dead, again.


EDIT:

In the immortal words of Edmund Blackadder, KOTOR2 starts off badly, tails off in the middle, and the less said about the end the better.

Do not play KOTOR2.

Yeah, the first game only really let you choose between Dudley Do-Right or Satan's cabana boy with regard to moral choices.  The second one was far more morally ambiguous.  I truthfully felt that the sequel was better until you got to the piss-poor unfinished ending.

Despite being a Star Wars nerd, I have yet to play either of these games.  I have KOTOR2 sitting shrinkwrapped on my shelf.  Perhaps I should pick up KOTOR1 when I get my new rig together.

Well, you could ignore people.  That right there was really your choices. 

*Random guy walks up to you*
Guy: Hey, can I borrow a few bucks?
A) Give him ten times that amount and offer to escort him around on his daily chores.
B) Tell him to go away.
C) Impale him, eat his entrails, and order your party to make a necklace out of his body parts.

The story was good enough on its own to look past those sorts of 'choices', but it remains probably the weakest part of the game.  Still, it was a good game overall.

KotOR, originally played it on the xbox. 60 hours first run-through as Jedi, 40 hours second run as Sith. Great game. Probably played it too much, totally burned out by the time the pc version came out. Now I know to wait a few years for Bioware to pop out the pc version.

Gizka is 3 minor bugs away from the next build. I'm hoping to play KotOR2 by xmas.

http://team-gizka.org/wip.html

I've been watching that -- I have high hopes for the Gizka rebellion. :)

KOTOR was pure awesome, though. HK-47 had much to do with that, I admit. I'm thinking of trying the game again to see if I can actually force myself to get through the game without switching to a pure Jedi party by the time I get Jolee off Kashykk.

Speaking of the ending -- when Darth Whats-His-Face sends everyone after you, he's not fucking kidding. On the bright side, three patient Jedi with Force Wave makes life fun. :)

Carth first annoyed me with his habit... his habit of stammering... stammering whenever he was agitated.  His constant whining about how he couldn't trust anyone turned that irritation into genuine dislike.  But blurting out something to the effect of "Fighting under an assumed name is a good idea since we're hiding from the Sith!" right in the middle of the cantina, right in front of the hutt that was signing me up for the arena match?  That throwaway bit of dialogue was what made me hate him.

And he never turned it around.  He continued to be a whiny Dudley Do-Right bitch throughout the entire game.  His crowning moment came when everyone realized I had turned to the dark side, and that he and Mission were the only surviving party members who weren't cool with it.  He doesn't draw his gun and try to buy her time to escape.  He doesn't even deliver any cliche "Keep me but let the girl go!" lines.  Nope, he just starts running without a word, pausing only briefly to yell over his shoulder that she should run too.

Wow, real fucking heroic there, Carth.  I hope you came back after I left and felt like a shitheel when you found her mangled little corpse.  I'd have let her come along as part of Team Evil if she had been willing, but I wouldn't have pissed on Carth if he were on fire.

 :evil:

I thought Carth tries to come back? I remember curb stomping in the end, even after his cowardice.   Maybe if it's only if you're female and Carth is your love interest. 

I played light first (dude), then dark (chix).  Dark was hard for me, but had some truly great moments. 

I wasn't disappointed with KOTOR at all really.  KOTOR2 with its dangling plot lines, technical hiccups (still the only game to ever crash on my xbox), and shitbox ending (last level + resolution) had me feeling empty when it was done.

KOTOR was pure awesome.  I was lucky enough to avoid KOTOR2 as I was busy with other things at the time. 

I have high (ULTRA HIGH) hopes that Mass Effect turns out to produce the same kinda of experience that KOTOR did.

Meatbag.

Light.  I don't like playing "evil" characters in general, and in KOTOR it just seemed stupid.  You weren't being "I will conquer the galaxy and enslave all it's people" evil most of the time, you were just being a dick.


Combat.  Run in, autoattack.  Depending on your numbers, you might have a special attack that you'd want to spam endlessly instead.  Occasionally there's a force ability to use if you're a Jedi, or an item if you're not, but usually you're just playing the numbers.  Hope you didn't roll up your character thinking that playing a high int/dex scoundrel was going to be a possible option just because it looks that way up until you've beaten a quarter of the game, that kind of thing.

Cutscenes bugged me too, but Mass Effect looks a thousand times better in that department, so at least they're getting better (I think).

I'm playing through again as an evil chick.  I need to kill Carth.   :-D

A.  Light side.  As mentioned by many, the dark side choices were too Snidely Whiplash most of the time.  There were some good moments playing dark side though, like having the Wookie murder Mission because she wasn't going to stay with you once you revealed your evilness. 

B.  Being forced to spend 8 levels as a non-Jedi, assuming you didn't just not level past 2 until you got to the Jedi Academy. 


Overall, I liked KOTOR 2 alot more than the first one though.  It was easier to skew dark without having to kick puppies around, as I recall at least.  The ending sucked, yeah, but the game up to that was golden. 

1.  Light side.  I always like being the good guy, and never had the urge to go dark.

2.  I played the PC, so the most annoying thing for me was that it kept crashing every once in a while on XP.  I'm not sure if anyone else had this problem, but every once in a while it would crash while loading a saved game.  I never finished it because I got tired of the crashing towards the end.

I started Light Side, then slowly broke down after the midway point. By the end, my character totally flipped out and killed Carth (I think...? Maybe he ran away. I don't remember).

I have the same problem with the KOTORs that I had with baldur's gate 2.  I never could quite muster the nerve to make the truly evil choices like selling people into slavery and whatnot.  I always wanted to do them all darkside (BG2 in particular) but I guess I am just wimpy or something. 

I played through as a light side int/dex monkey scoundrel. And yes, it's not only entirely possible, but also pretty easy if you're good at these sort of games. Stealth + Crit Strike = lol 1-shots.

Playing a dark side male who was never particularly nice to Carth, I didn't get to kill him.  He ran away like a pussy shortly before Mission's little "You'll just have to kill me!" routine.  And to me, Mission's last stand was probably the most powerful moment, story-wise, in any RPG I've ever played.  I mean, I liked Mission.  Sure she was just the Imoen of Star Wars, but I found myself genuinely hoping she would give in once it became clear that Zaalbar wasn't going to break his life debt.

When I had Zaalbar kill her, it wasn't a case of "Haha, melting faces and being a prick is funny!" like most of the other dark side events were.  It wasn't even a dramatic lightsaber-swinging throwdown like when I took out Jolee and Juhani.  It was more like "I really wish she hadn't dared me to kill her, because I cast my die before I even got here and now I have to follow through."

It was the only choice I made in the game that succeeded in making me feel bad, and it finally made the dark side seem like something besides a fun carnival ride of owning faceless peasants that I didn't like anyway.  It gave the entire climax from that point on a certain narrative urgency.  Like, my urge to take over the galaxy meant this girl had to die, so I had damn well better succeed in taking over the galaxy.

Aww, come on, you gotta like Imoen and the other imitators. Also, the movies would probably have benefited from such a character.

Also, it would have been funny if, "Heya! It's me, Mission!" had been a line in the game.

^

WUA's best post evar

First time through is usually light side for me: it lets me see all these people's incredibly moving life stories for when I slaughter them as dark side next go around.

For disappointments, I can't really think of many, although compared with KotOR2 the dark side was really underdeveloped. Turning Mira dark side blows pretty much anything with Bastilla out of the water. The most annoying thing about playing through as dark is that you develop these close bonds with other people and when it comes down to the "UNLIMITED POWER" sort of moment: you have to kill them. Your followers in KotOR through dark either don't give a shit, or stay with you merely to save their own hides... you never get to actually turn them yourself.

With KotOR2, you actually got to use your relationships with people to make them side with you. Then Jade Empire basically turns the idea on its head and lets you say, "Haha! Your souls are mine, puppets!" which is equally a great option.

While it would have been fun to have a character or two around whom you could influence to the dark side, the bottom line is that your party had a number of light side Jedi and dedicated Republic types in it.  You certainly weren't going to convert ALL of them.  If you want to play through as one of the ruthless murderous Sith, it's entirely reasonable for the game to ask you to ruthlessly murder some characters you otherwise liked.

In other news, I give up on playing an evil chick.  I can't spend thirty or forty hours of gametime being nice to Carth.  Not even for the chance to kill him.  Bleh.

But that's balanced out by the crazy stuff you can do to Bastilla if you play an evil chick. Not only can you make her confused over her allegiances, but you can also make her sexually confused. It's pretty funny.

Played Darkside as Scoundrel/Conselar(?) Chick. Not going combat monkey makes for a more challenging game - unlike Kotor2, where if you went force monkey you could just fry every enemy in a room in three seconds.

Played with Bastilla and Mission for 95%, using a mod to make the game allow a lesbian romance with Bastilla, clearly in order to satisfy my 8th grade level fantasies...

Bastards, let me bring Bastilla to the Darkside, but made me force Chewie-clone to pop Mission's head off. That was just mean.

Kotor2 is not a total waste, some of the storyline was really well done, and they do give you some less extreme options on the whole alignment development. The last planet was an absolute travesty though.

I played a high-dex Scout/Sentinel light-side Jedi in KOTOR. Of course, I stopped leveling scout at level 4. (I did take the third level implant feat). A few things of note -- first, the light-side gear scattered through the game (up to and including the Star Forge Robes) means lack of wisdom and charsima means jack shit. I was a fucking god. My stats were insane. Nobody could fucking touch me.

Secondly, the 'extra content' -- the Yavin Station -- was well worth the visits, especially once you blew up the Trandoshans and beat the guy 10 times in Paazack. Not only did he buy everything (including racing bonds) for a fuckton more than anyone else, but his high-end gear (after the Trandoshans) and his discount (after the Paazack wins) meant you were going to be using some seriously top-notch shit. Kinda made the game too easy.

The only fight I even considered moderately difficult was the end fight, because my Jedi wasn't kitted out for either full combat or full force. I was forced to dip into the giant supply of stims I had. :)

I found that the huge number of medpacks I had made combat trivial.  Anything that couldn't instapwn me in one round was basically fucked.

I found that after the first portion of being a Jedi in KOTOR the combat became trivial.  There was never any real risk of losing so fights went on just as long as it took to whittle the enemies hit points down.  The main reason I finished the game was simply the story telling.  I never finished KOTOR2.

Dual-wielding + Critical Strike + forged lightsabers fitted for more crits and extra crit damage = lolz

QFT. Though I'd say this is a problem with all Bioware games.

I had so many dark side points that the mana cost for most dark abilities was insignificant, even as a guardian.  Whenever there was a crowd of enemies, I would just wade in and spam Force Storm.  I'm pretty sure a max-dark consular spamming Death Field would be invincible.

You're somewhat correct.

That's OK, neither did Obsidian.

 :rimshot:

I only played light side in the KOTOR games.  The first game was incredibly easy after the first planet, but the last boss can be very tricky if you don't pick any offensive force powers (like I did on my first playthrough).

It was a good game though, nice story.  But I didn't like how weak and useless every other character was once you got Jedis in the first version.  The Yavin Space Station download sort of fixed this, but it only did so at the end of the game when you had enough money to gear out your non-Jedi.

The sequel was good, if buggy and unfinished.  Some of the systems were better designed, like gear crafting.  Non-jedis were much more useful.  You could bring non-Jedi and droids without crippling yourself.  The game was easier than the first version, especially if you went with a mage archetype.  I did a total lightsider using mostly darkside powers and I didn't really notice any penalties.  The lightning powers can pretty much clear a room with two blasts even with total lightside characters.

Playing a rogue archetype isn't bad really since you can melee, but also have the option to do more of the small quests (like upgrade the droids).  I didn't use stealth all that often, but sneak attack is very useful if you have some force powers like stasis field or have some weapons which can freeze the baddies.  Sneak attack triggers when the enemy is prone, not just on the first attack from stealth.  Makes them actually a better melee class than the pure melee archetypes I found.

I'll probably never get around to playing through on the light side.  Everyone else on the light side was just so douchey, especially the Jedi Council.  Maybe some people want to talk about their feelings with Carth, listen to endless lectures from Good Bastila, and suck up to that ignorant pseudo-Yoda and his cronies while they tell you that a true Jedi is supposed to never have sex.

Me, I'll be getting shitfaced with Canderous while HK rips the arms off the bartender and uses them to club the bouncers to death.  Then I'll kick a few puppies, murder a few peasants with force lightning, shed a silent little tear for Mission when nobody is looking, and finally head home to my Fortress of Doom to bang Evil Bastila in the ass.  Good girls gone bad are always the biggest freaks.

You should definitely play through KotOR2 then.

Oh i don't know... evil in KotOR 2 has a much more philosophical bend to it.  :-D

I played the first one through thinking I'd go dark side, but really straddling the line. It worked fine until that last deciding moment, the one where you have a choice to destroy an entire planet or not. My light/dark points were right in the middle on that one, and I just couldn't make myself kill an entire planet. The amount of force points that gives you will pretty much turn you the exact opposite of what you were if you need it. Before that choice, I couldn't use either side's specific gear. After that, no problems. I never did play it through dark, because the dark choices just seemed like "How Can I Be A Senseless Raging Douchebag Here?" options to me.

I also played pretty much in the middle, I never specifically intended to be either a dick or a boy scout, I kind of played it through making choices as close to my own morals as possible, which resulted in a mix of not being a dick for dickness' sake and also a lot of "fuck me? fuck YOU! Blam!" instead of being a Carth.

Of course, when I finished the game, the closing cinema failed to work (on my legit copy of the game, on the PC) so I'm intending to reinstall it and watch the game's ending when I get my new gaming rig. As for KotOR2, I'll look into playing it once Team Gizka finish their work. Whenever that may turn out to be.

Should be fairly soon, judging by their website. It seems like they took a fairly professional approach to it as well.

I was light-side Jedi, and used bastilla and the neutral jedi-guy most of them time.  For some areas, however, I pulled out the R2-looking droid.  I had him outfitted with the best in hacking gear, which made some of the quests very, very easy.  Why fight in person when you can have the base's defenses go berserk and kill the defenders for you?  Also, the R2-guy was weak as heck in combat, so you had to protect him, which was a pain.  He was a god when it came to computer security, though.

--
Alkiera

You could get "infinite use" gear off the Yavin station for droids. That made a significant difference, we he could basically stay shielded the whole time. That was an awesome little droid. I was quite fond of using him to oblitrate enemies via power conduit. The only problem I had was occasionally -- and stupidly -- losing track of which system I was using and blowing myself up.

I've been following TG for a while now, depending on how finished they'll get it before their first release (they may leave some of the text bugs in at first release, I've heard), I'm still not expecting it before christmas. They are steady...but sloooow. (and that's OK)

I found the astromech to be decent in combat. He's ranged-only and you have to keep him in the back, but I never had much of a problem with him unless we got ambushed from behind.

When you get yanked in by the Leviathan, I used the astromech to get my guys out. I suppose HK-47 or Mission might have been better, but Star Wars without droids is kind of stupid.

Hell, that's why I had a totally useless droid following me around in SWG. Gotta have those droids.

Whenever I used the little droid, I just made him sit back and toss nades.

Jolee is funny if you use him at that particular point in time.

I liked Jolee. Between him and HK-47, they made the game for me. I'm particularly found of his story about the Jedi he knew that obviously had a destiny, and how that turned out.

Flipside:  You could puppykick your way through all the one-shot encounters if you felt like it, but the game was way too reluctant to let you cut to the chase on longer quest-chains by just beating ass.  Case in point, the feuding farmers on Dantooine, namely the one who had kidnapped the son of the other.

You ask him about the kidnapping, and he says something to the effect of "Pshaw, go away lest I sic my droids on you!"  After that he walks out of the room, and the guy's daughter helps free the prisoner, because she's in love with him, blah blah blah.  Light or dark, it all runs basically the same, right up until almost the very end where you finally get the chance to puppykick everyone to death for no reason.

But where was my option to skip all that star-crossed lovers bullshit in the first place, and just be like "Fuck your droids, do you see this lightsaber?  Bring me the prisoner and a polite apology or I'll wade through this dump and shove it up your ass!"

Darth Vader wouldn't demean himself by committing 90% of the petty dark side acts in the game, but he sure as hell WOULD come down on that lippy farmer like a ton of bricks without waiting to hear about the romantic subplot.

Darth Vader's whole backstory is crappy romantic subplot.  He'd probably empathize.

That is the major flaw in the KotOR games.

Velorath: we just pretend ep1-3 didn't happen. It's better that way. I saw Jedi the other day and goddamn if I don't think it's a decent movie now. I used to hate that movie. But in comparison...

"Get on back here before I tell everybody what a whiny little bitch you were about Padamanmay or Panda Bear or whatever the hell her name was. OH, he's crying!"

Best advice on the Net Today.

You know how if you had taken the appropriate powers, in conversation you would get the option to use Force Persuasion?

"But I don't want to give you all my money!"
Okay, sorry.
Well then die.
[Persuade] Yes you do.

They needed to do the same thing with Force Choke.

"Your ancient religion sucks, Vader!"
You hurt my feelings.
I'll chop you right here bitch!
[Persuade]  No, you think it rules.
[Choke]  I find your lack of faith disturbing.

Dark side would be a million times better with that.

QFT. That would rule.

Er, I distinctly remember such an option.  Am I on crack ?

Truly innovative will be the game that allows the player to have freedom of choice, provided they choose to be evil.  I mean, you're evil, so you can do whatever you want, and not follow the pre-scripted events that the devs put in.

Of course, they still have to put in code for all your possible choices, and supposedly the majority of people will never see that content (which I think is false)...

I think you might want to re-evaluate this statement or explain how you are actually an infinite amount of monkeys.

There's exactly one time in the game that I can recall that you're allowed to use Force Choke as a conversation option.  It's on Tattoine, when one of the Czerka employees is rude to you, you get the option to Force Choke him if you have Force Choke.

Personally, I barely managed to play that game Light side.  Had to force myself to do it just because I wanted to see the Light Side ending - and then I decided the ending was NOT worth it.  C'mon, a crappy ceremony and a medal?  No matter how I envision my character, I can't quite go through the whole game without getting pissed at the Jedi Council for being lying asses, and trying to manipulate me, the rightful Dark Lord of the Sith, with their damnable lies and crap.  Nothing pleases me more in that game than watching my fleet obliterate the Republic fleet and Master Vandar.  Even if I'm trying to play a nice guy, being manipulated sits so poorly with me that I'd rather turn evil than side with the Jedi Council.

I played Light first, then Dark.  I could buy in to the ULTIMATE POWER ending as dark, but I also hated the puppykicking.  I think they really had a narrative problem there, trying to portray evil in everyday life.  I specifically remember having difficulty ripping off an old man on Coruscant.  It felt like I was a thug, not a galactic mastermind.

I played both sides on Xbox, never got the PC version. However, third time through, I hit a bug that didn't occur on any other times where if I equipped armor of any kind, the game locked solid.  It started happening on all my new games as well as saves. It was a real downer because I could play that game through over and over.  As far as I know, none of my other Xbox games had the problem, and I tried someone else's copy of the game and it still happened.

It's simple really. They confused 'sadistic dork' for 'amoral, power-mad bastard'. Hence all the puppykicking options instead of 'why would I be bothered with you worms?' options.

IMO anyway.

It's not an infinite number of choices, despite the theoretical.  The game mechanics already limit choices about what you can do at any given moment, and like others have said, the dark side only needed a few "skip" dialogue options, because an evil character doesn't really want to do all the stupid stuff that people ask for.

The problem with that is that all the stupid stuff that people ask for is a considerable part of the game.  If the evil path through the game essentially was composed of a lot of dialogue options that say 'go away and don't ever bother me again you insolent worm!' I'm not sure people would be happy with the evil path in the game, considering it would be anywhere from 30 to 60% or more shorter than the good path.

On further consideration, I suspect that's why we see all these 'greed = evil' and puppykicking options in games as the evil path.  It's rather hard to motivate an evil character to do quests, especially sidequests.  Main quests are easily motivated by threatening the character's life (as in the Baldur's Gate series) or something of the sort, but sidequests generally depend on greed or desire to help others, and greed winds up being 'evil'.  When I really think about it, it's pretty difficult to come up with good motivations or sidequests to present to an evil character that's not directly motivated by greed.

The only good 'evil' options I can think of are resolutions to quests...the main Manaan quest in KOTOR is a good example - try to find a 'good' resolution that's more difficult and may not work, but saves the life of the fish, or do the expedient thing, poison and kill it.  So, it seems to me that most of the time, an evil character must be of a type that still has motivation to do these quests in the first place, for whatever reason, but the resolutions should be available to be evil.  KOTOR does a decent job at this.  I mean, there's some puppykicking involved in some of the quests, but a lot of them are somewhat appropriate evil responses.  Another good example is several quests on Tatooine.  The guy caught between the exploding droids, the Sand People and whether to try to make peace with them or simply kill them all, and the Krayt Dragon and betraying the guy at whatever moment you choose to be most convenient (before or after it's dead). 

In my opinion, most of these work in KOTOR because the game gives you good reason to keep up the appearrance of a good guy throughout most of the game.  You're not trying to be the most evil bastard in the galaxy, you still need the help of the Republic and the Jedi Council, and in the beginning, you aren't really planning to become Dark Lord of the Sith.  The trick is to make similar situations work in other games with other stories, as well.  There has to initially be a good reason for the character to interact and perform the quests, and let the evil work itself out in how the character handles the situations, rather than whether or not she initially gets into the situations in the first place.

Fine, but it's too obvious to game the game. There's no real choice between: 1) Help the innocent old man being accosted by thugs, 2) Stand by and cackle, 3) Kill the thugs, threaten the old man yourself, kill old man and take his wallet.

Yeah, really hard to figure out where they were going with this. I'm looking for a game where you make the decisions because it's what you would actually do, and you're not entirely sure how the moral implications would always balance out. Sure you know some are good and some are bad, but they don't really bother greying the lines like what happens in the real world.

I'd like a quest where you encounter a doctor who horribly kills his captured aliens for research, but he also has created a vaccine to one of the deadliest diseases to humankind. Then you get to decide what to do with him. I mean, at least make people think about the choices. Ask some Utilitarian questions, pose a few dilemmas, don't just make me choose between: randomly beat this dude on the street to death, or give him some cash and shine his shoes.

The only real questions they asked were: Help mankind or make some money.

I have to agree with Paelos on this, that's a really excellently-written post and shows a much more interesting take on gameplay decisions.


 

Agreed, there should be more difficult questions available beyond the simple.  Still, things are getting to some degree better, in my opinion...evil paths are including more true evil motivation, rather than just assigning 'wanting to get paid' as evil.

One issue with the 'tough moral question' line though, is the question of who decides what decision counts as 'good' or 'evil'?  The designers would have to decide, but obviously their moral judgement isn't going to be the same as that of everyone else playing the game.  This may be another reason why such questions haven't been added to these games, and have instead stuck to decisions that are easily determined as good or evil.

I'd like to see a game with a story this deep, but with a little more potential for consequences ala Baldur's Gate.  Each individual sidequest asshole you puppykicked in BG was irrelevant on his own, but being a dick consistently enough would make your good-aligned party members quit, and get the local law hunting you down.

I play the game as greedy neutral -- Whatever gives me the most plusses. I pretty much was middle-light until I pegged light side with doing a few good deeds -- not because they were good or evil, but because finding lost dogs and retrieving stolen watches from bandits provides much needed XP and money. I would often get 2 light side points for finding some guy's watch, but then lose one or two for demanding a reward.

That's why the Mission thing worked so well I guess, since loyalty and betrayal are pretty much universal as far as I know.

This was my exact situation when i played KotOR through for the first time. I stayed neutral the whole way, playing to the Lawful Neutral stereotype - until the very end where you are forced to choose Light or Dark. It's always annoyed me that there was no dedicated 'Neutral" ending.

To be fair I'm not sure how you'd put a neutral ending in there. I mean either you defeat Malak and become a hero for the Republic or you defeat him and take over the Sith. I guess you could have an ending that sees you hero just bugger off and hide from the world but I'm not really sure how that's characteristically Neutral. I could just as easily see someone who doesn't like taking sides being perfectly happy to be lauded as a hero as a good Jedi character forsaking all that celebrating and glorification.

 I guess when it comes to the end of KotOR I just think they've set it up so that you really do only have 2 choices, the story would need quite a bit of rejigging to fit a neutral ending in there that didn't involve ignoring the whole thing and flying away.

I was thinking something along the lines of both screwing with Malak, and preventing the Jedi council from messing with people in the future. Or, something like that...

Basically, i'm sure there are plent of OTHER endings they could have set-up had they wanted to, since i strongly dislike the dichotomy they present.