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Star Wars Games: What Happened?

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Let me preface this by saying that the upcoming Battlefront II looks pretty cool. That being said, its existence is indicative of one of the many problems plaguing modern Star Wars games.

When I was younger, we used to get Star Wars games left and right every single year, sometimes even multiple times a year. They weren’t all good, in fact a good chunk are pretty bad, but at the very least we got them. Now we barely get any and what we do get is either not that good or just doesn’t add that much to the existing Star Wars experience. I find this very strange considering the era of the maligned Star Wars prequels was a better time for gamers than that of the much more critically acclaimed new films under Disney.

There was a bit of a lead up to The Phantom Menace when it came to games (for example the Dark Forces games), but it was really after Attack of the Clones where it picked up greatly. However, we did get hit games Episode I: Racer and Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader in between the two.

After the second prequel but before Revenge of the Sith we got a huge amount of great Star Wars games. Knights of the Old Republic, Knights of the Old Republic II – The Sith Lords, Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, Bounty Hunter, the original Battlefront, and so on and so forth.

Finally, after Episode III came out, we got such hits as the original Battlefront II, Republic Commando, all the good LEGO Star Wars games, etc.

There are plenty of games I’m not mentioning, mainly since I just wanted to focus on how many quality games we got. However, Star Wars games started to taper off from there. There were a few good ones like the original The Force Unleashed and The Old Republic but, for the most part, things had changed.

From there it was almost nothing but cancellations, poor entries, and lack of content. The Rogue Squadron, Jedi Knight, Knights of the Old Republic, Republic Commando, and Battlefront series all had cancelled sequels. New IPs like 1313 and a Darth Maul game were cancelled as well. After that, the overall continuity was reset with Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm, LucasArts was shut down, and EA was given the rights to Star Wars games.

EA’s first Star Wars game came four years after The Old Republic, the previous Star Wars game (we don’t talk about Kinect), and disappointed fans everywhere. Since then, we’ve gotten an underwhelming LEGO adaptation of The Force Awakens and some DLC for the rebooted Battlefront, for The Old Republic, and for Disney Infinity. With EA’s 2017 E3 conference behind them, we have a confirmed Battlefront II for this fall with “three times more content than Battlefront 1”, whatever that means, and nothing else. We also didn’t learn that much since the game had already been announced a month prior. What we saw was mainly EA trying to drive home the multiple eras feature of the new game.

Both Visceral Games and Respawn Entertainment have been confirmed to be working on something. However, we got absolutely nothing regarding those two games at E3 so they’re no doubt far away from being released. This is especially considering EA’s history with Star Wars announcements, having had something to show at E3 2013 with Battlefront finally coming out after two more years of conferences.

As I said in the beginning, Battlefront II looks great. However, it’s both a reboot and the sequel to a reboot of a franchise that I (and many out there) preferred under Pandemic and LucasArts rather than Dice and EA. Things have declined greatly for fans of Star Wars games. Hopefully, I’m wrong and EA really is turning things around, but I’m not holding my breath after their disappointing E3 2017 conference.

Trailer for Battlefront II

I spend most of my days working towards my Writing and Rhetoric degree at the University of Central Florida, but I spend a lot of my down time keeping up to date on the best TV, movies, and video games the industry has to offer. Here I put all of that extended time to use discussing each of them in-depth.

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Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made

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As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.

Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”

You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.

 

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You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5

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You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.

The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.

The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.

The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.

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This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive

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Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.

For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”

Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.

Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.

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