Lit The Dark Forces Saga

For me, I see both sides of the argument. I understand why it makes sense that throughout the game your choices affect your ending–to use the Luke example, sure, he Force-choked the Gamorreans, but he also didn't kill them, just incapacitated them. This showed that, inside, he was still a good person. My point is that your actions are a reflection of what you are inside–a good person (like Luke) may use such powers but he knows when to stop (incapacitate rather than kill) whilst a darker person would have probably killed them both. Even when Luke threatened Jabba–and inevitably took out all his guards–he did so after giving Jabba repeated chances to negotiate, and even then he only leapt into action when he was literally at death's door.

All of this bleeds over into his actions at the Death Star. Inside, Luke wasn't a bad person. He didn't have it in him naturally to strike down Vader in cold blood. He lost his cool and almost did so, yes, but it was a result of temptation from Palpatine and Vader and protectiveness for his friends. but his good nature brought him back from it (that and seeing how close he was becoming to Vader). He saw what he'd almost done and was repulsed by it (note the look on his face when he looks down at his gloved hand–utter horror). And then he chooses, and throws away his lightsaber. By stopping himself from killing Vader, Luke had already proven that he was a Jedi, and throwing away his lightsaber was just a symbol of that. In other words–left to his own devices, Luke Skywalker was a being that would choose the light side.

On the other hand, I understand the "I just want to make one choice to be able to say whether I'm good or bad," but not for story purposes–more for fun reasons. If I'm playing a game for fun, I don't want to trudge through hours and hours of gameplay again to make the opposite choice. Now, if I'm playing the game for story reasons, I personally would choose the latter option–I want to play through the game and be good or be bad, not just magically have this choice made for me. This is one thing that I like about KOTOR 2, and it's similar to JK in that regard, I guess. One dark side choice at a crucial interval, and suddenly everything spirals downhill. You can't kill Vrook and say "Oops I want to be good now" because Zez-Kai Ell and Kavar will find out and you'll be forced to go dark anyways. You have to make multiple choices to keep yourself on the light, whereas slipping to the dark side is easy as that. You can even wait until the end and choose to kill all three Masters together and go dark, but on the other hand once you go dark there's no way to come back–once one of the Masters is dead, you're stuck on the dark path (unless I'm mistaken).

So, TL;DR is: if I'm playing for fun, I'll choose a game like JK: JA or TFU, where I can drop back to one specific point and do the other option. If I'm playing for story purposes, I'll choose a game like KOTOR 2 or DF: JK, where I have to make sure I'm doing the morally right (or wrong) thing if I want a specific outcome. I'm not sure if this whole post made sense, but...I tried.

 

Well, Revansfan, have you ever driven around liberty city in a white SUV trying to paint it red by mowing down pedestrians?

i.e. shouldn't your gameplay reflect your morality where morality is part of the gameplay?

 

I think there's a lot more agenda that went into making Jacen evil than just following tropes, including an attempt to discredit the NJO -- primarily Traitor -- since they were viewed as an attack on this paradigm by ostensibly allowing the dark side, since Vergere told Jacen there is no dark side once, he must have taken it completely at face value and used the dark side, and it corrupted him. Never mind what actually happened in the books -- ironically I think Vergere was challenging this notion that if a Jedi strictly uses the "light side" but otherwise is completely incognizant of the morality of his actions, that's okay. Which makes it all the more amusing that after Jacen and his heresy have been disposed of, the Jedi revert to moral hypocrites because so long as they use the light side it doesn't really matter what they do, they have the moral high ground over the Sith. Compassion is for those who deserve it.

I felt that the NJO had a nice balance even if it was skewing toward having more Jedi than the Bantam novels, but that may be why Luceno wanted to get out of that era after The Unifying Force. It's notable that the one novel he wrote afterward, Millennium Falcon, was sans Jedi, except for Leia.

 

I'm in agreement with you. If you do bad things throughout the game then obviously by the end you should be a bad guy.

It just...it makes me so mad that people can actually misinterpret Traitor as badly as Denning did. I mean, he completely missed the point. How does one even do that?

Also, if you're saying what I think you're saying–that Denning basically turned the Jedi into what Vergere was afraid they would become–then I am not only in total agreement with you but I almost have to laugh at it because Denning himself doesn't seem to realize that he's done exactly what he was trying to avoid–turning the Jedi into irresponsible jerks.

 

It's honestly been so long since I read those; I couldn't finish that rotating-author series where Jacen dies because of how breath-takingly terrible the EU had gotten.

EDIT: To be fair, I think Denning is routinely confused by any number of things - Star Wars, light switches, gravity...

 

Confession time? GTA IV was just too realistic for that. The older, more cartoony, games? Sure. But in in IV the pedestrians were too realistic and the sounds. By God, the sounds. The first time I ran over an elderly lady and heard snap, crackle, and pop, and her cries of agony I made an effort to drive responsibly even in chases.

I even had a bout of conscience in TFUII recently. I started up again, and was having fun throwing Stormtroopers around on Kamino. I got one alone, and just kept him levitated, laughing evilly as I moved him around... and then he tried to grap onto something, as they occasionally do. But this time, I considered the cruelty inherent in the action, and wondered if there was a Mrs Stormtrooper (and a Stormtrooper Jr?), before carefully setting him down and running off... and cutting my way through the rest of the garrison. Hey! This was survival we are talking about!

I suppose that general final 'choice' is to represent that potential moment of revelation? The same way that discovering you are Revan could make a good character backslide, it might be enough to knock some sense/rationale into one who was already backsliding?

But generally, I distance myself from the characters I play, especially in RPGs.

 

Yeah I guess though an RPG is different to Jedi Knight, but you had a similar reaction with GTA IV to me. But I had trouble in KOTOR with the concept of the dark side path, where Zaalbar can be compelled to kill Mission - it felt so damned wrong, but it wasn't something that happened in the blink of an eye nor was it the "right, and now sport, you've solidly evil!" moment either. It was the natural progression of a stroll down the dark path, and that's what Jedi Knight did well. If the reaction was "what? I killed Maw and now I'm a darksider?!" , you weren't paying attention. It ought not have been a surprise in hindsight.

 

I suppose the question comes down to whether or not a player thinks the story is important in shooters and action games in the same way that it is in RPGs.

For me, it still is, as I'll only play a game if I enjoy the story. There are very ,very, very few games that I've bothered to play if the story sucked, regardless of the gameplay, as "pew pew" just doesn't do it for me.

 

Yeah, I couldn't do BioShart:Insipid for that very reason.

Story should be important; that we instead get Call of Battlefront of Honour, the mouth-breathing games for the mouth-breathing generation is disappointing but not the end of the world. After all, we also have Deus Ex.

 

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Black Ops actually had very intricate stories. Not why fans played them but that's not a flaw of the games.

 

A few years ago, I actually tried Modern Warfare to see what all the fuss was, and yeah, I'll give that one the benefit of the doubt: I enjoyed the story, and was genuinely impressed at some of the creative choices in Modern Warfare 2 (the part where the US gets attacked genuinely shocked me, and I'm not even American, as that was some pretty bold stuff).

Black Ops... I found more boring. It was alright, but by that point I guess I was just growing bored of the "pew pewing" and haven't played any other shooters again since, as it just reminded me why I disliked the gameplay as "move from this checkpoint, kill some guys, move to next checkpoint, repeat ad infinitum" got old. (Yeah, people play those games for the multiplayer, but bleh, never, ever enjoyed shooter multiplayer.)

 

I'm more of a classic gamer from when Carmack's adage about story in games was mostly universal.

 

I did that in Jedi Outcast!! I heard two stormtroopers in the asteroid base talking about how dead they would be if the Jedi came across them. Taking pity a merely stripped them of their weapons and moved along as they stared at me and pointed imaginary guns!

 

Page 99 of the Legacy Era Campaign Guide mentions an upgrade to the HWK-290 space transport, the model of spaceships Kyle Katarns Moldy Crow belongs to. The Guide calls it a "sleek, aerodynamic interpretation of the original ship's frame" and that "it might look like an updated version of the Moldy Crow".

Do you think this is supposed to be the Raven's Claw's class?

 

The HWK-2000 is supposed to be a Legacy era ship, but it's seemingly mentioned purely as a hypothetical.

Now that this thread has been bumped, I've been feeling nostalgia for Jedi Outcast lately.