The future of Star Wars’ long and occasionally fruitful flirtation with our fair medium has been uncertain since LucasArts vanished in a puff of financial logic just over a month ago. Not so now. EA have inked a deal which gives them exclusive license to publish and develop “core” Star Wars games, and have handed the keys to three of their favourite children: DICE, Visceral, and BioWare.
Star Wars Battlefront 3 stands as one of gaming’s most famous cancellations. It had all the intrigue of a scandal: big license, big publisher, big developer, the game was reportedly only months from release at the time the plug was pulled. Since then we’ve still not managed to learn the entire story.
Developer Free Radical claim they’d almost finished the game, now-defunct publisher LucasArts claim that’s codswallop and that they’d missed deadlines and the game was in a poor state.
Well, you can be the judge of that, yesterday, in honour of Star Wars day, an hour of the game’s pre-alpha state was streamed.
LucasArts, maker of classics like the Monkey Island games, Grim Fandango, X-Wing, Dark Forces, Star Wars: Jedi Knight, among many others, has been closed by new owner Disney.
With the studio’s closure the future of Star Wars: 1313 is now unknown.
We have been spoiled with KOTOR news this week. First KOTOR 2 finally makes its way over to Steam. And now Obsidian Entertainment, maker of the second RPG in the series, has stepped up to the plate and stated they "Would so love" to make a third.Our Spotlight units plug content our journalists have made, that our advertisers want to promote. Sometimes the promotion is paid for, but the content they go to is always independent with no client oversight or approval.
Star Wars 1313 is certainly looking impressive - and with us still in the look but don't touch phase of its marketing cycle, that's all we can say - but the new developer diary released by LucasArts is making it sound right up my street. It sounds like the guys over there are making an oddity when it comes to the Star Wars franchising, and it's the games which are an oddity in that cannon which really stand out as the best.
A long time ago, on a console far, far over there - in the used section - there was a Star Wars game beloved above most others. Where the first, developed by BioWare, was a bright and colourful game of black and white morals, this second game, made by Obsidian, was a melange of ambiguity. It was simply a great game. And nowhere could you put your hands on it. It's available on the PC. It just wasn't available through Steam. The oddity was that most other Star Wars games were, including KOTOR 1.
There's definitely a rather different, distinctly un-Star Wars vibe to LucasArts' latest. While the flashy cinematics are exactly what we'd expect from a space opera, the dialogue hints at a much grittier experience. "It gets a lot dirtier where we're headed," murmurs one character, and we bet he's talking as much about morality as mud. As a spaceship uses an access shaft to slip below the surface of Coruscant, is it also sinking into the criminal underworld of the Star Wars universe?
Speaking to GamesTM, BioWare's lead designer Emmanuel Lusinchi has suggested that Star Wars: The Old Republic could, just maybe turn free-to-play in future. This comes in the wake of the MMO dropping from 1.7 million subscribers to 1.3 million between March and May. Which is precisely the sort of thing that forces a re-appraisal of your business model.
Star Wars 1313 has been officially confirmed by LucasArts, following what seems to have been a slight slip-up from GameTrailers.com. The game’s title refers to Level 1313, a cavernous underground area on Coruscant, the capital city planet first shown in Star Wars: Episode One.
