Disney murders LucasArts

[Doppleganger]

Welp. There goes any chance at a Tie Fighter remake.

Originally Posted by Yahoo

Gamers who felt a great disturbance in the Force Wednesday -- as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced -- weren't imagining things.

Disney has shuttered LucasArts, the long-running game development wing of Lucasfilm, effectively ending all internal development at the company and laying off the majority of the staff.

Moving forward, the company that brought forth such gaming classics as Grim Fandango, Sam & Max and The Secret of Monkey Island will only be a shell whose name is used to license games.

"After evaluating our position in the games market, we've decided to shift LucasArts from an internal development to a licensing model, minimizing the company's risk while achieving a broader portfolio of quality Star Wars games," Disney said in a statement. "As a result of this change, we've had layoffs across the organization. We are incredibly appreciative and proud of the talented teams who have been developing our new titles."


The news is hard to bear for fans of the developer's many hit franchises. Founded back in 1982, LucasArts (then known as Lucasfilm Games) initially focused on original games co-created with Atari. The company would find its groove courtesy the then-lucrative adventure game genre, to which it contributed all-time greats like Maniac Mansion and the Monkey Island series. Eventually LucasArts began mining the Star Wars license, leading to terrific franchises like X-Wing, Dark Forces, Battlefront and Knights of the Old Republic, which kicked off the company's collaboration with the hit-making studio, Bioware.

Unfortunately, it made plenty of bad games as well. And in recent years, the company has seemed to be somewhat rudderless, failing to launch a real hit and scrubbing a few promising titles, like a new Battlefront installment and a new entry in the Indiana Jones gaming series. Its last game was last year's Kinect Star Wars, which was savaged by critics.

Once Disney acquired Lucasfilm last October, questions began to swirl about the fate of the gaming arm. While Disney made no announcements and staff kept working on games optimistically, the fact that Disney has been pulling out of internal development for most console and PC games was an ominous sign, though the company also recently revealed an ambitious undertaking in Disney Infinity, a toy/game hybrid based on a variety of Disney franchises.

As for the fate of promising upcoming games like Star Wars: 1313 and Star Wars: First Assault, a Disney spokesperson refutes reports that both have been cancelled.

"It is worth noting that we are looking for proven external partners who can help us provide video games to our fans," the representative told Game Informer. "We still believe in the video game industry, we still will provide Star Wars games, we're just looking at different models rather than internal production... They're evaluating everything. There's always a possibility that it [Star Wars 1313] can still come out via licensing."

...

Source.

Undoubtedly true that LA has fallen from what it was, but that's also due to how game development has changed over the years. Less emphasis on making a good game and more on making a money-making product.

Still appalling, though.

[Talon87]

They should've at least allowed them to finish any projects that were past the 50% complete marker. They've basically consigned the 1313 game to the same fate as Duke Nukem Forever now: to be half-heartedly finished by a second team who claims to be super-passionate about it.

[Concept]

On the other hand, maybe this means they won't be quite as bad at forcing studios to meet a ridiculous timeframe for games, causing potentially great games to be released broken and nigh unplayable! (Kotor 2 is a pet peeve of mine, in case you didn't know :p. Lucasarts famously forced Obsidian to cut months off the development cycle to meet a Christmas release which caused the game to be released nearly unplayable).

Also in fairness LucasArts haven't made a game worth playing since 2005 (Battlefront 2). I did all my mourning for LucasArts when they became crap years ago.

[Talon87]

In all fairness the last game of theirs I purchased was Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast in 2002; the last one I rented was KotOR back in Summer 2003.

[Doppleganger]

While the company did indeed stagnate, there's a certain amount of loyalty fans have because of the good games they once made. I definitely felt marginalized by LucasArts despite almost every decent game I ever played during the '90s (pre-Baldur's Gate) being an LA title.

I find it a bit ironic that LA, famous for their Disney-like games, ended up euthanized by Disney itself.

[Loki]

While I know TIE Fighter was an amazing game in its day and age, in today's gaming, I don't think it would be that popular. Combat Flight Simulator are not very popular. Granted they don't have the Star Wars title, they're no longer as cool as they were in TIE Fighter days. 1st person shooters basically have the same perspective and none of the restrictions in movement and more variety (since you can change guns on the fly, you would need to change a plane to change that in a flight simulator). Meanwhile, titles like Battlefield 3 also have their own vehicle simulators including jets, helicopters, and even ground base vehicles. The only saving grace TIE Fighter would have in a modern day would be the Star Wars title, but people don't love Star Wars like they used it. After the special editions of the original trilogy and the prequels, all the big fans have become less and less loyal. Star Wars Lego, Star Wars Kinect, and the failed Old Republic, I'm fairly sure people are sick of Star Wars.

[Talon87]

Flight simulators are one of my favorite video game genres, right behind fighters. I owned two for Windows 95 PC as a kid (X-Wing Collector's Edition and Falcon 3.0) and one for Windows ME PC (Klingon Academy). We didn't have a 5" floppy disk drive so I couldn't play Falcon 3.0 ^_^; , but I played the shit out of the other two. Probably (no exaggeration) over 300 hours in X-Wing and over 200 hours in Klingon Academy. And those are conservative estimates. I want to say "over 500 hours" for both but worry I'd be overshooting as it's hard to have a good handle on how much time I spent playing them as a kid.

So I'd have absolutely no complaints if we saw more dedicated flight simulators. What you're celebrating -- how most modern FPSes have flight simulators built in -- is something, as a fan, I find frustrating. ^_^; It'd be like if I told you that an RTS like StarCraft 2 was built into Modern Warfare but you had to play through five FPS stages to reach it and, once there, you only got to play one round before you had to move on to the next FPS stage. Pretty irritating, wouldn't you think?

[Doppleganger]

I think in principle a flight simulator isn't much different from a FPS. One of the things that surprised me in a lot of modern FPS is that one can pilot vehicles. The only FPS I ever played that allowed that was the very first, Shadow Warrior, where one could get in the cockpit of tanks, trucks, and stationary machine guns.

What made Tie Fighter amazing wasn't just the game mechanics, although I'd say that it was a fun game in the vein of Baldur's Gate where the play wasn't just tacked on. It had a very life-like environment that felt like genuine Star Wars, a "hard" sci-fi universe with some scattered fantasy mysticism here and there. It revolved around politics and economics, not morality and emotions, and had genuinely surprising twists/turns. New technology was invented that improved your piloting system, so you literally got to experience the changing times from a cranky old Tie Fighter to a beam-weapon equipped Tie Advanced. And most of all, it was from the bad guy's POV, and it made the bad guys look really, really good.

Bioware and Valve are both capable of making games like that, but the trick is to keep the games more Wedge Antilles or Han Solo rather than Luke Skywalker; less emphasis on the Force, the Jedi/Dark Jedi and a stronger focus on the ordinary.

I wonder how gamers would have reacted to Muv-Luv Alternative if it debut in America first. Would they call it fascist? Xenophobic? I look at TF and see people a bit hesitant to make a game like that again, lest they be accused of endorsing Nazism. That's simply too reactionary.

[Loki]

>Talon

That's not a proper comparison. As long as you beat your allies to the flight deck and you're playing on a map with jets/copters, you basically will always get it since the respawn time for a player and a jet are similar. You also get the versatility of doing insane things since the game isn't JUST a flight simulator. My friend has a story where he played a domination tunnel map, but it had helicopters to transport you to the enemy's side to steal their 'base' from behind. Instead of flying over the tunnel, he flew INTO THE TUNNEL and gunned down everyone he saw. There's a video on youtube of a guy gunning down a helicopter pilot, then JUMPING INTO THE CRASHING HELICOPTER and continuing the battle. We have legends of a guy in a jet that gets shot down, he ejects, then shoots the pilot of another jet and jumps in to take control of his crashing jet. We've known noobz to completely ignore the flight portion of a jet and use it as a car, shooting their auto-guns at people on the ground. These little things add insane variety to just a Flight Simulator or just a FPS. Sure it's not realistic, but it's stuff which makes myths.

And there are definitely people who built custom games in SC2 with a completely different game style. Star Battle and Hero 3X are basically MOBA games. There are RPGs in SC2 Arcade and even Third Person Shooters. People even remade the first scene from FF7. And you can access it whenever you want by entering the custom made. It adds to the games versatility.

In a modern gaming era where the average gamer is looking for as much stimulation as possible, I highly doubt Star Wars TIE Fighter will be able to even sell. The backgrounds being empty black space, the ships being the various Empire/Rebellion ship, and probably no form of combat other than space ships shooting at one another, it would be at best rated as an average game to appeal to a niche crowd of either Star Wars or flight simulator enthusiasts and would never become the icon the original TIE Fighter was back in the day.

[Talon87]

We have legends of a guy in a jet that gets shot down, he ejects, then shoots the pilot of another jet and jumps in to take control of his crashing jet.

Uhh, I've seen that video on YouTube before. Several months ago (back in 2012), actually. Still doesn't really prove your point, which is that my point is wrong, which was that I don't want to have to shove past a bunch of other stuff to get to my desired game. I want my game right there, out of the box, 100% the experience. Do I think it's admirable that modern FPSes are veritable "Swiss army knives" which support so many different game modes? Yes, I do. But when I want the best knife for the job, do I want the Swiss army knife "jack of all trades, master of none"? or do I want the knife that is only a knife but is a God amongst knives? I want the God amongst knives. I want to be able to pull it out of the drawer or my pants pocket and wham, it's a knife, no assembly or manipulation required. The same goes for video games. That's great that modern FPSes have excellent flight simulators built into them, but I don't want to play a military-style flight simulator with heavy choppers and F15s all the time. I'd like science fiction spacecraft on occasion. I'd like stealth bombers on occasion. I want, like in X-Wing, to make runs down the Death Star's trenches or other "famous flights" you're not going to find in a military shooter. The point is, telling me to go buy Modern Warfare or Battlefield 3 if I want a modern flight sim isn't a satisfactory answer, even if it is the best answer in the current market.

[Loki]

No. I'm saying modern shooters makes the niche market of a flight simulator less appealing to anyone but flight simulator enthusiasts. If you haven't noticed already, niche markets are dying out to mass appeal when the gaming giants like EA and Activision invest their money into titles (we can probably add Disney to this too).

Niche markets are now pretty much handled by kick starters. That's why RPGs like Torment, Wasteland 2, Project Eternity are not backed by big companies. It's why TIE Fighter remake is highly unlikely and rather unsellable from a business standpoint.

And while combat flight simulators sell decently, we've only seen about 7 in the last 10 years, I highly doubt anyone will pay big money to gain the license to Star Wars to make a flight simulator when they could just as easily make a WW2, Vietnam, Korean, Cold War, whatever simulator for free.

[Talon87]

Why did you insist the StarCraft analogy wasn't a proper analogy then?

[Loki]

Originally Posted by Talon87

Why did you insist the StarCraft analogy wasn't a proper analogy then?

Because on BF3, it can be a flight simulator if you choose to exclusively pilot a jet or copter. It's not required that I play through the campaign or shoot 9 guys to unlock the jet. It's there right from the start. If I get there first, I am in a full out flight simulator. If someone beats me to it, maybe I co-pilot. If not, I'll wait until he's shot down and wait for the respawn or join a different game.

[Amras.MG]

Could be really good or really bad, depending on if they decide to license movie cash-ins or actual original games by good developers.

Knowing Disney it's probably the first though ;;

Strangely enough I'm not sure how much this affects me, huge Star Wars fan though I am. The only Star Wars video games I own are KOTOR and KOTOR II, due to the whole me sucking at action games thing.

[Muyotwo]

It's sad that it's closed, but really Disney just turned off the lights after everyone had already gone home. No Brian Moriarty? No Tim Schafer? No Peter McConnell? It hasn't been the LucasArts you think of when you think of games like TIE Fighter, Grim Fandango and Loom for a long time. It's sad that they won't be making new games, but if the studio had been successful in the seven-eight years before Disney purchased it then it would have survived.

[Mercutio]

Yeah, sad but have to echo. This is a fairly smart and predictable decision, regrettably.

[Amras.MG]

The problem with that Muyo is that they had two (seemingly) excellent games lined up for the next gen consoles: Star Wars 1313 and the just-announced sequel to Battlefront. It seems like LucasArts was finally coming to its senses, and then Disney just guts it.