KOTOR 2 is buggy - blank screen bug

Talk about game ending bug, that would totally piss me off.

Reminds me of a character I had in "Sacred" a couple months ago, the developers released a patch that killed all previous characters. So a character I nurtured and played for nearly 4 weeks, was gone.. That day I posted the game on Amazon and got rid of it.. Do they not even consider these things? Ugh.

Lucasarts has been nothing but a letdown for me, I gave up on their games a long time ago. Kotor (original one) was too slow for me anyway, and seemed to drag on and on and on. I listed Kotor as one of the most overrated games of all time. So I have zero incentive to buy an Xbox so I can play Kotor2, and even less incentive after hearing about your problem.

Damn bugs.

I'm not a big game player my self, but I've heard several "comments" from my lad when the game "throws a wobbler".

It upsets me greatly that the software companies have the gaul to trial test their products of the general public, be that PC or Games Console. When I buy something I expect it to work without issue, they have my hard earned cash after all.

KOTOR 1 also suffered from this problem which seems to lie in the way it's cut-scene movies are loaded up. Often you can go around this error by either going to your autosave and simply doing some other things for 10 minutes or so and then ree-attempting the action that loads the movie, changing the members of your party before you go into the movie load (crucial in late stages of the game as it crashes at one point everytime unless you have the right chars (even though it doesn't tell you you have to)), or by going to another planet or doing something that causes a different movie to load first. These things seem to reset whatever sticky bit the game has a problem with.

I played KotOR 1 on the XBox and the PC. There were some bugs and glitches in the first one... but nothing like the sequel. I haven't even left Telos Station and I've already experienced 3 crashes where I had to revert to a previous save. Add to that horrible framerates and what we have is a sad excuse for a released product. It's a shame too because if you took the bugs out, this would be a great game. The story is good, the voice acting is excellent, and the tasks are more interesting and complex than the original. Beneath the stuttering and the crashes, there's a great game. Too bad LucasArts and Obsidian Entertainment decided they had to rush it for the holiday season release and not test it as much as they should have. The really ridiculous part is that this is almost the exact same engine as the original game... you'd think they'd have figured out the fixes to the outstanding issues by now!

I think consoles are going to lose their edge over PCs for "ease of development" as the console games get more and more complex. Eventually it's going to be as much of a chore testing all the game event combinations for a console as it will for a PC (especially as PCs are standardizing around a few standard pieces of hardware... and hardware vendors are standardizing their drivers across all their products). Another problem the consoles are seeing now is that they're showing their age. Play Halo 2 and then look at Half Life 2. Note the visual detail, also note which one has more framerate issues. Play KotOR1 on the XBox, and then on the PC. See those textures? See the framerate difference again? When the XBox came out 4 years ago, yeah it blew everything out of the water... but it stayed the same while everything else blew past. The PS2 is really hurting for graphics quality now... the GameCube seems to be the only one that doesn't have the same glaring defeciencies (probably because the developers know the limits of the cube and design UNDER them).

KotOR 2 for the XBox is frustrating me so much, I may just put it away and wait for the PC version to come out in February. Hopefully some of the really bad bugs will be fixed. And I know my rig can handle the game without dropping a single frame.

Oh, and let's not forget how the keyboard and mouse is a superior interface combo to a gamepad for just about any type of game

By all indication I've read on this game (and I was very tempted to buy the XBox version) is that the game isn't exactly a complete product. The major complaint is that the dark-side storyline isn't complete.

Originally, both PC & XBox version are supposed to come out at the same time. I'm glad that they've held PC version over to Feburary. It certaintly give them time to fix the bugs.

Draginol, Have you purchased it lately? If you have, maybe you can take it back and get a new copy(It might be the disk). I'm surprised no one has gotten a game yet that didn't have no game in it in the first place. My hushand purchased Kingdom Hearts and it didn't have one. Anyways, whatever you do with the game rather play the one you have or get a new one, good luck at it. My nephew does nothing but talk about how phat it is.

Of course, IGN is right there, ready to plant a "93% Editors Choice" award on it - idiots.. I swear the gaming mentality at IGN is of the level of a 14 year old. To this day, I still maintain, Kotor1 was one of the most overhyped titles in history. I found it overall, to be only an average game. But then, I said the same thing about Black and White - overhyped, and way overblown. Years later, I think most people are starting to agree with me.

As for Kotor2, the "Real" review sites aren't being so friendly with it. Most saying its buggy, has too few improvements, and the story is lacking.

Metacritic yields some interesting contrasts. Link

dark-side storyline isn't complete.

I can tell you that the dark side game is in fact not finished. Not even close to the darkside plotline of the first KOTOR.

Glad I'm playing Light then.

I've seen a similar game-crashing one with KOTOR2, entering a transport tube on the station around Telos. Went to black, couldn't do anything.

Thats what you get for buying cheap PC disguised as a console. But I don't play games because they make me feel dirty. They remind me that deep down, I wish I was a girl.

Fagboy got owzed by Microsoft.

easy to say as an anonymous coward:)

Thats what you get for buying cheap PC disguised as a console.

The Xbox isn't the only one with buggy games. They're now on all consoles these days. Even Metroid Prime, one of the greatest games ever, would occasionally freeze when using the elevators. Besides, it's not the fault of Microsoft or the Xbox as it is for the lazy developers.

I think the only console that doesn't have buggy games would have to be the Game Boy Advance.

They're now on all consoles these days.

hmmm sweet sweet Soldner... How I relished throwing your disc across the parking lot....

I remember back in the PSX days when Gran Turismo 2 first came out, there was a glitch in it that would empty your garage and basically take away all the cars that you had worked days and weeks to win... so Sony sent out new copies of the Simulation disc to people who had the first batch.... and those discs in fixing the one problem caused another.... no saving of track records... which for a racing game is a big deal.

Shame to see that console gaming hasn't got its act together.

Out of all three consoles, the XBOX has the worst problems. Having to reload a disc over and over again just to get it to boot do to a disc read error is annoying. The disc read eror problem didn't rear it's ugly head until after a few months of use. I did a Google search and found that "disc read error' is a common problem on the XBOX. I only have an XBOX for the exclusive games, otherwise I despise the XBOX.

that's too bad, Draginol, I was an avid player of KOTOR -- best game Lucasarts had come out with in a long time IMO. Think I'll sit back and see if they can fix these issues before I buy it though. Thanks for the tip.

It's a console game. They won't "fix" it and remanufacture. I guess we'll see how the PC version does.

I've been playing more and the problem didn't repeat. So that's good at least.  It is disappoitningthat the dark side path wasn't fleshed out since they advertised that side of the game so much.

kotor 2 was rushed for a Xmas release by lucas arts, obsidian had no choice in the matter.
Don't get me wrong, the game is bugged to hell, but the PC and International console version released in a couple of months should definetly be a much cleaned up code.
I had major issues on kotor2 like not being able to talk to members of my crew and the inability to progress in the story.
Luckily enough I have a modded xbox, I say lucky because unlike an un-modded xbox I was capable of deleting all the cached files on my xbox hard drive (usually residing in the X,Y or Z partition) which was causing problems due to the all the global variables getting messed up.
Don't even try to give me a hard time about having a modded xbox as I live in the UK and the ntsc and pal releases were about 4 moths apart, and no, I don't have a huge ass hard drive, I still just use the original as supplied with my machine.

All that said I've played through to what I think is the last battle and as soon as my xbox is back @ my house I'll just finish it off.
I will however definetly be investing in the International version when it's released.

I'm nearing the end of KOTOR2 now and I've encountered a few bugs that required me to fall back to previous saves, some at the start of an area because I got a bug at the end of it. Got trapped in the tomb on Korriban for some reason after defeating the last ghost... had to reload from the start of the area... very frustrating

I've noticed a few consistency bugs too in conversations:
1) You get to decide at the start of the game what Revan's gender is from the previous game. I'm near the end, and the characters have all forgotten I set Revan to be a woman and they're all refering to Revan as "he"
2) When conversing with group NPCs on the ship and such, they often will refer to conversations I never actually had with them. It's like at some point the game forces all story lines to advance to a given point. It makes for some very confusing moments.

The biggest annoyance I had with the game was the main quest on Onderonn when you first get there. It bounces you back and forth between areas a dozen or so times in the course of a few minutes worth of gameplay. This makes a 5min quest take about 3 times as long as you have to keep dealing with the horrible load times.

I'm one planet from the end now... Somehow this game feels much smaller than the original, all of the worlds so far seem to be made up of 2-3 zones (Nar Shaddah being the exception) and no more. Dantooine in the first game had easily double that, and it was about on par with the rest of them. None of the planets were as deep as Tarsis (sp?) where you started the first game. It's kind of disappointing... and I know Obsidian isn't pleased with the results and largely blame it on devel time given by LA (they had less than a year to write, build and ship the game). Sadly I think the poor sales for KOTOR2 will mean we won't see a KOTOR 3... I like the plotline and want to see it continued.

I know about 4-5 people with Xboxes vs about 30 with PS2s. The PS2 folks talk about their games. The Xbox guys talk about their bugs. 3 of us have issues where sometimes the box appears to have difficulty reading the disk and will take upto 20 minutes to finish whatever it is its reading - if it doesn't bail out entirely. Sometimes it gets corrupted and loads garbage in. Most of us are on our second or third Xbox - only to find the problems continued. We all bought from different places.

Perhaps Kotor1 pushed the limitations of the Xbox, but Kotor2 might as well be called "Kotor1 continued" there's nothing really new or exciting in it on the Xbox. Infact, all your old favorite bugs from the first engine are still there Quick example: Friendly AI only move toward you, so you will find yourself getting stuck countless times simply because none of your characters can move and you have to mess about with swapping chars in/out at xbox-like snails pace. Numerous NPCs get stuck in a sub-plot state or fail to come out of it (e.g. salvagers still have join the militia option).

I'm hoping the PC version is delayed not only for bug and content fixes but also because the PC version is going to be making full use of the video and sound features available to those of us with more sense than to buy a hunk'o'junk manufactured by Mickeysoft.

Summary: Don't buy Kotor2 Xbox unless you are a masochist.