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Star Wars - The Force Unleashed
CVG has the news from the front cover of Game Informer's March edition: the next-gen Star Wars title LucasArts has been working on is called Force Unleashed. Set in the relatively unexplored time period between Episodes III and IV, you'll be taking on the role of a dark side agent assisting Darth Vader to hunt down the remainder of the Jedi. The game will use the much-touted Eurphoria physics engine LucasArts has been working on, and will feature a number of elaborate force-using effects. Highlights from the game may include (spoilers ... feel free to look away ...) a fight with Shaak-Ti in the Jedi Temple on Coruscant, and assisting Vader in an attempt on the Emperor's life. There's even talk of allowing you to play out 'alternate paths', in which the dark side ultimately wins the Galactic Civil War. No word on a release date, but the game will come primarily to 360 and PC. PSP, PS2, and DS ports are being farmed out to another developer.
This article has been posted for hours and no one has commented? Glitch?
:P
Didn't have much to say about it, was interested to see what everyone else had to say. Apparently nothing.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Thanks LA, this is what? the 30th star war game you have released? If you want to release Star Wars, fine, but can you also go back to your roots and start re-releasing some of the originals that made your name (Monkey Island, Grim F, Sam & Max).... I know the series would never be the same since most of your creative adventure designers are most likely long gone... but damn I miss them.
Damn you Lucasarts, Star Wars is the perfect game for the Wii, everyone wants to wield their lightsaber, why are you porting this to the DS (albeit through 3-party) rather than the Wii?
On the plus side, it is refreshing to be the bad guys. Just let us Wii owners (there are alot of us, possibly more than you thought would be)
If this were really happening, what would you think?
They should make a more extensive lego collection from their previous games Lego Grim Fandango and Lego Monkey Island. Now theres an idea!
gokugone.com "Bah-weep-grah-nah-weep-ninny
I have to say, even as a minor SW geek, I'm intrigued by this. I like the idea of being a 'bad guy' from the outset, that isn't something you see a lot of in games - usually the game is setup so you play as the hero.
I remember wishing, back in the day when I used to watch cartoons like GI Joe, Transformers, and Thundercats - I believe this was last Thursday, that the bad guys would win one - if only to mix things up a bit.
I like being given a choice to be good or evil, a la the Knights of the Old Republic series, but sometimes it's just so much more fun to be straight up evil. The idea alone has me wanting to see/hear more - if the game play lives up to the theory, I may even buy this 350,001st Star Wars title.
That said, I do agree that seeing some of the older lines brought back to life would be wonderful. Guybrush Threepwood for Emperor.
Getting the story to load so that I can comment.
I'm shocked that Lucas of all people would allow a game that caters to the Dark Side fan-base so much.
I'm light-side for life, but my wife's panties will no doubt get wet when she sees this.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
it should be pointed out that TFA mentions this game will be developed in-house for Xbox 360 and PS3, but makes no mention of PC (which the summary erroneously stated).
to save u the trouble:
The first details of LucasArts' PS3 and Xbox 360 Star Wars project have finally emerged, from the latest issue of US mag Game Informer.
It's called Star Wars: Force Unleashed and takes place between Episode III and Episode IV, when new Sith on the block Darth Vader is out to wipe the galaxy clean of runaway Jedi.
As Vader's apprentice, you're on a secret mission to dive head-first into the forbidden Dark Side of the force, take out the emperor and rule the galaxy as master and apprentice. Awww.
Xbox 360 and PS3 versions are being developed in-house at Lucasarts, while PS2, PSP and DS duties have been outsourced to another, unnamed developer.
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George Lucas reportedly has a lot of input in the project, and even helped design some of the characters.
Force Unleashed uses LucasArts' much-touted Eurphoria engine, which calculates environmental damage such as smashing crates in real-time. One given example of the tech is how a tree will either break in two or splinter realistically depending on how you hit it. Likewise, steel will dent appropriately when damaged your fancy Force powers.
And speaking of Force powers, many of the world-bending tricks from the E3 tech demo are present in Force Unleashed, including the "cannon ball"-like force push, with controls presented in a similar vein to the excellent Psi-Ops.
One scene reportedly has you battling Jedi Knight Shaak Ti in the Jedi Temple, after the galaxy-wide order to exterminate of the Jedi. There's also the suggestion of being able to control your own pack of Rancors, the gigantic beasties that Jabba the Hutt likes to keep under his gaff.
But we all know how Star Wars ends so it's going to be a very predictable cock-up for Vadar's Palpatine-trouncing plans, right? LucasArts promises to shake up the Star Wars lore with alternate endings in Unleashed, where the bad guys really can win.
We'll bring you more details - and hopefully media - as it arrives. Where's the Wii version though? Perfect for the Wii Remote...
Firstly, how was the PS2 the runt of its generation? Are you referring to its somewhat lesser graphical capabilities? You do realize that anything that wasn't a system exclusive on the other systems eventually made its way onto the PS2, even AAA titles such as Resident Evil 4, not to mention a lot of titles were developed specifically for the PS2 and never ported to the others.
Secondly, what's the point in claiming the Wii might not have the power to cope with it when you follow it up with mention of the PS2 port?
Lastly, most gamers I've seen who are concerned about lightsaber dueling on the Wii are not concerned as much with the accuracy as they are with the issues of resistance. Specifically, there is none. If your lightsaber collides with another, you're still swinging even though the on screen character is now locked saber against saber.
It's entirely possible to make arguments against the Wii, which seems to be your MO. However, if you're going to do so there are far better arguments than those you're using.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
Am I the only one who finds the idea that Vader attempts to kill Palpatine before Return of the Jedi ludicrous and out of character?
Well... not that anything else that happened in 1-3 was in character...
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
From TFA: There's also the suggestion of being able to control your own pack of Rancors, the gigantic beasties that Jabba the Hutt likes to keep under his gaff.
Take heart, fellow Creature Handlers!
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
It says "Assist Vader in an attempt on the Emperor's Life." I'm guessing you're assisting him to *protect* the Emperor from the assassins, not playing the role yourself. That would be more in character with the story ... until, well...
Maybe you're spotting Vader lifting weights?
There will be no greater disappointment than a Wii game that uses the Star Wars license and totally reeks on the gameplay side. I rather see the game development take some time and get it correctly on the execution, than a hastily put together game that tries to cash in on the license. Again.
Not that THAT has ever happened before on a Star Wars game. On a Nintendo platform. Or any other platform.
ANY opportunity to throttle Jar-Jar with a force-grip before taking off his f*cking head with one good swipe is, in my opinion, very welcome and long overdue...
Meta will eat itself
Am I the only one out here who wishes LucasArts would just bring back the X-Wing series with some updated graphics? No change in gameplay at all, but some nice new shiny models.
MMOG X-Wing vs Tie Fighter. You have to do some missions for rebels/imperial for money before you can go out on your own as a merc. Or maybe it would be funny for you to steal your first vehicle. Once in space, you can run missions to earn more money to buy bigger and badder ships, or extra ships to accompany your fleet: See Star Destroyer for an escort. Finally you get a team of your friends together, and you take on large battles for big money or rebel/imperial control of star systems. It wouldn't be hard to get it right.
God spoke to me.
Speaking of Wii and lightsabers I just got the best idea! ...or one could just go out into the woods with a couple of sticks.
Whaddaya say they make a kindof addon-sword to attach to the current Wii-mote, of course this still wouldn't work singleplayer, but you might get some nasty multiplayer with a couple of those things!
http://www.videosift.com/video/Euphoria-physics-en gine-GC-2006-demo
Looking Good.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
"Other game developers" means mostly indie stuff (Darwinia, Uplink, Lugaru, etc) and id software, with a few random things (Neverwinter Nights, ut2004). The vast majority of games do not have native Linux ports.
I mean, I do wish they did a native Linux verison. In fact, with most of the Jedi games (using the Quake 3 engine), it would've been a simple recompile. Then again, the Quake3 engine does REALLY well under Wine (better than native Windows), so I guess it's not all bad...
And by the way, the game+Linux DVD has been tried before, but they couldn't market the concept to anyone. One big problem with that is that on a console, you have the native console kernel/BIOS available for drivers, and even if you roll your own, the hardware is all identical. However, on a desktop, a bootable game makes no sense, because it's a hassle to reboot, and you can't then do driver updates. Plus, it makes patching and savegames kind of difficult, unless you assume one giant NTFS partition on the hard drive, which means the Linux bootable DVD wouldn't play nice with actual Linux installations...
It does mean you're immune to spyware, I suppose. But, for many Windows users, it's better to clean out the spyware and have all your games run faster than have to reboot for one of them in order to have just the one run faster.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
And breaking the wrist strap confinement of my everyday life as my Wii-mote hums with cascading force-field contained light energy ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I agree, but let's hope it's not just online play, but one where you can fight light saber and laser pistol duels with your friends, even split up into Dark and Light side Force battles ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You miss the point entirely. I do have a Wii (waste of £200 that it was) and the grandparent is absolutely right. What he is talking about is not the lack of force feedback, it is the lack of resistance.
Just think about what happens when you swing your lightsaber, in this theoretical game, at your opponent and he parries. On the screen, he catches your blade with his and, to all intents and purposes, it stops moving. In the living room, meanwhile, there is no such physical impediment for you to encounter. Your momentum carries through your swing, even if the Wii-mote gives you a buzz of force-feedback. The result is that you are now positioned completely differently to your on-screen avatar. Even if the game has some code to tell it what to do when this happens (which would be difficult - probably impossible - to implement to everybody's satisfaction), the illusion of being in an actual lightsaber duel is lost. With eps 4-6 style "slow" duels, this is bad enough. The moment you try to simulate an eps 1-3 style fast-moving duel this way, the whole thing becomes a soggy mess.
PLEASE don't pull a KoToR II lamer by making us "Jedi" from the start (which is good) but keeping us from getting a light saber for 1/3 the game. Someone needs a slap!
And please make the light sabers power-uppable with crystals and whatnot like KoToR. That, too, is sweet.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
How could I rant about how bad they are if I hadn't spent hours playing them. 'I hate this. Just another couple of hours, then I quit...'
The way things are looking currently, developers are having no problem porting or developing games for the Wii. This may be due to the lack of HD assets they need to create and tweak, or simply the ease of development as the hardware isn't radically different from their previous offering.
Concerning your controller argument, it seems less about precision and more directed at the lack of games that use the remote as anything but a replacement for hitting buttons. The best thing to do would be to rent/buy Warioware and put the remote through its paces, and see how precision affects the mini-games there.
Personally, the only argument of the lot that seems to be more than speculation is the "killer" one I brought up, which only affects games of an uncreated genre. What happened with the PS2 is something to be considered, but there are too many differences between the two systems for an argument by induction to work. Speculation is fun, but it needs to honor the fact that the position the PS2 was in is vastly different the position the Wii is in.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
No game to date has really done lightsaber combat perfectly. However, there's a significant difference in terms of the instinctive expectations that go with traditional controllers (mouse+keyboard, or gamepad) and the Wii-mote.
With Jedi Knight 2, which had, to my mind, the best implementation of a lightsaber I'd seen to date, the rules were fairly simple. Primary and secondary fire for different types of stroke, combined with directional movements, to give a basic armament of lightsaber moves. Within this framework, limited though it was, I could control how my on-screen avatar fought with reasonable precision. Any reasonably well designed set of controls should become instinctive for a player fairly quickly.
With the Wii-mote, the disconnect becomes more serious. To a large extent, it looks and feels like I am holding an actual lightsaber. My instincts therefore have a specific set of expectations regarding what the outcome of each move I make will be. When in the real world, I do an overhead swing downwards, but my on-screen avatar is blocked even before the blade passes below eye-level, the disconnect is much, much more significant than when I just get blocked after pressing a key on a controller.
The end result would be depressingly predictable; with the heavy penalty that would automatically be applied on large sweeping motions, battles would almost certainly be about people holding the Wii-mote within a relatively narrow field in front of them and twitching it about in a deeply spastic manner, in the hope of compensating for the disconnect through sheer number of swings.
No, the grandparent AC is right.
There are currently very strong signs, of which this story is one, that developers *are* hesitating to port games to the Wii. Sure, it's by no means universal and you can find counter-examples, but the simple fact is that more or less every cross-platform game scheduled for the Wii is a shovelware movie-license. These have never been made on cutting edge technology and most of them, for now, are still essentially last-gen games in every respect. Moreover, as we saw with the John Carmack story the other week, and as we are likely seeing in this case, the Wii's lack of horsepower is a key factor in this. Once the current generation is more firmly established and its standards have become the norm, even the current trickle of cross-platform titles is likely to dry up.
If the Wii doesn't have a PS2-scale installed base by this point to make it worth sinking megabucks into exclusives for it (and I'd say it has about a year from now), then it's dead in the water.
I've played Warioware. I actually found it less impressive than Rayman Raving Rabbids. Ironic that the only Wii game to have even come close to impressing me so far was a third party offering.
Ummm, as a kid I always wanted to be a Jedi. I didn't spend any time at all pretending I got to hunt down and kill all of the remaining good guys in the universe. Lucas appears determined to undermine any love I had for his world and series, by somehow wanting me to cheer for, not against, Vader and the dark side.
I think its pretty clear what will happen at the end of the game, your character dies. Theres no way around it, being Vader's apprentice (playing Dark-side) you can't live because he has no apprentice in episodes IV-VI. If you choose to be a Jedi (playing Light-side) you can't live because the only one who does is Kenobi, and if they won't let you play Vader they're certainly not gonna let you have Old Benny-Boy! Come release time I'll be proven right.
http://www.lucasarts.com/games/theforceunleashed/
They have some good looking concept art there, but I'd like to see in-game stills.
Also, this looks interesting:
Digital Molecular Matter (DMM) by Pixelux Entertainment
What is DMM? DMM -- exclusive to LucasArts for any game releases through September 2008 -- brings an unprecedented level of realism to the new generation of consoles by making completely interactive environments that react as they would in real life. From crumbling walls to shattering glass and even swaying organic plant life, in-game objects have material properties that behave realistically all in real time and without using a single frame of animation.
Blazing Angels for the Wii comes out in two weeks. Not sure if it will be great, but it looks very entertaining.