The JA Story

[Sith_Chick]

My big prob with the game is the only way you interact with 99% of the people you meet is to kill them. How about some 'innocent bystanders' and people you need to get information off or assistance from? Rescuing the people from the Rancor was good, but other than the Bar Keeper, I ended up killing *everyone* else. And why can't I talk to the barkeeper? I thought the barkeeper in JK2:Outcast was a scream! How about some NORMAL PEOPLE?

 

And please, enough with the preposterous 'evil' voices. Are the game playing public really so stupid that they need plot devices saying THIS PERSON IS NOT NICE all the time? In the Star Wars flicks evil often wore a kindly face and did not talk like pantomime villains.

 

And why does Jaden call Rosh 'her friend'? The guys is rude, stupid, weak and tries to kill Jaden with a droid during training! Sure, Jedi training might make her understanding, but that is not the same as 'friends'. And ANYONE getting in my personal space that way Rosh does would be finding their face coming into high velocity contact with my handbag!

 

[Hamburglar]

Yeah, the story and voice acting were fairly arse... I love to knife Rosh and choose the dark side when you get the opportunity but then you miss out on the good (but brief) Alora cinematic saber fight! And you get the I'm-really-angry-and-bad voice acting for the rest of it.

 

Also bugs me how they treat the force like its an epidemic All of a sudden you 'catch' the dark side and are instantly turned bad. Rosh took some antibiotics and is suddenly cured... baddies being 'infected' with the sceptre. It takes a lot of the... ooomph... out of it. It seems to be handled a lot differently to the movies.

 

Would be nice to see fewer saber battles against generic 15-minute-force-users and more lengthy battles against educated, years of experience Jedi types, if you know what I mean.

 

It'd be nice to see them hire some good acting talent for the next game... as well as letting me write the script!

 

...otherwise, its a kick ass game ;D

[SpaceButler14]

I really miss the innocent people from Jedi Knight. Also, this dark side plot was just like: "I have teen angst. I know! I'll kill EVERYONE!" I wish there would have been more of a direct connection to all these swarms of reborn types instead of just calling them "leftover".

[Damar Stiehl]

"And where do they take your... garbages?"

"Who cares! Out of sight, out of minds, says us."

 

I know what you mean, I REALLY looked forward to chatting the JA Chiss up, but he must've been scared right outta his pants by my display of @w3s0m3 pWn@g3.

 

(heeh)

 

To the originator of the thread: You wouldn't be Barefoot_Sith_Chick of some drawing/writing fame perchance, would you?

[Sith_Chick]

Nope, I am Sith_Chick with shoes my footies are clad in Manolo Blahnik shoes at all times (in my dreams at least)... my attachment to the Sith is purely on the basis that Bad Girls have more fun

[Damar Stiehl]

Heeh. It was worth a shot. Anyhow, nice to meet you. Hope you have fun being Tavion. Cheers.

[JediLurker]

Yeah, the plot could use some work. Aside from the stuff mentioned above, I think the thing that bothered me above all else was Chewie's introduction scene. Where the heck did Jaden learn to understand wookies? It seemed to me in the movies at least that understanding wookies was a talent *very* few non-wookies had. Anyway, the whole conversation had no real purpose. It didn't tie in with the plot at all even though Chewie was pretty upset with the mercs for reasons left unknown. Besides that, the fact that the Kel Dor and Rodian sound perfectly human grated on me a bit, but that's not really plot related.

 

As for Rosh...well, given half a chance, I would have offed him right about the time he jumped at me on the shuttle at the start of the game, but that's me.

 

I also agree with the 'infection' comparison. The whole game, Jaden's dialogue is solidly in the catagory of a lighty. As soon as you kill Rosh, Jaden instantly becomes a cheesy villain straight out of a B-movie.

 

All that said, however, the plot is secondary. It's all about seeing how many body parts I can hack off a storm trooper before he hits the floor. It definitely delivers on that and as such, I'm happy.

[idontlikegeorge]

I didn't mind the storyline so much, I mean, it is a Star Wars game based off quake.... come'on!

 

But, I really got annoyed with the briefings and such about going someplace to "investigate" or "learn some negotiation skills" when all ya do is go from start to end killing anything that moves!

 

There is nothing wrong with killing everything from A to B, but the briefings actually hinted that maybe you wouldn't do that, when in fact thats all you do!

 

But most of this is just nitpicky crap anyway.

[BS87]

Well, it wouldnt look very "jedi-like" if the breifing said "We've had reports of cultist sightings here. GO here and kill everything that moves (including droids) incase they have cultist ties"

[Astrotoy7]

As a star wars fan I did enjoy the JA story, in particular the many EU references, but Ive since revisited JO SP and the levels are a bit more complex, with puzzles and so on... I know these have been toned down for JA since JO, but it probably explains whu I finished JA so quickly. What I would love to be able to is the JO SP maps with my JA character... If anyone can give a *straightforward* explanation of how/if this can be done, then I would be most delighted !

 

MTFWBYA

[Lord_Vessen]

I think the game should be way longer, like after you defeat Tavion maybe Ragnos gets into someones (Rosh's maybe) body. Or maybe you become a Master and get pupils of your own. Then stop another evil plot . Oh well, I guess I can get some mod SP levels

[JediLurker]

Here you go, Astrotoy. I ran across this on another board. I haven't actually tried this so no guarantees.

 

JO maps in JA

[KaiaSowapit]

All in all, I'd say Academy delivers what it set to accomplish - nonlinear and a cohesive plot line aren't easy things to bring to life.

 

That said, I thought the ending was god-awful and would have been more fitting in a Dungeons & Dragons style game. Honestly, does every story have to end with a cartoonishly sinister villain you must thwart to save the universe, some ridiculously uber boss you have to reload your last auto-save 400 times to beat?

 

Can't we come up with something a little more sophisticated than that?

 

As for 'innocent bystanders' - I dunno if that's within the engine's limitations, but it sure would have made it more interesting/challenging/fun if you had to avoid killing civilians during wild bouts of jedi mayhem.

[Janus Krug]

I move that the dark side ending, despite the bad acting, be made the "true" ending, as it is nowhere near as lame, and sets up for yet another Jedi Knight game.

[Remirol Nacnud]

I agree, the storyline was a bit linear.

A few things like the Phantom Menace mission where you have to go around trading parts, would have been nice. But then again, I was lost on that for like an hour

 

The briefings annoyed me too.....like when you go to that planet to find information. You see te guy. You say hello. A sniper kills him. :@

But that's made up for by the uber cool mission that follows.

 

I'd like one of these jedi games to include a more 'original' jedi style(and by original, I mean the original movies)

Did Obi Wan go running through the death star killing everyone? Nope, he snuck around, throwing imaginery rocks to distract people.

He didn't leap around with his sabre like a maniac either.

 

I'd also like a few more difficult enemy sabre uses. I've only done it on the standard setting(but as I understand it, higher levels don't make the enemy skill any higher).

Someone said that the main boss required you to reload 400 times....but I didn't die once. Maybe I'm mistaken with the enemy skill thing.

[Brett]

And please, enough with the preposterous 'evil' voices. Are the game playing public really so stupid that they need plot devices saying THIS PERSON IS NOT NICE all the time? In the Star Wars flicks evil often wore a kindly face and did not talk like pantomime villains.

 

Yeah. Darth Vader, the Emperor, and Darth Maul looked and sounded like such nice people. Not at all like cliche bad guys.

 

I agree with your last point though. The relationship between Jaden and Rosh was done very poorly. I could tell that Rosh was gonna turn to the dark side half way through the tutorial. Jaden somehow didn't see it until she was fighting Rosh for her life. Even if she really was so clueless, why did she feel so betrayed? Since when was Rosh her friend? Their relationship, what little there was of one, was nothing but adversarial from the get-go.

[Brett]

I'd like one of these jedi games to include a more 'original' jedi style(and by original, I mean the original movies)

Did Obi Wan go running through the death star killing everyone? Nope, he snuck around, throwing imaginery rocks to distract people.

 

They tried that kind of thing once in Jedi Outcast. Everyone whined about it. It's easy to see why they didn't do it again.

[Damar Stiehl]

I personally have no problem with the majority of JA story. The "filler" missions are what you'd expect to be sent to whilst being a numb-nuts Padawan... and as the Force would have it, you just keep landing smack-dab in the middle of major trouble.

 

That said, the lack of innocents sucks, and character development could've been much, much better. Rosh could've been WAY more than an annoying little sh!t - why not make him a girl if Jaden is male avd vicey-vercey, BTW? And yeah - the voice acting. Marka's ghost looked terrific, but when he proclaimed "DIS IS IMPOSSIBULL!!" in his best Boris Badenoff impression, I almost fell out of the chair laughing.

 

(And there should've been an option to redeem Tavi, or at least whok her on the head with the sceptre and drag her off into captivity instead of letting her die).

 

But then again, this is 80% FPS and 20% Star Wars pseudo-RPG, so it does deliver most of what it promises.

[Prime]

Originally posted by Remirol Nacnud

Did Obi Wan go running through the death star killing everyone? Nope, he snuck around, throwing imaginery rocks to distract people.

He didn't leap around with his sabre like a maniac either.

Then again, Obi-Wan wasn't running around in a video game either. Besides, if that is how you want to play JA, it is certainly within your means. You have mind trick standing by...

[Omikron]

That is certainly possible, I did it myself on a few missions (such as the rancor one at the beggining).

[Remirol Nacnud]

I do try to do it like that.

Playing outcast I wiped out hundreds of those nameless stormtroopers. There just isn't that much fun it it. Apart from force choking people, or pulling their gun from their hands etc.

 

Outcast had a few fun things like when you have to be 'stealthy' so that the people don't set of the alarms.

But that was severely flawed. Spawn a few dozen storm troopers and you can kill them.

 

Oh, and the emperor seemed 'nice' in the first movies.

[StormHammer]

I have to agree about the story in JA. The core story was okay, but not great, and had nowhere near the impact of, say, the one in JK. Part of the reason for that is that you are given no reference point in Jaden's past.

 

In the original Dark Forces, for example, you learn straight away that Kyle Katarn is a mercenary, and an ex-Imperial, and not to be wholly trusted. He 'proves' himself by undertaking the missions in the game. In JK, you learn about how his father died, and his need to go on a personal quest to seek justice, or revenge.

 

In JA you're told your character Jaden Korr is special, because you've built a lightsaber without any Force training...

 

The reason why you could do this is never explained in the game, and there is no other background to your character at all.

 

The plot of the game falls back on the 'Force-empowered' reborn cultist thing, which is okay, but seems to be just an excuse to send an army of saber-wielding baddies after you. It could have been a lot better. JK only had 7 bad jedi guys, each with individual characteristics, and I found that game to be more compelling. More sometimes means less.

 

They need to ditch the 'cultist' idea for any further games in the series and focus on a few powerful antagonists that you can encounter, and then fight again. I like the way that Alora escaped to fight another day, for example - in a similar way to Yun in JK.

 

Omission of NPCs was very disappointing for me, especially in areas that should have been populated. JA became tiresome in parts because the whole game was about killing practically everything that moved, and that just does not fit well with being a Padawan learner at the Academy.

 

Luke: Hey, you've killed hundreds of people. Congratulations, you're now a Jedi Knight.

 

Jaden: WTF?

 

More like a master of the Sith, with a track record like that. :|

 

With the premise of Jedi Academy - learning the ways of the Force, etc. - the gameplay should have been more like Deus Ex, with properly implemented options for stealth (not the poorly realised forced stealth level in JO - but a real choice of either using stealth or force in every level), and that kind of level of NPC interaction.

 

I liked playing JA, but it's not a great game, and it could have been. IMHO it needed another year of development time to flesh out the sub-plots of the mini-missions, and add a lot of things that many people can see are missing.

 

I've got to be honest here. If there's another game in the series, and it follows the same formula as JA, I'm going to think twice before buying it. The format of killing everything across lots of linear levels is getting a bit stale, IMHO. You can say...well, fair enough, don't buy it then. But I want to play a great Jedi Knight game that can not only capture but supercede in every way the features, game mechanics and compelling storyline of the original Jedi Knight. It must be possible if the willingness is there to do it.

[Remirol Nacnud]

Come to think of it, I'm getting pretty bored of 'linear' missions in all aspects of gaming.

 

In most FPSs it seems that you just go down a corridor killing things, possibly backtracking after you flip a switch.

 

Why don't we have a game that would be a little more like real life situations? You have a complicated system of doors, corridors, hallways, lifts, stairs etc. You could choose any route. But each route might lead to different complexities.

 

You could have several mission targets where YOU choose which to do first.

 

To stop yourself getting totally lost in that sort of game though, you'd need a detailed mini map or something.

[StormHammer]

Originally posted by Remirol Nacnud

Come to think of it, I'm getting pretty bored of 'linear' missions in all aspects of gaming.

 

In most FPSs it seems that you just go down a corridor killing things, possibly backtracking after you flip a switch.

 

Why don't we have a game that would be a little more like real life situations? You have a complicated system of doors, corridors, hallways, lifts, stairs etc. You could choose any route. But each route might lead to different complexities.

 

You could have several mission targets where YOU choose which to do first.

 

To stop yourself getting totally lost in that sort of game though, you'd need a detailed mini map or something.

 

But Deus Ex allowed you some of this kind of freedom. Granted, it did also furnish you with a few small maps of an area along the way - but not a map in the HUD display. I never got lost in that game, because the location of the objective was always made clear. You just had to decide the best way to reach it, depending on your play style...

[King Jezuz Pie]

Same for Hitman or even better Hitman2. I loved these game... especially the Hitman sequel. You could try it the Rambo way but you could also try to achieve the silent assassin rating. After each mission you got a certain ranking for aggression and stealth. This rating system was kinda cool... and i don't think it'd be that misplaced in a Jedi Knight game as it could show you which side of the force your tending to...