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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.
Using the handle of a whip perchance? Or perhaps a fake hand?
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
Double bladed lightsaber?
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...
The triple bladed light-saber gives a closer shave.
Conjures up some imagery of Diana Jones and the Dungeon of Doom... ....many many whips. ...mebbe even a few snakes for the benefit of the poor victim (Henry Jones Jr).
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Oh I know. A tray of the common canteen variety. Darth bless Jeff Vader!
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
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.
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Don't forget about the horse he rode in on!
You can make your own now, just strap a bunch of LEDs to a Wiimote and run around hitting people.
The Wii-mote probably would do a great simulation of a light sabre considering both would have about the same balance type. Since a light sabre would not have any weight where the blade would be either. Kind of a cool concept for the wii-mote. And you can sell a light sabre "handle" for the wii-mote to fit in.
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.
...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...
Already exists. Don't know what games it's for.
As to the weight of the light saber -- have we established it would have no weight? Certainly, any of the scenes in which a light saber flies around, the physics seem modeled to indicate weight.
Not that, in the grand scheme of things, the weight of a light saber is a meaningful discussion. But, you know. It's Friday.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I have always wondered why good swordfighting games have never come out... it's always been just the default moves, combo moves, blah blah blah. Hopefully, since it would use the wii controllers, this will be cool :)
I see those NDAs that LucasArts probably made their employees sign went a long way.
No, we call that Darth Goatse.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Because the Wii-mote will not stop when it hits their blade. My brother fences, and he assures me that a Wii sword-fighting game would be terrible.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
Fuck everything, we're doing five blades.
Several of the books describe it not as a beam of light, but as a plasma circuit that extends one meter and curves 180 degrees back to the base, which is why the tip is round. While not much that would give it some mass. As an aside, it would also be 5000c, hot enough that holding the handle would be a sure fire way to get some serious burnination.
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
To a purist fencer (something I'd love to get into, as an aside), or to a gamer?
I'm sure the original SNES "Duck Hunt" with the little gun thing wasn't the most accurate simulation, either, but it was more fun than shooting with a mouse...
I don't really care about the other games, but I want a KOTOR 3 dammit! =(
i'm surprised and delighted to see this concise summation of my opinion given this information.
1 - the guy is not only beating dead horse franchises to powder, but he's going necro too, dragging them up from decades ago for a second round, this time using light sabers to beat the leftover powder into vapor.
2 - he's laying off experienced, skilled american labor who have demonstrated their loyalty for god knows how many years of work to replace them with offshore labor. He doesn't even bother to invent a pretext like "there just aren't enough talented americans". It's like watching your spouse make mad, horny love to whoever theyre cheating with on your dinner table in front of your 5 year old children.
3 - not only is he doing this, but he's adding insult to injury to both his remaining american staff and his customers by cutting this staff from dev and QA, meaning more pissed customers putting dents in the devs' reputations when it was the head honcho himself who overworked, understaffed, and partially repopulated his departments with trainees who in all likelihood barely meet minimum qualifications.
so yeah.. the conclusion.. (explative deleted) george lucas... it's absolutely brilliant. it boils down 3 paragraphs into a 3 word post title.
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OK, but tactile feedback is a very important part of sword-fighting, much more so than recoil is for shooting. Maybe vibration will be good enough, but I'm still not convinced.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
Isn't that essentially what Lucas did with General Grievous?
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
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 don't own a Wii, but I have played it a few times, including WiiSports. It seems to me that the mote isn't nearly responsive enough for a fencing-style of combat. It seems much better at large, exaggerated swings than quick thrust and parry.
The game is already done. It's "The Force Unleashed". The Wii version has a multi-player light saber game in it.
I've got a bad feeling about this.
Actually, I thought your post was much more representative, in that sort of rule-mongery whiney "But I've got the +5 sword" kinda way.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's actually fairly difficult to precisely model a sword, as was seen in Red Steel. Accelerometers tend to have too much drift to get a precise model of positioning. That's why most swordfighting games just use the "waggle to hit" method, and I think that's going to be the useful limit for swordfighting on the wii.
The best way to use the wiimotes features is to measure the controller's tilt in relation to the ground. An accelerometer at rest will always give you a reading of 9.81 m/s/s towards the ground. That's why the wiimote can work pretty well as a steering wheel in Mario Kart and other driving games.
Not a typewriter
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.
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Yep..... you might do a "repel the blaster shots" game or "fight vs drones" etc. as the light saber seems to slice through them as thin air, but the epic jedi vs jedi light saber duels would be just stupid. Imagine you take a big swing that gets blocked, either you pass right through the opponents light saber (stupid) or the blade is blocked ingame but the wiimote continues onward (stupid) so you have to realign your wiimote with the saber on screen somehow.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Ah, the good old Gillette 3000... (aussie irreverancy at it's best)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=gStI9ysPrhs
Hmmm. Maybe it'd have to be a two player game then. ;)
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So... you get penalized for wildly swinging when there isn't an opening. The character reels and you have to get your Wiimote back into position. The faster you do, the quicker the recovery on screen. Just a thought. It's no replacement for real tactile feedback, but without actually fencing, you're not going to get any anyway. Well, maybe if the Wiimote was made from metal and you were standing in a highly sophisticated "magenet room" that could force that thing to stop dead in its tracks. Would be cool, no?
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Well, I own a Wii and I can tell you that the responsiveness of the Wiimote depends greatly upon the programming of the game.
For instance in the Boxing mini-game of WiiSports, when I first got the system and got together with some friends, I tried doing actual punches with it (jabs, straights, crosses, and hooks) and got almost no response. Somebody else there who already knew what the game responded to just flicked the controls one way or another as needed and handed everybody their butts.
A very small number of games have great responsiveness, but most are poor to mediocre. Even with mediocre responsiveness it can handle quick thrusts and parries though (as demonstrated to me in SoulCalibur Legends), but it's not enough to really make you feel totally in control of things.
This may be why so few games have been aimed at taking full advantage of the Wii's functionality (or any advantage for that matter). It appears to be very difficult to program a game to get the most out of the Wiimote.
However, I still don't see it as impossible to make a good sword/lightsaber game for the Wii. It does require two things, though:
1. The programming skill to get the most out of the Wiimote
2. Training (penalizing) the player to overcome the limitations of the Wiimote. By this I mean the suggestions of using the rumble feature to signify when the blade has hit something that would make it stop. Then having the virtual blade fall away in the direction the Wiimote continues if the player doesn't stop. After this lets the opponent's blade skim along the player's blade and into the player enough times, the player will learn to respond to the feedback when making their motions.
Not much chance of seeing that actually happen with the way things are going right now, though...
A laser sword has to be a magnetically contained tube of plasma; anything else is clearly ludicrous. It cannot have a very high rest mass, and a high enough thermal energy density for it to have a significant weight from the energy... well, that would cook the planet.
However, interesting side-effects might arise from moving such an intense magnetic field at such speed. There should be a current flow. Lightsabers ought to crackle and discharge to nearby objects; they'd be EVEN COOLER that way.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I know of one book that describes it as having a weight, Darth Bane: Path of Destruction (or something like that). It describes the apprentices (sith) using durasteel (typically presented as pretty heavy) blades to simulate the heft and weight of a lightsaber.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
Well, the actors were swinging around sticks on a light saber hilt, which adds the "weight". Perhaps they were initially envisioned to be essentially weightless, but were limited by reality?
When they work in a foreign country and their family hates it and they are tired of weird squishy food and odd customs they will wish they had not gone.
The difference for a company is that work will suffer as there are all kinds of new barriers to putting out good work including culture, time zones, and language. It can be done, but generally it is not.
I'd like to add to this individual's quite apt reply.
Even if the pay were vastly greater, the factors he mentioned above would also include extreme degrees of separation from extended family and all acquaintances for the vast majority of a populaction, would further limit the number of willing applicants.
Aside from that, your argument is highly specious. The controllers of a given corporation can place its headquarters in congo and still rake in the profits and live the vast majority if their life in the US anyway.
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IN an universe where the eing have complete technological control over gravity, I thing your making an hell of an assumption about the weight of the blade. By all visual cues the blade does, in fact, have weight.
However, yes it's going to be damn cool. The Wii Lego star wars game use the Wii motion for light saber action..or so I heard.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In the first movies, the tip was not round, and there was an edge.
The fact that it would need to be 5000c kinda means that's how the must not be doing it, since no one could be near one.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
No it doesn't, it could be some technology the we don't have, like most of the god damned movie.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"OK, but tactile feedback is a very important part of sword-fighting,"
modern real sword fighting, but not with a light saber. Whose wielders use the force to determine strikes before they happen.
You could pop the control into a plastic sword.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The HQ can be anywhere, but if the team was in one place and then is distributed (ie outsource pieces of the project), then the project will suffer.
When they work in a foreign country and their family hates it and they are tired of weird squishy food and odd customs they will wish they had not gone.
Exactly - no one likes weird squishy food and odd customs.
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.
Whats the point of employing people? What is our responsibility to our communities?
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.
I think he was five blades plus the precision trimmer.
Also, he vibrates, so he's quite popular with the ladies.
Outsourcing is also beneficial for anybody who is a consumer. A successful "buy American" campaign would curb outsourcing, of course those things never work because outsourcing benefits more people than it hurts. Outsourcing (and automation) may negatively impact employment in a specific industry, but the cost reduction for goods and services results in a net benefit for the economy overall.
Jobs don't exist to employ people, they exist to meet the needs of people. Would you like somebody coming up to your door and demand you pay them to landscape your yard?
What is the responsibility of the consumer? It is they who hold the ultimate power over corporations. For some reason they are willing to pay $600 for a $10 purse because of a name, why wouldn't they pay extra for a product made domestically.
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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.
As to the weight of the light saber -- have we established it would have no weight? Certainly, any of the scenes in which a light saber flies around, the physics seem modeled to indicate weight.
;)
The scenes depict weight because they were modeled after Kendo, tennis swings, and such, so they adopt the weighted swing.
However, you don't necessarily need more mass (weight) to increase inertia (an objects resistance to change of motion), such as electromagnetic fields.
Besides, I do believe light sabers are made out of light
ah the good old structural unemployment argument.
It works for advancing technology like automation, but it does not work for off-shoring like we've seen in the past few decades.
So you started in an unskilled profession, they offshored that, you retrain and start in a new skilled profession at entry level, then they offshored that, so now you retrain again for another skilled profession.. oop there goes that one too...
exactly when do you advance beyond entry level pay and earn a salary capable of doing more than just scraping by with your family? when do you recoup all the training costs?
there is a difference between structural unemployment and companies just not giving a damn about rewarding loyalty and hard work anymore, dispensing with the last bit of humanity they attributed to you.
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"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/
Only because lazors went out of style when the masses started to realize they don't actually work anything like that.
Nobody expects the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal.
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.
For the most part, outsourcing is the worker's boogeyman, something that is blown out of proportion.
On the contrary, offshoring has been part of the steady erosion of the middle class, and it doesn't receive enough attention. During the post-war boom, it was common to graduate high school and make $20 an hour at a unionized manufacturing job. Good luck doing that today; many struggle to make that much with a college degree.
First went the unions, then went the manufacturing, and now the white collar jobs are leaving, and all so the top 1% can see their annual 15% increase in income. Smashing, yea capitalism.
Outsourcing is also beneficial for anybody who is a consumer.
In the same way right-to-work laws free workers from having to pay a thousand dollars a year in union dues AND making another five dollars an hour with twice as much vacation time. It's a penny wise, pound stupid decision, because the vast majority of all cost reductions are not passed down to the consumer, they just go straight into the executives' pockets.
No, all so consumers can buy a $20 HD-DVD player. Companies wouldn't take the significant risk of outsourcing unless there was competitive pressure to reduce prices.
It's a double-edge sword. Maybe the union worker gets extra benefits, but they get locked into a system that often promotes longevity over meritocracy.
I'm still not sure where you get the idea that the majority of cost reductions are not passed down. Costs for necessities have decreased, the price for manufactured goods has decreased, and the share of worker income spent in these areas has decreased.
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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.
The hilt has weight.