Lit Eleven-ThirtyEight and stuff

Honestly, that video reminds me more of the newer Battlefield games, 3 and 4, than of Call of Duty. Considering that it's a pre-Alpha video, though, there's really no telling how the game would have turned out if it had been finished. And trailers like that are usually cut to make the game seem most exciting, anyway.

I just want to see an OT-era Star Wars game in true high-def that doesn't have Starkiller in it.

 

Dug through the site for abit. I also concur that Star Wars needs more Hojibs.

 

For variety's sake!

EDIT: Relevant - EA Plans to Model Star Wars Games on Batman Arkham Series

 

Not knowing the video game scene that well, is the popular view really that LA failed because SW games sucked because they were "derivative and unoriginal" in the sense of being clones of other non-SW-games made before? I'm asking this because the kernel of that accusation has been around since the time of the Episode 1 tie-ins. That kernel being that the games were unoriginal in that they didn't make something great out of their inspiration. When you talk about X-Wing, you mention that - there's obviously been similar games before, but the developers added great stuff. Same for Jedi Knight which I remember was said to really blow the limitations of FPS games. The "derivative and unoriginal" claim only sinks in when games were relying on being "X with a SW texture" and didn't deliver on other stuff. But KOTOR was "just another RPG" in one sense, and in another it was, for some, a better experience than the prequel movies. A game that tried, while the "d&u" fare that the criticism invokes didn't try all that hard. Note, I haven't played most of the newer games, so I couldn't really say. Anyway, it seems to me that the complaint you're adressing in one removed from the real complaint, and I don't know if that's because "the people" are misinformed these days or because the complaint has been hardened into a figure of speech/cliché by over a decade of repitition.

The other two branches of LA figure into all of this, too - the Indiana Jones licence, which, IIRC, was intended to be the original receiver of the TFU engine (a novelization of that game had already been announced) but was abandoned in spite of the new movie (LEGO games don't really count since those come from a very different place); and, where Indy games originate from, of course the classic LucasArts Adventure, whose "death" has been the other big complaint against LA since the turn of the century. Both support manager-related/change-related arguments as you make here.

 

One of the main issues with the company, one which I didn't get into with the article I had, is the simple time involved. Lucasarts as a company "lived" for over thirty years, which is a very, very long time in the games industry. When they first started out, making games like Monkey Island, they didn't even have anything to do with Star Wars, the Point-and-Click games were their sole properties, and they had such magnificent minds like Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert working for them. But time passed, and the Star Wars brand called them; people like Schafer and Gilbert were let go and went to form their own companies, and more people came in, ones more experienced with the projects being proposed and launched. The cycle played itself out three or four times over the company's history, the most radical of which came in 2004 under one Jim Ward, gradually weeding out the more invested and powerful of the developers and designers in favor of ones that could be told exactly what to do, cutting the staff of the company from over four hundred to 190.

Time preyed on the company quite heavily. They started out as an independent studio able to make creative decisions and release all their own, but wound up becoming a corporate lapdog forced to churn out licensed game after licensed game, none of which had creative bases so much as they had ones based on other popular games of the time. Basically, LucasArts was forcibly strangled of creativity in favor of trying to make a profit and attempting to keep the company fluid with changing tides in the games industry. Which might have been forgivable, if the games they'd released were good. The fact is, derivatives or not, all fanboyism aside, we haven't had a really, objectively good Star Wars game in almost ten years. No company can survive that kind of quality drought, not even one funded by Lucas himself.

People tend to look for the Occam's Razor solution, the easiest explanation for why the company failed. Yes, they failed because the games they've made didn't sell well, and a lot of people I've encountered draw the conclusion that they didn't sell well because they were copying other games, since one of the execs came out and said "Yes, we're copying other games" at one point. But that's not the root of the issue; creative bankruptcy alone is not what sunk the company. It helped/hurt, but it wasn't the sole factor. That's the main thing the article is saying, that the whole mess is a lot more complicated than most people think.

 

Quick note: Dark Forces was the first FPS to allowed proper free aiming (specifically the first to allow looking up and down).

Unfortunately (or fortunately?) it appears that the future of non massively commercialised tie in games for Star Wars lies in the modding community. Projects such as Freeworlds and Galactic Warfare seem to be it for the moment.

 

This essay on The Dark Side is pretty good:

http://eleven-thirtyeight.com/2014/03/you-dont-know-the-power-of-the-dark-side-how-does-it-work/

 

Well, that's a neat idea - thanks, look for that in about a fortnight!

 

My favorite thing about Hav's pieces is that you can make little poems out of his image captions that kind of summarize the article:

 

Another interesting article - especially with respect to "capturing the original sense of wonder":

http://eleven-thirtyeight.com/2014/03/star-wars-for-all-ages-all-of-the-time/

 

So I guess we cancelled the SuperShadow guest piece?

 

That is the SuperShadow guest piece. I'm his nom de guerre.

 

Havac: Eleven-ThirtyEight's corporate synergy expert.

 

I wonder what/who the GFFA equivalent of Wolverine would be.

 

Boba Fett. The man who just won't die.

 

Does that make Han Sabertooth?

 

And Mirta is Jubilee.

 

Oh, at least make her X-23!

 

Kitty Pryde.

 

Domino. Or at least her mother is, based on her illustration.

 

So, in summation, Mirta is all of the female X-men (except for maybe Storm or Rogue). Though, if Wolverine=Boba, Patch is probably the closest. That means the Empire is the X-Men, which makes Palpatine Professor X, not Luke, and Vader is Cyclops. Han is Sabertooth, which makes the Alliance the Brotherhood of Mutants, which makes Mon Mothma Magneto.

 

So, you're saying that it's a perfect fit, then.

 

I'm just not sure who Luke and Leia are. I'd say Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch are the closest match, but it's not ideal.