Slashdot Mirror
LucasArts Layoffs Spark Many Rumors, Including KOTOR 3
It seems that LucasArts has laid off somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 employees, sparking all sorts of interesting leaks and rumors. Chief among the rumors seems to be another carrot in the chase for the LucasArts/Bioware MMO project, which according to one employee, will take the shape of KOTOR 3. "Most interesting, however, is the information they provide on how the layoffs leave the company severely short-staffed as they approach a packed development schedule, one which it appears may be increasingly outsourced. Some of the titles they report LucasArts apparently have in this stacked pipeline, whether as publisher or developer, include: KOTOR 3, Battlefront 3, 'The Official Indiana Jones' game, another LEGO based game based on the Indy universe, and 'a lightsaber game for the Wii.'"
You get to play as an aging Han Solo who finds an artifact and meets aliens..........wait........redundant?
I stopped caring about LucasArts when they stopped making space combat simulators.
And everything he owns.
Amen
They need to make an up to date version of Xwing vs Tie Fighter... Imagine a 20 ship scrum going on with shinny new graphics...
*drool*
"I may be full of crap about this game, and I may be wrong, and that's fine." -Jack Thompson
KOTOR3 as an MMO? That's awful. KOTOR 1 and 2 were the best adventure games to come out in a long time. That's what I want more of, adventure games.
I want a game with a compelling story, and interesting puzzles interwoven into the plot. I don't think that's possible to do with an MMO. I want to be the (singular)hero, the protagonist to the story. You can't have a compelling story with thousands of protagonists.
This is really bad news.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Emperor Palpatine: Lord Vader, can you hear me?
Darth Vader: Yes, Master. Where is Padme? Is she safe? Is she alright?
Emperor Palpatine: It seems, that in your anger, you killed her.
Darth Vader: I... I couldn't have. She was alive! I felt it! nnnnnnnnnnnnNNNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooo!
LucasArts just hasn't been the same since the late 90's. Deciding to solely exploit the Star Wars franchise instead of the incredible IP they had built up over the last decade was probably the worst decision they could have made.
Now, we're all a little tired of the endless Star Wars games (and not even the great ones, like Tie Fighter!), and they're laying off staff and outsourcing to continue producing the same Star Wars crud.
Not a good sign for LucasArts' future if you ask me.
Take note, moderators, this is a prime example of when to use the overrated mod. Normally it is used for -1, Disagree, but this is what it was made for. A post that says nothing at all that currently stands at +3, Insightful deserves a few Overrated mods.
More on topic, is there anyone else here who still doesn't have the graphics card to get through the first KOTOR?
the first time it came out, when it was called SWG.
...because I have no fucking clue what KOTOR is?
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
Or Grim Fandango 2 on the list. Sigh...
I see those NDAs that LucasArts probably made their employees sign went a long way.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I don't really care about the other games, but I want a KOTOR 3 dammit! =(
Only one person can save the galaxy. I don't want to have to compete with thousands of people to be that person.
Saving galaxies, can you stop at one?
Galaxies, save all you want, we'll make more!
We replaced this young Jedi's galaxy with Folger's Crystals. Let's see if he notices!
****click****VOOOOOOORN****SWISH****THUMP****
When the inevitable happens and a disgruntled former employee goes berzerk when told he is laid off and is then shot by a security guard, you can bet George Lucas will edit the security cam footage to make it appear disgruntled worker shot first.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
I've got a bad feeling about this.
Why its a town in Montenegro of course.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
if you ever take that expanded universe crap seriously, you should prepare yourself to seeing star wars more like a barbara cartland novel than sci fi. ex imperial admirals running away in love, 'hiding' in black holes and whatnot. total crap.
Read radical news here
Rich.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
We can only hope for some gaming goodness that is KOTOR3.
... Damnit LucasArts, don't leave us PC users now!
Failing that, I'd settle for a Windows version of Force Unleashed
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force...as if a 100 voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
Lucas the great rebel... is really just another corporate dick.
Actually, think about it. What made KOTOR probably the best non-flight-sim SW game, or generally movie-based game, was the fact that Bioware chose to just move 5000 years away from the SW story and make their own epic story in that universe. It's technically the same universe, but 5000 years is enough for whole civilizations to rise and fall... repeatedly. So nobody expects it to be an exact clone or rehash of the movie.
I mean, think about, say, Jedi in SWG. They actually launched an official MMO without Jedi, 'cause OMG, Darth Vader hunted them all. (And without spaceships too, if the Jedi issue wasn't enough issue.) It's a bit like selling a racing game without _cars_. Not that Sony didn't pull that stunt too.
Then they add Jedi, but with an _unholy_ grind involved to get one. Again, 'cause, OMG, Darth Vader hunted them so we can't have whole armies of arse-clowns with lightsabers.
Yet moving as little back in time as the Clown Wars... err... Clone Wars, would have provided an official timeline where just that happened: whole armies of arse-clowns ran around with lightsabers. All canon.
The NGE added lots of Jedi, but, among the many embuggerances of it, it just turned the whole game into what we all hate about _bad_ games based on movies: it became just a bad merchandising exercise. You know, just like printing Darth Vader's mug on a t-shirt: it does nothing except use it to milk some money from fans.
Now suddenly you had Han Solo personally saving you (and every newbie for that matter), Darth Vader and his whole armada after you, Jabba The Hut personally giving you quests, etc. And while it made some sense when I started a new Jedi there, it stopped making any sense whatsoever when I went, basically, "wait, let's see what happens when I make a Twilek dancer." Turns out that the same happens. Darth Vader apparently hunts those too, not only Jedi.
And I'm not convinced that there'd be that much they can do. The events of the original trilogy basically dominate that time interval, so there's not much else of epic importance you can do without breaking compatibility with it. You can't pull, for example, a "kill Onyxia" quest without people going, "wait, something this big should have been in the movies."
Again, moving back or forth in time a bit would have provided ample oportunity to actually make a good game with a story of its own, instead of a merchandising exercise. If you look at WoW, Blizzard did the same thing: they didn't try to milk Warcraft 3 by making you run around in the same war and meet Grom and the gang, but moved a bit forward in time and made it its own game.
So basically if Lucas eventually decides to make another SW MMO, pulling a KOTOR is the only really viable way. And it makes sense too.
Plus, let's face it, the vast majority of the problems of SWG weren't because of the SW license. There is nothing inherent in SW that says a game based on it must be a "clusterfucked abomination". The problems of SWG were because basically, Raph "I wrote the book about fun" Koster is another John Romero. His claim to glory was that basically he was a peon at Origin while Lord British made UO, and eventually got in charge... at a time where EA didn't want any new content anyway, but just bug-fixes. But he wasted no time in telling everyone how great a designer that makes him. Again, much like John Romero about his time at Id. In practice, he couldn't design worth shit, and spent his time polishing his own statue and arguing why
A) he's right and the players are wrong. You don't know what you really like and dislike in a game. The Great Man Koster does.
B) anything he doesn't feel like working on (e.g., "single-player content" like quests), is a fad and will go away.
C) he's got an excuse, 'cause he's a pioneer in a new genre. (And here we thought SWG was _third_ generation MMO and had no excuse to repeat what was known to be mistakes.)
D) you should stop comparing his game to WoW, 'cause WoW isn't _that_ successful. See, it
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"Some of the titles they report LucasArts apparently have in this stacked pipeline, whether as publisher or developer, include: KOTOR 3, Battlefront 3, 'The Official Indiana Jones' game, another LEGO based game based on the Indy universe, and 'a lightsaber game for the Wii.'"
Where is their information coming from? Indiana Jones Lego game is all set for release: http://www.lucasarts.com/games/legoindianajones/
I did a free project evaluation for LucusArts in Marin County several years ago. They sent me over to a lab where a project was going too slowly. I spent an hour trying to find a fit where my skills could help move things along. Finally they kissed me off with the above remark. I haven't paid much attention to them since. And by the way, I never did see that project hit the streets. Not in over five years.
Why would anyone wants to make a third version of a Montenegro town.
The person who gave the Kotor 3 leak might not have meant that it is going to become a mmo but that there could be a multiplayer option, like the one on Neverwinter Nights (another excellent Bioware game). I think a multiplayer option would be great, I mean the multiplayer options turns Neverwinter nights from a good game to a great game. Imagine what it would do to a already great game like Kotor. This is just speculation.