Part 2: Peragus: What's a Survival Horror Level Doing in Star Wars?

Welcome to the Peragus Mining Station.



The dramatic zoom in.



Is that you, God?



We end up teleported to the middle of the floor somehow.

Let's just pretend there's some Prestige shit going on with the tank and move on.



(Actually there was suppose to be an animation showing the water draining from the tank, and Jesus slumping out into the floor. Probably was cut for time.)



We can check the sods in the other tanks, but they've already departed for greener pastures, so to speak.

It's almost like Malak was here. MALAK!



If only there was a button on this thing to bring up the mall directory.



"Only one survivor, placed in the kolto tank for recovery. The carbon scoring on the vessel suggests it was in a battle, but no indication of who fired on it...."



The old woman was already dead, and the utility droid was probably T3.

Strange, we don't remember a protocol droid though...



"There was a detonation in another one of the fuel vents the droids were working in - we deactivated several of them and moved them down to maintenance, but we're still treating the plasma burns..."

"WARNING: There has been a fuel detonation in the mining tunnels. Emergency Lockdown commencing. All personnel report to quarters and prepare for emergency venting countermeasures."



So some jerk gassed everyone and poisoned us. That explains why everyone's dead.



We can open up the door to the morgue from here.



I'm glad we're starting Jesus's career off by robbing the dead.

Yet another thing this game has in common with Planescape.



Come to think of it, Planescape also had people waking up from the dead too.





We were looking for a gun, and found a creepy old woman instead. So... that's a no.

"I thought you were dead."



"A little disoriented... was it your voice I heard in the kolto tank?"
"I am Kreia, and I am your rescuer - as your are mine. Tell me - do you recall what happened?"
"Last I remember, I was on board a Republic ship, the Harbinger... what happened to it?"
"Your ship was attacked, and it is no more. You were the only survivor... a result of your Jedi training, no doubt."
"Your stance, your walk tells me you are a Jedi. Your walk is heavy, you carry something that weighs you down."
"The Jedi Order and I have a... troubled history."
*Already knows* "So it would seem. Keep your past - and let us focus on the now."
"The ship we arrived in must still be in this place. We should recover it and leave. We were attacked once, and I fear our attackers will not give up the hunt so easily - without transport, weapons, and information, they will find us easy prey indeed."
"We'll see. There's got to be someone left alive around here."



"I'll return soon to make sure you're all right. Maybe then you'll actually answer my question."
*smiles* "Probably not. But perhaps... in time."



Okay if you want to come along then - no...? Well... you can just chill here... I guess.

Hello?



We ditch Kreia and head out, and immediately get jumped by mining droids.



At this point I'll point out something about the Peragus level design. I know it always gets a lot of flak for being boring as hell and a slow way to start the game. There are a lot of , not a lot of fighting compared to Taris in the first game, and you don't get to have a lightsaber. I think that was the point though.

It's actually a survival level shoveled into a Star Wars game - almost System Shock-ish. You wake up alone in a strange base and you have no idea what the hell's going on; almost everyone on board has been mysteriously murdered; all the enemies you find have a zombie-like vibe. Most of the NPCs you come across are holograms of dead people. You're alone with your single character most of the time. It's suppose to be very low key, tense, and creepy; if they tuned down the lighting a bit and had flickering lights or something, it would have been perfect. And in fact, the more enemies you see, the less creepy and effective the level design becomes.



This is the log of the security officer.

I think he was the one responsible for making sure everyone on the station didn't get horribly murdered.



Oh sure, pin it all on Jesus.

[Static.] "...so you're in maintenance? Then maybe you can tell me what's going on with these droids."



"Well, that's reassuring. It isn't happening. So the next time we nearly have a breach in the ventilation tunnels, I can just close my eyes and pretend it's my imagination."
"You better give me some answers - I want to know the damage these droids can do if they start mining us instead of asteroid rock."
"Sir, these droids aren't combat models... their mining lasers are weaker and less accurate than blasters. I doubt those droids could even hit one of us."



Here's what happened to the last guy who tried to sell Jesus:



"So I want you to find out how these droids are being sabotaged. That'll tell me who's trying to clear a path to get that Jedi off the facility - and stop him."
"In the meantime, make sure the security's armed with all the ion and sonic charges you can find. If those droids start coming after me, I'm gonna need more than low-grade mining lasers to take 'em down. Clear?"
TERMINAL: "Yes, sir. Maintenance control out."
"Idiot."

Let's keep moving to-



Oh not again.



":: ...can you not sense them... reach out... cast aside your sight, cast aside what you see, and instead, reach out with your perceptions... ::"



Jesus can see through walls.



They play it up a bit here like it's some big gameplay feature, but I think it only happens like 3 or 4 more times in the game.





The jail area is out in the administration level. There must be all manners of dangerous criminals inside, right?



Nope, just this jackass.







Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me?





There's an outtake in the game files here:

"I'm Atton. I actually wasn't supposed to make it into the final game, but I was created at the last minute. Blame my agent. I was actually slated for a spin-off to Jedi Knight, but I don't want to talk about what happened *there.*"

Anyway meet Atton Rand, our proof that no Star Wars game is complete without its own resplendent Han Solo wannabe.

One the plus side, he's miles less whiny than Carth Onasi from the first game. On the other hand, his name sounds like some sort of contagious genital itch. It's only the third worse NPC name in the game though.



"Care to explain why you're locked up?"
"Security claimed I violated some trumped-up regulation or another - take it up with them if you want, but they stopped listening to me shortly before they stopped feeding me. Now that's criminal."
"This slice of paradise is the Peragus mining facility, the only supplier of shipping-grade engine fuel to this corner of the galaxy."
"Peragus fuel plays havoc with engines, but it gets the job done... as long as you don't mind the toxic byproducts and trying to mine it without blowing yourself up."



"Yeah - this asteroid belt is one giant minefield. One proton torpedo, even a stray blaster shot, can start an explosion that'll make the one that shattered Peragus II look like a kid's pop detonator."
"You know the planet with the exposed core you saw flying in? That hole was caused by the first mining station that tried to siphon fuel off the planet."
"Blew a whole chunk out of the planet, and set it drifting out here in a big clump of fuel-cooled asteroids. So the miners drill the asteroids now, not the planet's surface."

For reference, we're referring to the candy coated planet here:



I don't think that's how planet cores work... in fact I don't think that's how gravity works. But nevermind.

"This facility's deserted. What happened?"



"You see, this Jedi shows up, and you know what that means - where there's one Jedi, the Republic will soon be crawling up your ion engine in no time."
"But the story gets better. See, some of the miners get it into their ferrocrete skulls that since the Jedi's unconscious, they can collect the bounty the Exchange has posted for live Jedi."
"Well, what passes for the law here didn't like that idea, so the two groups started fighting."



He's just going to keep harping on the whole underwear angle, isn't he.

"Not many Jedi left... wouldn't surprise me if the bounty's pretty high."
"The ones that weren't killed in the Jedi Civil War ended up switching off the lightsabers long ago. Word is, there's not even a Jedi Council anymore, but who knows?"





Jesus is a bit out of the loop.

Here's where it gets tricky. We're about to pick Darth Revan's gender and alignment. Obsidian wanted to accomodate all four possibilities, and it changes the rest of the game quite a bit depending on what you pick here.

I think Light Side female is suppose to be canon, so why don't we go with that.



"Well, I wasn't there, but like all Sith, Revan and Malak turned on each other. After they turned on the Jedi, of course."



They're tempermental like the weather?



"I had heard Revan's redemption involved her stopping Malak, and she had no choice but to fight him."
"Well, I wasn't there, thankfully. But I heard what she was like during the Mandalorian Wars, and it sounded like she was quick to wipe out anyone who crossed her. "

I'm going to speculate that Obsidian spent way too much time trying to fit in all 4 possibilities for the end of KOTOR 1. It probably came up at a design meeting ("Hey that would be cool!") and was harped on by a lot of KOTOR 1 fans on the boards. It's actually extremely well done, but for a game with this kind of development timeline it might have been been something they should have shed in exchange for, oh I don't know, an actual ending. For the NWN2 expansion pack for example, Obsidian will be ignoring the bad ending and assuming the good ending.



"Hey, wait a minute - you're that Jedi the miners were talking about. Where is everybody?"
"Look - hey, let me out, and I can help you. I can. I've gotten out of trouble countless times."

NOW he starts being nice. While it would have been fun to let him rot in there, I guess we should let him out.





"All right, here we are. Now this console is set on automatic hail, you may have heard it when you came in."



"Pure pazaak - the console's ours. Now, all we need to do is re-activate the turbolifts, cancel the emergency lockdown... hey."

Jesus is starting to get impatient. Jesus has a sword.



"This system's been severed from the main hub - after it was locked down from remote. You can't even reroute the system, it's been cut clean."
"Can we contact the miners?"
"We could try. But if the miners were trying to trap you up here and probably kill you, why not call them and chat? I don't think a friendly call is going to wake them up."
"Cut the backtalk and let me check the console."

Fucking Atton. We shouldn't have let him out.



Can you hear me now?



Oh thank god, someone less mouthy than Atton.

"Are you operational? We're trapped up on the administration level. Can you unlock the turbolifts?"
"Doooo-reep. Bee-wheeep."
"Bee-deeeet? Dwoooop-Beep!"
"Don't question my orders, just follow them."



On second thought, T3 is every bit as mouthy as Atton, we just can't understand him.



And we're back controlling T3 again.

This is probably a good time to talk about the excellent writing in this game. It's hard to write for a robot NPC. I mean, it's a fucking robot. The first game had 2 droids, and only HK47 had any personality. This game has 4(!) droid NPCS, and they tried to give all of them a personality, and mostly succeeded. The biggest accomplishment was T3, who's the only character across both games to know exactly what's going on at all times. I don't know how they managed to communicate T3 as a happy-go-lucky droid with an agenda of his own when he says nothing but "Bee-deeeet? Dwoooop-Beep!" the entire flipping game, but they somehow managed to do it.



We got dumped off at the hangar bay, it looks like.



And it looks like the gaping hole in the Ebon Hawk got fixed somehow.

Someone took a blaster to this computer here though, and we have to go and find a part to repair it.



T3 starts with this ridiculously overpowered Shock Arm that's got unlimited charges and scales up with level. He doesn't even really need a gun till level 10 or so, and he just blows through all the droids on this level.

There's a body downstairs with the part we need, and also some mines we can use to blow a hatch open. There's gotta be some goodies behind it.



Oh shit. I guess we can ditch this emoticon .



More hologram ghosts. This is the... flight control guy, I guess?

"...tractored the freighter in... it was lucky it wasn't destroyed when it drifted into the asteroid field."
"Not much on board - one damaged droid, one annoying protocol droid, and a lot of bodies."

Again they mention the protocol droid. I don't remember one of those on board...



We keep going and find a computer console; this looks promising. But it's awfully creepy and quiet up here, let's check our six to make sure it's safe.



Nope, no one there.



T3 comes through again.



Wait, what was that noise?







Fuck, not AGAIN.



Next Update

Jesus looks for pants.