Star Wars: 1313, a 'Darker, Grittier' Star Wars Game

MojoKid writes "When it comes to Star Wars, the gaming industry has a long history of cranking out titles of uncertain quality. For every brilliant title like Knights of the Old Republic, we've seen several clunkers and a few outright failures like Republic Heroes. LucasArts demonstrated a new Star Wars game at E3 this week, Star Wars: 1313 and despite the brand's uneven history, folks are cautiously optimistic. The 1313 moniker refers to a specific level of Coruscant which is a haven for criminals, bounty hunters, and crime lords. You take on the role of a bounty hunter looking for information on an unspecified criminal conspiracy who descends to 1313 in search of data. This will likely be the first Star Wars game to be rated 'M' for mature, and it focuses on the seedy underbelly of the universe."

Comments

1313 ... PG-13?

[Korbeau]

Please show me some hardcore 18+ Star Wars with Nathalie Por ... heu, Chewbacca kinky X-mas explosions and stuff.

Re:Lame

[macshit]

Er, yeah, sure, I like open games too, but Uncharted was really fun. Really really really fun. Uncharted is one of the few games I've played through many times (and similarly for Uncharted 2, which was arguably even better).

So while I'm generally kind of down on overly linear games, when done well, they can be wonderful. So don't write off "1313" just yet...

Chest high walls....chest high walls everywhere

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. Can we all move past the GOW cover based shooting formula already? It's been obnoxious for a long time now. The Dark Forces series was awesome back in the day. Noticeably absent were chest high walls.

Everything is darker and grittier.

[JoshuaZ]

It seems like everyone has as their go-to thing to reboot or add life into old material is to make them darker and grittier. Some cases this goes really well, like the Batman movies. Sometimes less so. I have to wonder what is going to be next? Darker and grittier Carebares where they fight actual drug dealers and pimps? Dark and gritty My Little Pony where Nightmare Moon stomps Twilight Sparkle to death? Maybe a darker and grittier Mario game where the koopahs die violent deaths and at the end you find out exactly what Bowser was doing to the Princess the whole time she was kidnapped? Maybe a dark and gritty live-action He-Man movie? Actually, I'd watch that last one probably. But this really feels like writers and producers have run out of ideas and think that "darker and grittier" are magic words which automatically revive franchises. Maybe instead they could try actually writing good plot lines?

Re:Everything is darker and grittier.

[Grishnakh]

I disagree. It's not just comic books and such that have gotten that way, it's everything. Maybe you're not old enough to remember, but back in the 70s and 80s, even things aimed at adults were much "lighter" (and some say "campier", at least for the 70s). Serious TV shows like Star Trek: TNG weren't "dark" or "gritty" at all, but the later shows in the 90s and 00s were darker and grittier than it, though that was nothing compared to what's going on these days. The levels of violence depicted in those previous decades were much less than what's shown now; many shows went to great lengths to avoid anyone, even villains, dying, and others simply showed their vehicles exploding in a fireball and that was that (I'm thinking Airwolf here). These days, if people aren't shown being tortured to death, people don't take it seriously. The whole thing is rather disturbing, and before long we'll probably just be watching mindlessly violent programs like shown in the movie THX-1138.

Literally blown away?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have I gone insane or did I actually hear the reviewer host guy say, "You'll be literally blown away"?

Egad.

Re:Literally blown away?

[xevioso]

Literally, when people say literally, the almost never actually mean literally. Literally.

Re:Literally blown away?

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Unless you're talking about the most illiterate users, most are using it as a form of ironic emphasis.

Of course, due to Poe's Law, you never really know. Make your best guess, but at some point you just gotta let go, man.

Meh ...

[lennier1]

Looks like a lot of button mashing, which means we'll most likely end up with a fucking dumbed down console port again that barely works on the PC (e.g., Force Unleashed 2, where the game's toughest enemies were the character controls, camera controls and other assorted bugs).

Re:Meh ...

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

Imagine if SWTOR's space combat was similar to Xwing vs TieFighter? You'd run missions and suit up your fleet by spending credits. They could make the curve long for you to get a full squadron of capital ships, interceptors, and supply ships, like 6 months. PVP could involve your fleet + your friends flying the interceptors. This idea is very simple, but it'd make the game very desirable. And if you threw on a map of the galaxy to tactically control and take over places, making it harder and harder to conquer the whole thing, you'd have people addicted. The reason it should get more difficult as you control more of the galaxy is that the best players need a handicap to even things out. Also it is Starwars Lore,"The tigher you grip the systems, the more will fall through your fingers."

The funniest part of all this is that aside from the art/sfx, design and coding a space shooter is one of the easiest things to do in game development. I could solo the a whole project like this myself, and I'm weak in matrix algebra.

From my cousin, who saw Phantom Menace first....

[Lord_of_the_nerf]

'But.....it just won't be Star Wars without child-friendly racist analogues and Galactic Dance-offs'

I've raised this young Padawan well.

Quick time events suck.

[SirDrinksAlot]

The demo video they showed looks like it's entirely quick time events. Which means as pretty as this game may be, it'll be complete garbage.

Quick time events ruin everything they're put in and make the game suck. I cant think of any example where they actually add anything but frustration. You can't pay attention to the action that they trigger because you have to focus on hitting the combination it throws up on the screen.

Re:Lame

[CanEHdian]

the game looks stiff and scripted

In this game, the Force guides all your actions...

PC gamers o_O

[ToasterMonkey]

One thing that jumps out at us from watching the video is that the game clearly isn't running on legacy console hardware. Creative director Dominic Robilliard confirms this a little later in the interview, when he states that the demo is being powered by PCs using Nvidia hardware.

Obviously we can't say for certain, but there's some good circumstantial evidence that the game is built for DX11. Shadows are always the best thing to check -- DX10/DX11 shadows are softer and more realistic than their DX9 counterparts. Fog is another area where DX11 implementations tend to noticably improve on DX9, and the 1313 scenes are impressive on both counts.

There's no reason LucasArts couldn't develop the title for current consoles and cutting-edge PC hardware simultaneously, but this is good news for computer gamers -- games built on our platform tend to play better (and look nicer) than console ports that offer better textures but otherwise keep to the limits of six year-old hardware.

Nobody cares about PC gaming epeen. Really, nobody. Prettier shadows.. got it, that's one of those boxes we uncheck for consistent framerate when playing against other people.

These guys are as bad as the audiophiles that are made fun of on /. all the time. First it was frame rate, 200+ FPS with 85/75/60 display refresh rate... /eyeroll
Now that the average PC gamer has found vsync it's teh softer shadows and highlights. Lets be honest, if you can't do pretty with a moderately consistent frame rate, it gets turned off by any serious gamer.

I'm not saying your shadows _aren't_ super pretty, just that the money you have to spend for slightly prettier visuals at smooth not-disrupting-gameplay frame rates reminds me of $200 audio cables.

And... as nearly all of us are typing and reading this on a PC.. we most likely play/have played games on them. There is no us v them, just mostly people who already have played PC games and still don't give a damn about ridiculous epeen contests.

Gritty has already been done...

[StevenMaurer]

Republic Commando was a gritty look that for once nearly made Star Wars look like an actual war. It had casual senseless death and the tactics in it were pure military.

I'm pretty sure the reason why it wasn't all that well received was that it was so jarringly different from the cheesy "war-esque" melodrama that pervades Star Wars, and never got the idea playing it, that the clones were really finding their situation terribly fun.

It was, needless to say, the best Star Wars game I played, at least in terms of actual suspension of disbelief.

Re:Gritty has already been done...

[RogueyWon]

I liked Republic Commando and have been surprised that it never got a sequel. I think it came out at the wrong time - a few months before the launch of the 360 and the start of the transition to the current generation of console hardware. It was very rapidly eclipsed by prettier (though often shallower) games (and its PC version suffered from being a less than stellar port of a game for old hardware).

Worse still, despite still being a fairly new release, it wasn't on the 360's backward-compatibility list at launch. They did patch it in a couple of years later, but by then, the chance of the game benefitting from any kind of "long tail" was dead. I think this is one case where they might have been better to hold back for a year or so and make the game an early wave 360 title (or even a launch title, where it would have blown away the competition).

Re:Lame

[ShakaUVM]

Eh, different strokes for different folks. I have trouble enjoying linear games. Uncharted drove me bonkers.

Skyrim is much more my cup of tea.

Re:J.E.D.I. or G.T.F.O

[Sez Zero]

Why would anyone want to play in the SW universe, if you're not going to be a Jedi?

Two words: Boba Fett. BOBA FETT!

Jetpack, a host of nerd gadgets, awesome outfits, cool ship, trained and skilled enough to hold his own with the magical-powered Jedi.

Attn: LucasArts

[Digital Vomit]

Look, just give us a new TIE Fighter or X-wing vs TIE Fighter game already, okay? That is what the market has been demanding for years.

God I hate IP laws. With LucasArts sitting on the Star Wars IP, it's impossible for any competitors to come out and make a TIE Fighter game.

Re:Attn: LucasArts

[drinkypoo]

Haven't you heard? Space fighter sims have been dead since Freespace 2.

Are there any decent space battleship sims out there? I wanted to like Vega Strike for that but there's not enough controls in the game to even build a keyboard map that would make it fun.

Re:Attn: LucasArts

[simtel]

Have you tried X3 from Egosoft? X3: Terran Conflict (standalone expansion) is a mighty fine game.

Re:I'm burned out, thanks to TOR

[Anonymous Coward]

I still have pretty fond memories of playing Dark Forces. It felt Star Warsy - back when the Star Wars IP lived off the good graces of the original trilogy.

These days? It's so tainted and diluted with an abundance of junk that it no longer represents any particular tone, style, or theme.

Re:Lame

[crazyjj]

I saw their presentation on G4 yesterday. It was a joke. All they have is some concept art and a vague idea about it following bounty hunters. They're barely in pre-production. They had so little information that I'm not sure why they were even at E3. I guess LucasArts wants to remind people that Star Wars still exists, since there hasn't really been a decent Star Wars game since the KOTOR/Battlefront days in the early 00's (unless you count The Old Republic, which seems to have burned out pretty fast).

Re:PC gamers o_O

[19thNervousBreakdown]

Woah, slow your roll there, you're missing one vitally important difference: While the softer shadows might not be important to you (or even objectively important), they are an actual, measurable difference, that somebody can rationally decide is worth the money.

$200 digital cables do absolutely, positively nothing, and $200 analog cables either measurably don't do what's claimed, or the claims are unmeasurable nonsense--"It's a brighter soundstage, with a hint of orange peel tang."