Random news stories from today.

[Shockeye]

Looks like Pirates! is coming to the Xbox and LucasArts may be in trouble.

[Furiously]

Arrr!!!! Can't wait to find the right governer's daughter...

[AOFanboi]

Li'l ditty about LucasArts and economic tightness from Internalmemos. The layoff rumor isn't on Fuckedcompany yet, though.

[WayAbvPar]

November 2004 for Pirates! on the PC? Woohoo! If it sucks, I might be forced to go on a shooting spree of epic proportions. The Bride ain't got shit on a scorned gamer.

As for LA- until Lucas himself is no longer involved, the fuckuppery will continue.

[Shockeye]

Looks like there's an update to the previous story.

Responding to yesterday's reports that it had laid off staff, LucasArts today said in a statement that it was undergoing "a major restructuring of its development studio." A notice on the company's Web site outlined some of the restructuring's details, including layoffs of 31 staffers and the appointment of Peter Hirschmann as vice president of product development. Hirschmann, a two-year LucasArts vet and former Electronic Arts producer, had been managing the development of Star Wars: Battlefront and Star Wars: Mercenaries.

On the project front, an informed industry source said the team attached to the early stages of development on Knights of the Old Republic 3 was let go in yesterday's layoff.

There's more but I didn't feel like copying the entire thing.

[eldaec]

If we're doing news stories unrelated to each other, but not worthy of their own thread, Mythic just announced the next DAoC expansion will only feature 1 new class for alb, but 2 each for mid and hib in order to attract more players away from alb.

[Shockeye]

As most players of Dark Age of Camelot know, there is currently a disparate number of classes in the three Realms. The reasons for this go back into the shadows of Camelot's early design days, and even though it seems strange now, at the time we thought it was the right thing to do.

Now we are in a situation where Albion on almost all servers has a distinct advantage in simple terms of number of people playing characters in it. We've come up with some ways to alleviate this over the last few months, and today I'm going to tell you about another: in the upcoming Catacombs expansion, Albion will receive fewer new classes than the other Realms. In our current plan, Albion will receive one new class, Hibernia and Midgard will get two new classes each.

There are two reasons for doing this: the first is is to make up for the fact that Albion has one more class than Hibernia and two more than Midgard. Another reason is to motivate people to start new characters in Realms other than Albion to smooth out the population imbalances a little.

We'll start to release more specific information about the new classes in a few weeks, and of course we'll continue to look at population numbers and tester feedback about these plans and make changes where appropriate.

As posted on Camelot Herald

[Merusk]

Looks like Pirates! is coming to the Xbox and LucasArts may be in trouble.

Does LA even dev games anymore?  I see them more as a publisher than a dev these days, so it makes sense to me they're axing Devs and Producers.

The few I remember by LucasArts in the recent past weren't fantastic or were cancelled.  Bounty Hunter, Force Commander, Full Throttle's sequel, Obi Wan. None of these titles really go down as "classics" the way the good oldschool LA games did.  The ones that do, X-Wing, Tie, KoTOR, weren't developed by LA in the first place.

[Trippy]

Does LA even dev games anymore?  I see them more as a publisher than a dev these days, so it makes sense to me they're axing Devs and Producers.

Gladius was done in-house but I think that's the exception these days.