A/V No Bigger Luke Here- Massive Star Wars Video Game - Star Wars Outlaws!

I think Lucasfilm licensed the games to EA.

Sort of like Marvel licensed the X-men to Fox and Disney is stuck with the deal.

 

Yeah, it was a 10 year exclusive games licensing deal, for which EA likely paid a lot of money. Because there's a lot of money to be had from the Star Wars brand and Disney, having paid $4 billion, isn't a charity lending it out so that everyone can make money from something that they now own. And EA don't want to pay a lot of money for a license that then allows competitors to release games alongside theirs (the Lego games appear to be the exception, and some of the mobile games are inhouse Disney Interactive products). That's not how these things work.

Having said that, I don't think they've been great caretakers of the license; 2 proper games in 4 years is a pretty poor showing and frankly Visceral's game should have come out already but was still going to take another 2 years (and it was started back in 2013 alongside Battlefront!) without having shown diddly apart from a few seconds of demo footage. Let's hope that the remaining 6 years with EA give us something more than just Battlefront.

 

I miss when Star Wars games had more variety. When games ranged from KotOR to Empire at War. Sadly that era has long, long passed. These days its either really expensive AAA games or mobile games with plenty of microtransactions/pay-to-win. There are some great indie games, but Star Wars is too big an IP for a game like that.

I thought the EA deal came about after Disney bought Star Wars? Not sure about the timing, my memory isn't that good. I thought 1313 had still had a few images leak out before the sale, then after that Lucasarts was officially dead except as a license name. I can understand why they gave an exclusive license to EA, they're a huge game company/group, but other developers have shown more... creativity (heart?) than them. Its been four years and the only really high-profile Star Wars games have been Battlefront I and II, and both were kind of based on Battlefield (same developer and all) and only II even comes close to the older Star Wars games. And now the only other game in development has basically been shut down. Maybe it'll re-emerge someday, but it'll probably be so different as to count as an entirely different game.

Heck, I'm still sad they shut down Tiny Death Star. It wasn't a super-great game, but it was kind of fun and different. Nowadays its all "free-to-play", and while some of them can be decent, most are frustrating unless you spend a lot of money.

 

There's also a game ("third-person action/adventure game") coming from Respawn Entertainment (the Titanfall guys). We don't really know anything about it though other than the announcement and there's a rumour of it being a Jedi/melee combat game based on motion capture recruitement.
http://admin.respawn.com/stig-blog

 

I think most consumers understand that a business operates for profit, but unless you're an investor, that means absolutely nothing; consumers operate with a desire to buy products that they want. Plenty of other companies have been able to handle licenses and turn a profit while also being lauded by consumers.

And maybe Disney - also a business interested in profit - should've kept a close eye on what happened to Marvel and the X-Men movie license. Maybe after a decade of endless Battlefront re-releases they'll figure it out.

EA and Disney; announcement was made on May 6th, 2013.

 

Looking at this, and looking at all the cool warhammer games being made at the same time...man, I really wish they hadn't gone with an exclusive deal.

 

Exclusive deals aren't unworkable, but EA, Microsoft, and Activision are the last publishers I would trust with such a license. As I said before, EA has a history of buying independent developers and running them into the ground. Microsoft has a similar history, especially with what happened to Ensemble and probably driving Bungie away. Activision seems to make a lot of questionable decisions, getting some things wrong about Call of Duty going back to CoD2, to the point they almost prevented the Modern Warfare series from ever happening. I have nothing against FPS games, but I really want RTS and flight sim games. Which I seriously doubt will happen under EA, since publishing executives seem to think RTS and flight sim games are dead for the most part. This is why I have been very interested in Star Citizen, Escape from Tarkov, Planetary Annihilation, 0 A.D., and other big indie games, often early access. Star Citizen is bringing the kind of technological innovation that made Star Wars special to flight sim games alongside some realism, which have largely been dead since the late 1990s/early 2000s. Escape from Tarkov is also bringing innovation, this time to shooters. Planetary Annihilation is the one of the few RTS games in recent memory, of course not made by a AAA studio, but some of the Total Annihilation and/or Supreme Commander developers. 0 A.D. is another RTS game, which is trying to be a successor to AoE and has been in development for a long time.

 

My favorite line from the press release (by EA): "but the games will be entirely original with all new stories and gameplay."

 

Titanfall plus Jedi Knights?



Sounds like it's time for KNIGHTFALL: JEDI OUTCAST II: JEDI KNIGHT III: DARK FORCES IV: A Video Game of the New Republic

 

Warhammer isn't the BEST franchise to take pointers from.

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/warhammer-40000-storm-of-vengeance

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/warhammer-40000-sanctus-reach

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/warhammer-40000-eternal-crusade

http://www.metacritic.com/game/psp/warhammer-40000-squad-command

http://www.metacritic.com/game/ios/warhammer-40000-space-wolf

http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/warhammer-40000-fire-warrior

 

You are way too in love with this joke.

 

To be fair, BFII will have a new story. New gameplay...well, at least they were half right?

Considering the development hell of this game and the DLC and Loot Crate flubs of BF and BF II, respectively, though, really makes me feel like "This deal is getting worse all the time."

I just hope whatever game comes out of this mess and Respawn's game are worth it in the end.

 

Except its not the Titanfall team working on this, it's ex-God of War series developer Stig Asmussen's. It will be a God of War hack n slash, combo chaining, type of game most probably.

 

I don't care either way, I just wanted to make a joke about wall running.

(Appreciate the insight, though. I also like the God of War series, so, hey-ho)

 

1. I am referring to the current crop of games, most of those are pretty old.

2. Plus - so what? If a franchise has good games and bad ones, I can just play the good ones. If it just has one fairly average looking shooter coming out...well, then it is take it or leave it.

 

My point was that it's a bad comparison. The Warhammer licences and Games Workshop in general have, recently, begun giving the licenses out in a much less discerning manner, resulting in many games that are sub-par or low quality. Like Space Hulk, which was so broken the dev had to make an entirely new version to fix it, then had the balls to sell it AGAIN, or Endless Crusade, which is basically just an unfinished beta, or Eisenhorn: Xenos, which is someone's brilliant idea to let an inexperienced dev adapt one of the most popular 40k stories into an app.

Yeah, there are more games coming out, but people remember the good ones and the bad ones equally. And if it looks like its more the latter than the former, it makes the entire brand look bad, and especially peeves off the fans.

 

Eh, at the end of the day, Warhammer still has Vermintide and Mordenheim and Total War Warhammer and Battlefleet Gothic and so on and etc

And Star Wars has...Battlefront 2. Which doesn't look bad, but it sure doesn't excite me like anything listed above. Oh, and there have been a fair number of Star War MOBAs and phone/ipad games and the like, and they are more like the stuff you are complaining about...so, yeah, the Star Wars approach isn't doing better than Star Wars in that regard, while still having a lot less interesting star wars games.

So yeah, I overall think spreading the license around is overall the better decision.

Edit: I also have to strongly disagree with the idea that people remember the bad and the good equally. I have been in on a fair number of chats of warhammer fans, and the reaction I have seen has been overwhelming positive, with some even commenting on how these games have reinvigorated their love of the franchise or brought in new fans, and I haven't heard the ones you listed mentioned until you mentioned them.

 

I tried the demo for BF2, just not my cup of tea. Something other then a shooter would've been nice, I hadn't even heard of this project, so much for that.

 

I am just surprised because even if the games don’t have micro transactions I feel like they could have released 1313 and this new one to earn revenue and maybe DLCs. Is the marginal revenue less the extra cost more than what they could have received by just launching?


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I'm amazed the Battlefront VR mission didn't have us playing Dak or Janson.

Maybe we'll get a indie game on Steam where we ARE the tow cable.

 

Let's do a little test. I typed Warhammer games into my google search-bar. Here's what came up:



The first three are either broken, mobile ports, or have been critically panned. Three of the games are part of the acclaimed Dawn of War series, and the last two are ports from the mobile to PC. Notably, the last game is just a re skin of the company's previous game. Here's a video explaining both it and a broad history of Warhammer 40K games:



These are all canon in their respective universe, by the way. So, out of all these games, 30% are mobile ports, 20% are broken/bad, and 30% are Dawn of War games which have been coming out since 2004. That leaves two good games not attached to a series, from 2009 and 2016.

Not only that, but even the good games have some glaring issues, like Total War: Warhammer literally selling players blood. Or the two versions of Space Hulk, which I feel I should mention is based on a very popular tabletop game, that players have to buy twice.

On a side note, those games had such poor development cycles and were panned so much that the company shut down.

Games Workshop has little to no control over their IP anymore, and are just cashing out to anyone and everyone in hopes of making enough money to stay afloat. And, in doing so, a lot of bad games are coming out, and it seems like you're either willfully ignorant of them, or choose not to acknowledge them to make your point. But I guarantee that others are watching this and seeing some of these train-wrecks. And how many people are willing to take a chance on a Warhammer game when it's literally flipping a coin and having a 50% chance of a bad game.

 

Again, so what? it is not like exclusive licenses are any guarantee of quality - there is always a chance that a game will be bad if you buy it without researching it. At least there are some good games out there, instead of having one fairly standard game.

Maybe its risky, but one needs to take risks to produce the best - frankly, the whole video game market, much movies, has been suffering under too much risk aversion that results in the creation of endless cookie cutter productions.

Far better a world where Vermintide, Total Warhammer, Mordenheim, Dawn of War, Space Marine, Battlefleet Gothic ectera even if they exist along some bad ones, than only one of them exist - or worse yet, none of them, and instead we get some very safe and very bland knock off of another series because a company has a monopoly on the franchise and so has no incentive to do much of anything to get the fandom's money - at least in my opinion.

And I mean, I am speaking as a consumer here, not a company executive. I really wasn't expecting my wistful comment to receive such a detailed counterargument.

Anyway, shouldn't you do the same thing for Star Wars games if you wanted to do a proper comparison of the different approaches?

 

So what; It weakens the IP. Objectively, the more poor content exists tied directly to a brand, the less value that brand will be perceived to have. For example: Ghost Busters and Expendables are both very weak brands with a lot of extraneous stuff attached to them they weakens them (Ghostbusters 2, Ghostbusters Animated, Ghostbusters 2016, Expendables 2: The Game) and they aren't preceived as having much lasting value because of that.

Games Workshop isn't doing this out of some desire to make the best quality games around. It's being done specifically to generate more revenue. HERE you can see the spiral GW was in, where they had to begin borrowing money to stay afloat. After this point is where we see a lot of WH and WH40k titles come out, like 2009's Blood Bowl. THIS is the most recent earnings report, and the difference is staggering. By selling out their license to whoever wants it, they've begun raking in the money. Considering that I've seen no evidence of GW actually supporting the titles that bear its licenses (Focus Home Interactive does pretty much all the marketing for its WH40K games) I can't imagine these people share your passion.

Yeah, this scattershot approach can lead to some good games, and I think EA's exclusive deal is stiffening a lot of potentially interesting titles, but it's not a good idea to just throw your hands up in the air and give anyone and everyone free reign of your universe. We don't see every tom, dick, and hairy writing and publishing their Star Wars fanfiction, because that would be chaos.

What should happen is that GW sets up a team, like the Lucasfilm Story Group, and keeps an eye on all the projects bearing its licenses and offering a sort of quality control system to keep games at least polished and functional. We don't have to have two extremes here: Total Control or No Control.