This is a different post than I'm used to do, but I'm a big Star Wars fan and just yesterday was #StarWarsDay so I want to talk about a topic I've been holding back for a while now. Hope you like it!
In the entire entertainment industry I can't think of a more spectacular and richer intellectual property than the one created by George Lucas and that encompasses thousands of adventures in unknown galaxies, the cultural impact of Star Wars far exceeds that of any other franchise thanks to its extension not only in film but also in TV, comics, novels and video games, in fact I would dare to say that in video games it has had a strange relationship between success and not being understood by the big studios, for many years the galaxy far far far away was with several pending developments without being able to advance in any, apart from the success of past deliveries Lucasfilm Games was characterized in recent years by having administrative and organizational problems when lending its IP to third party studios for them to develop games, it is said Lucasfilm had absurd lapses for studios to complete the development stages, resulting in projects being canceled in the first months and even after being years with the concepts and gameplay defined.
But maybe I'm being a bit unfair to Lucasfilm and their games division, after all I think Star Wars has seen its best games from this studio with the collaboration of other third party studios like Pandemic with their Star Wars Battefront or BioWare with The Old Republic which is perhaps one of the best RPGs I remember playing. Lucasfilm had set a good path for the franchise in the video game arena since the 90s and had top notch developers that I would dare say rivaled bigger studios like Ubisoft. However, bad decisions and constant disappointments in development made Disney to buy Lucasfilm and close definitively its video game section, a bitter end for a company that had long been one of the ships of creative freedom and pioneer in some genres thanks to an IP as dynamic as Star Wars. With the closure of Lucasart all projects were also canceled, both those developed by the company itself and the agreements they had with third parties, today I would like to visit one of these canceled projects, perhaps the one that hurt me the most to be thrown away by Disney, a game that had a brutal potential to restore the brightness to Lucasart.
Star Wars 1313 was perhaps going to be a resurgence by the big door for Lucasart around the beginning of 2010-2012. The company was coming from a series of massive layoffs and having at least 4 presidents in charge between 2000 and 2010 conditioning the studio to have delays or sudden changes of plans in their games. With the new generation just a few months away and with sagas like Uncharted dominating the market, Lucasart embarked on one last adventure to regain its heavyweight status in the industry, after all they had the mother of franchises, Star Wars had the potential to single-handedly hit the table and bring the company back from the ashes, it just needed an idea and a development method... development focused on combining the mechanics of a Playstation hit: Uncharted. A third-person shooter that challenged the boundaries between gameplay and cinematics and put the player always in the action combined with spectacular in-game action. And the groundbreaking idea was to make a video game focused on a much darker and serious tone to what Star Wars was used to with movies and series, following a bounty hunter through the underworld of one of the most interesting and little explored planets in the movies: the underworlds of Coruscant.
The game was going to be focused on an original character, a bounty hunter involved in a war between underworld mafia families, with a much faster pace of play than titles like The Force Unleashed, and it was going to be focused on only gadgets and weapons exclusive to bounty hunters unlike most Lucasart games that focused more on the Jedi and the uses of the Force and lightsabers. There was also the focus on using a new graphics engine in this game, the Unreal Engine 3 was one of the top graphics engines of the generation and had been repowered to last much longer in the market. Definitely from the horizon it could be seen that a title completely different from the classic Star Wars Formula was being developed, perhaps inspired by previous games like Star Wars: Bounty Hunter or more current titles like Uncharted or the Tomb Raider saga.
A piece of Trailer was presented at Gamescon 2012 astonishing fans of both Star Wars and video games in general, the graphics were excellent and the feel of the game was fluid, the trailer was so great that it won the jury award that year and marked a solid path for Lucasart in the midst of the storm, the company though George Lucas had other plans in mind with Star Wars after years of attrition, in the midst of negotiations with Disney came what for me is one of the most stunning Gameplays I have ever seen, a Galactic ship descending through the underworld of Coruscant and being ambushed, where we control a bounty hunter while trying to survive on the ship, a cover system similar to games like Gears Of War, cinematic action in conjunction with the gameplay identical to Uncharted and graphics that made an impact considering that Lucasart was practically new to using a graphics engine like Unreal, it was a launch with capital letters, a Star Wars videogame that challenged the foundations of the saga and proposed something different in the formula, few knew that George Lucas was negotiating the sale of the franchise with the devil.
The sale of Lucasfilm as well as all its IPs (including Star Wars) was a blow to all the pending projects of the company, Disney initially committed to analyze and continue funding the pending games including Star Wars 1313, the project continued for a long time until there were problems in the development and Disney was not too interested in following the steps of Lucasfilm Games in view that they were going to start a new saga. Disney ended up closing the developer and scrapping all their projects in what is one of many decisions that turned fans against the mouse house, perhaps what makes me more impotent is not being able to see Lucasfilm's reinvigoration in the industry to which it contributed so many games, a legacy that continues Disney amidst controversial decisions and almost robotic performances in order to ensure profits, at least some redesigns and concepts of 1313 were used in one of the solid games of the Disney era, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order follows much of what I liked about 1313 and is perhaps its spiritual successor and maybe that's what we'll get to see for now as Disney secures profits and gives more creative freedom to its developers, the only thing that is clear to me is that with the release of new movies and with the contracts Disney is making with third party studios (ironically similar to what Lucasfilm was doing) we are seeing Star Wars projects being announced every year, I don't know, maybe that's a good thing for the industry, that the king of franchises is taking over the video game again.
This was a different post I know, I'm a big fan of Star Wars and even more of Lucasfilm and their projects, it's hard for me to talk about a cancelled game of which very few technical demos were released and of which little was said at least by its developers, some said that the game was going to be an adventure where we would control Boba Fett in his early years but they are just rumors, anyway it seems to me that Disney is slowly seeing the potential of Star Wars in the video game and deliveries like Battlefront 2 by EA are laying the foundation for a new generation of video games in the franchise. Thank you very much for stopping by this post, if you liked it leave me a comment and follow me for more content.