This was a welcome addition to the game. I didn't enjoy it as much as the recently released "Jedi Masters" mod, but thought M4-78 was more polished overall.
Likes
- The planet feels "populated," which is important. It felt like there were plenty of people to talk to and several side side quests.
- The planet feels like it's "part" of the larger game, which is also critical.
- The opening, where everyone on the ship is shown on the platform, makes the planet feel important and dangerous, which is great to set the mood.
- What you've done with Obsidian's original area designs is amazing. M4-78 and the Archon chambers were just wonderful -- a visual delight. I loved just looking at them.
- The main plot is very well-done, taking from, but vastly improving upon, the original M4-78 mod I played years ago. I love that there are repercussions for other planets. So far, I've only noticed
Telos
, but hope to see the impact on other worlds.
- The droid-as-PC dialogue was very well-done.
- The integration of Master Vash's dialogue was very well-done also.
- The ES Archon voice-over was phenomenal.
Dislikes
- The biggest problem for me was that the Industrial Zone was almost impossible for me to travel through due constant freezing and lagging. I often had to use the warp feature. However, my computer's old, so I can't blame that on you guys at all. I figure the proliferation of smoke is what locked me up, and I can't very well criticize the mod for including a nice detail that I would have enjoyed if I had a better graphics card.
- The quality of the voice acting varied quite a bit, as did the quality of the "mechanization" effects used. Some of the performances/audio quality were rough.
- Some of the droid dialogue overdoes it on the "these droids have personality" angle. I think the smarmy quality is given to too many of them, and that it goes over-the-top at times.
- Some of the splicing was really, really bad, such as:
Grenn saying "droid planet."
I think it would have been better trying to find someone who could reasonably approximate the Obsidian actor's voice for something small like that.
- Khah has a little bit of
"Anakin Syndrome," where his fall to the Dark Side feels more like teen angst than something dangerous. I know he's just a padawan, but he seems more like a whiny child than a Jedi-in-training.
- A lot of the main quest and some of the side quests, particularly the early portion of the main quest, felt like busy work and weren't especially engaging.
- The
Khah death didn't really make sense to me. 1) M4-78 says he'll turn the assault droids on them; 2) Khah turns M4-78 off; 3) Assault droid kills Khah; and 4) Exile gets to leave without any trouble from assault droids? I would have thought that once Khah shut off M4-78, everything would have been gravy. But if he was still attacked, why wouldn't the Exile have been attacked?
BOTTOM LINE
This clearly took a lot of work, and you guys turned out a product that felt pretty polished for a fan mod. I enjoyed playing it, will include it in future playthroughs, and am so appreciative of everyone's efforts to make something the KOTOR community can enjoy. You should be very proud (and I'm sure you are, since you even got a thumbs-up from Obsidian's original M4-78 designer).
Thanks for your work, and very well done!
