KOTOR 2 is buggy - blank screen bug

I thought console games were more solid?

Published on December 21, 2004 By Draginol In Console Games

Isn't one of the selling points of console games versus PC games that the console games are less buggy? That hasn't been my experience so far and right now, I'm pretty exasperated by it.

I'm enjoying the new Knights of the Old Republic game. I played the first one on my PC and loved it so much that I bought an Xbox pretty much to get this game. But it's glitchy.

Tonight I hit the biggest glitch yet, a game ending one. I escaped from the the planet Telos and as it loaded up the next screen it turned blank. Blank. Pitch black. I could get to the various menus including the map which looks corrupted or something. And I can ear the sounds around me. But I'm in a black void.

I save often when I'm in a dangerous situation but had not been saving in the area I had been because I was in no danger so I literally lost about 3 hours of game time as a result -- and there's no garauntee this won't happen again for all I know.

Sigh.

Comments (Page 1)

Kobrano

on Dec 21, 2004

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.

David Smith

on Dec 21, 2004

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.

greywar

on Dec 21, 2004

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.

Zoomba

on Dec 21, 2004

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

BigFire

on Dec 21, 2004

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.

i81b4u-uc

on Dec 21, 2004

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.

Kobrano

on Dec 21, 2004

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

greywar

on Dec 21, 2004

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.

Nakor

on Dec 21, 2004

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.

Unbeliever

on Dec 21, 2004

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.

greywar

on Dec 21, 2004

Fagboy got owzed by Microsoft.

easy to say as an anonymous coward:)

messybuu

on Dec 21, 2004

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.

greywar

on Dec 21, 2004

They're now on all consoles these days.

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

historyishere

on Dec 22, 2004

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.

JesseJ

on Dec 22, 2004

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.

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