f13.net

I don't have anything more to say.

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/04/03/disney-shutters-lucasarts/

How many years has it been since they made something good?

Not much to say. We've discussed LucasArts before and always kind of gotten to the, "They're producing what, exactly?" point.  Disney doesn't develop games, they have DIS to handle publishing and licensing, no reason to expect they were going to continue moving forward with LA.

End of a fucking era. Pour out a 40.


Internally? Way too long.

Maybe they'll have a fire sale of their non-Star Wars titles and franchises.  Would love to see Double Fine recapture Grim Fandango.   :awesome_for_real:

And yes, my avatar would show quite the bias with that comment  :why_so_serious:

I was about ready to ask the last good thing they made and everything I could think of was made externally at a different studio.

1313 getting shitcanned is kind of a bummer since it looked kinda interesting but oh well.

Just WoW at that joystick article comments section. The number of people completely lost on who owns what is astounding. Speculation that SWToR will be shut down by Disney. Hah.

Yay!

Edit: That's a little harsh. I'm very sad about all the people who are now unemployed, but let's be honest - gaming is an industry of "What have you done lately?" They've done nothing lately.

Incidentally Id Software isn't looking too good I guess.

 I agree there.   It doesn't fit-in with Disney's ramp-up to the 2015 movie, though, so I half expected this from the get-go.  If it had been set to use one of the canon Characters going in to EP7 it may have had a chance.

Weren't they purchased by Zenimax a couple years back? I kindof thought they'd eventually stop making Doom rehashes and just spin off Carmack and Co into a software development team.

Rage 2 got canned completely, and everyone forcibly shoved onto Doom 4 which apparently has had a not-so-good development process including a complete reboot in the middle of development. Zenimax apparently wants Doom 4 to have the 'impact' of Skyrim.

...yeah, so long Id.

Countdown to Carmack's kickstarter?

But let's not forget this turned out to be LucasArt's swan song:

(http://i.imgur.com/Rtt2j9I.jpg)

RIP LucasFarts.

At least then we might get a videogame related kickstarter worth buying into.

edit: what

You'll get an engine worth buying into.

It was just wrong to leave it in a persistent vegetative state for so long.  Still sad though.

(http://www.kerao.net/external/url.gif)

Occulus Rift was already kickstarted, and I think he has his fingers in that somehow.  It was all over QuakeCon as I remember.

From what I've seen of Carmack, I think if he really wanted to make a game as opposed to an engine, it'd be something heavy on tech but light on art assets and he'd just make it himself (a la Minecraft).

Goodnight sweet prince.

Oh man, that is just ... hoo.  :why_so_serious:

Good.

I think you mean:
(http://api.ning.com/files/XttGe4IuCKJHZZoNrCaxuw1Jpa8BT8nE0VnCN8ty%E2%80%8BnA9asz9bhhIGnG3K64uqM3ZpQNSgJbZYvJP61yXH%E2%80%8BQN8CwHZEJSlAN3gI/GrumpyCatGOOD..jpg)

Real question is whats going to happen to their studio in the Presidio?  And more importantly, the Yoda fountain!

The Yoda fountain is LucasFILM.

Too late!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTWP3wvAUuQ

I have a few things....

Disney is evil!

Fuck you Disney!

May Disney go bankrupt and Lucas' stuff be bought by a company that will honor it and not lay off workers and liquidate branches!

The person who made that decision is a damned idiot!

I knew Disney would be no good for buying Star Wars. I KNEW IT!

YYYYEEEEEAAAAAARRRGGGHHHHHH!!!

Yep, all that awesome LucasArts gaming from the past five-to-ten years is flushed down the crapper.

Disney's official statement is that they want to turn Lucasarts into a "licensing entity" to milk the assorted intellectual property for all its worth. Mostly that's Star Wars games, but I imagine things like Monkey Island and Grim Fandango will remain tightly within the everliving all-crushing fist of their copyright empire.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_xJqkzngBI

Disney's been getting out of directly making games for a while now, particularly at the AAA end of the spectrum. They've shut down a lot of their internal studios and this is just a continuation of that practise.

This really sucks for people who work there. But I also hope they saw the writing on the wall and got out or had an exit plan. It's not like they were allowed to even admit they were working on anything for the past 10 months. Not a good sign after a very-many-billion-dollar buyout.

As far as I can remember, the last internally-produced Lucasarts game worth a shit was Republic Commando, way back in the mists of time of 2005.

At any rate, it's still a bit sad to see Lucasarts go despite their dismal track record of recent years, which I imagine is largely owed to the constant management changes and complete restructuring that would accompany them.

Republic Commando is awesome, I love that game!  :heart:

Psycho.

(http://i.imgur.com/YQyTu0S.gif)

 :ye_gods: :ye_gods: :ye_gods: :ye_gods: :ye_gods: :ye_gods: :ye_gods: :ye_gods: :ye_gods: :ye_gods: :ye_gods: :ye_gods:

LucasArts fired everyone like clockwork every 2 or 3 years anyway.

Oh my god! Up to now I only saw stills of that Star Wars Dancing game. After finally seeing it in motion, I'd definitely have to rate this as a grief link. I'd rather see Bantha/Hutt porn than enduring that atrocity again.

If you think that's bad check out this one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfYZwQ0bOCA

If you wanted to parody awful licensed Kinect crap you could just put this game out with new box art.

Imagine being the guy who had to write those lyrics. I would seriously just quit immediately rather than work on something like that.

Looks like that's what happened with the character model creator.

You guys suck, I thought Star Wars kinect videos where hilarous!   :awesome_for_real:

"The Wookie's sayin' let's go
But my heart is sayin' no
If you wanna be with me
Solo, there's a price to pay
I'm a princess in a battle
You got to join the Rebel way"


I can't imagine the deep existential horror of knowing you were responsible for writing that.

I thought so, too, but some people are all Serious Business when it comes to Star Wars.

It's the kind of pop-culture mash-up that just melts my brain.  Not rage-inducing but a total collapse of all reason and comprehension that my brain just can't process what it's seeing.

I was put in such a state of, "What the Fuck?" I think I drooled a bit watching them.

Yeah this. It's not even that they are literally pissing on my childhood memories of Star Wars from a great height, it's the kind of jaw-dropping nausea-inducing hellscape of the mind reaction like seeing your parents show up on the Internet in German scat porn or something.

I may not like Disney as a company but you cannot absolve sins like that kinect game.

Is that game for sale? This may be the tipping point for me to run out and buy an xbox/kinect if it is.

Yea, Kinect Star Wars came out at the end of last year IIRC.

This!  Lighten up, people.  I was laughing the entire time I watched those clips.  And the one of the Vader/Palpatine dance-off.  :why_so_serious:

People paid for that shit.  Deep down, I'm glad people are poorer for bad decisions.

Is Kinect Star Wars entirely a dance game or does it have other game play in there crapping it up?

So with LucasArts closing, Raven has released the source code (http://kotaku.com/lucasarts-closure-convinces-developers-to-release-awes-468994505) to Jedi Academy and Jedi Outcast.  Neither of which I played, but I thought people here might find it interesting.

There are some funny comments in the source code too:

I played both of those religiously.

They were really good games.  Best lightsaber combat out there, and what I had hoped TOR was going to base its combat on.  (Actually SWG, too.)

There's a bunch of games in there, the "big" draw is allegedly a lightsaber game where the lightsaber follows your movement.  There's also some pod racing thing and a game where you play as a Rancor and smash buildings.  They're all allegedly fairly floaty, though.

GiantBomb has a quick play of most of it if you're really looking for it.
http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/quick-look-kinect-star-wars/2300-5841/ (http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/quick-look-kinect-star-wars/2300-5841/)

Giant Bomb also has a livestream starting right about now, Farewell to Skywalker Ranch.

Star Wars dancing SOLO POSE!  :why_so_serious:

God, I love reading source code like that. :) Other people's sarcastic comments on code are hilarious.

Doubly so when I don't have to fix their mess.

Still, Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy were pretty good.

WHAT THE FUCK?  :ye_gods:

My favorite Lucasarts games of all time is Rebellion.

I remember Jedi Outcast being good. For whatever reason, I remember Jedi Academy being a bug-addled piece of shit.

I loved the map design in Jedi Academy, there were a ton of interesting and exciting mission ideas there.  Being able to design your character was a plus for me, too, although it was pretty ridiculous that you could play as a Rodian and you'd still have the generic human voice, it didn't fit at all.

The one that really grabbed me was the original Dark Forces.  It was the first time I remember I realized you could tell an actual story in an action game, with a plot and characters and everything, and weren't restricted to either being an RPG or having the Doom/Mario Bros plot of "walk from A to B, win game, view end cutscene".

I also miss Full Throttle... I wish I'd bought that back in the day.  I borrowed it from a friend and beat it over the weekend, so I never bought it myself, but I remember it being really solid.  It's one of the few old games I can't find on Steam or GoG.

And like half my gaming time as a kid was spent in Tie Fighter... it was the first game my family got when we got a color computer, so it was amazing to me at the time.  I was so pissed off when they released an upgraded version for CD-Rom and we didn't have the drive for it.  I remember taking down Star Destroyers single handed in my TIE Defender, it took like twenty minutes to whittle them down.

I'm one of like three people who thinks the saber combat in both Outcast and Academy was absolutely dreadful.

Loved everything else though.

I thought it was fun but you never knew if one of your swings was going to hit or not. Each attack was basically like rolling a dice to hit rather than having anything to do with timing and positioning (I know that's not completely true but it felt like that most of the time).

I still think back to fighting the overgrown Kowakian Monkey Lizard, and him yelling RUN KATAAAAARN at me as I kited around.

All I remember from Jedi Outcast is the Rodians toting disruptor rifles, because fuck those guys.

Yeah, I actually kinda disliked that, too...  IMO it was at it's most fun when you were effortlessly mowing down stormtroopers, which The Force Unleashed did really well too, and at it's worst when you had to fight anyone who had another lightsaber.  Multplayer especially irritated me, because people got really pissed at you for kicking their ass using weapons other than the glow stick.

Light sabers would be really shitty weapons without magic anti-limb severing powers.

Or, other lightsabers.  :oh_i_see:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXp8T097vjc

I like the genocide of billions as a planet is destroyed in the background as a finishing touch on the dance routine, very classy.

I'm failing to see how y'all can't think that's awesome.

Dancing Imperial Guard. :heart:

I can't believe they got permission to put out a game like that!

Not sure what else to say...I think something inside of me snapped.

If there's one thing I associate with Star Wars it's strict quality control.

 :grin:

That, that video made me want to take someone, throw them on their knees, grab them by the hair and turn their face towards a screen, making them watch the song in its entirety, hissing into the ear 'Where is your god now??!'

The best part is how the words keep popping out of their crotch.

You know that those people aren't real, right?

Oh.... oh no...

Now I'm confused

That might not actually be the guys fault. If they make the models actually look too much like the actors they have to pay the actors more money.

But seriously, where the fuck is the Vogon destructer fleet. I'd rather listen to Vogon poetry than watch that crap again.

I titter with delight to realize that the game rewards you with accolades that spread from your avatar's crotch in a glowing mandala of positive affirmations.

Who doesn't like exploding crotch accolades?

I'd give so many accolades to someone who could make my crotch explode right now.

Now that I think about it does this mean that Disney owns the Full Throttle IP now? Hey, have Pixar make a PG-13 Full Throttle movie!*

*this will never happen

(http://i.imgur.com/1wCwr.gif)

WTF is that, and why is it not in the awesome pictures thread?

Ferromagnetic liquids.

They already opened the floodgates for this kind of shit with Star Wars Christmas, many, many years ago.

They opened up this shit with fucking ewoks.  Let's not kid ourselves here, star wars for as cool as it CAN be, has been rife with merchandising bullshit from day onethree.

No, you were right the first time. Star Wars has been considered a merchandising vehicle since before day one, when Lucas managed to get Fox to let him keep merchandising rights to the series.

Lucas has always touted that selling merchandice is where the money is, not movie sales. Ironically in the last 3 piles of crap, the movies made a mint but they pretty much lost money with the toys. That's also why he piled a ton of crap into the digital remastering of the original movies, so he could flog alien no 345 in the corner of the screen in that scene in Mos Eisley.

I still kick myself for not buying an ARC-170 toy.

And I'm mad at SWG for the NGE and shutting down.  I had a kick-ass ARC all reverse engineered with movie replica guns.

Christmas Special predated Ewoks and also managed to exceed them in horribleness.

I don't recall any Bea Arthur or Art Carney action figures, though.

If only.

dat kung-fu grip