Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: An4ximandros on April 03, 2013, 01:02:09 pm
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http://www.joystiq.com/2013/04/03/disney-closes-lucasarts/
http://www.vg247.com/2013/04/03/disney-shuttering-lucasarts-game-publishing-arm/
http://www.polygon.com/2013/4/3/4179334/disney-closing-lucasarts-game-publisher-layoffs-reported
http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2013/04/03/disney-closes-game-publisher-lucasarts.aspx
http://www.shacknews.com/article/78558/disney-closes-lucasarts-cancels-current-projects
Damn, just... damn. :( I am seeing the end of an era right here and now. I grew up with games like X-Wing & Dark Forces, not to mention Monkey Island and Indiana. Damn.
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That era of LucasArts has been long gone, my friend, long before the Disney takeover was even hinted at. While I also grew up with those games, the company that produced them went under a loooooooooong time ago.
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Not much to say...
Another company that marked my childhood gone..
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As I was never going to get another X-Wing, much less a SWOTL, I'm decidedly uncaring.
LucasArts is now resting comfortably where it should have been some time ago, probably about the time KOTOR came out.
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Do we have any confirmation it's not April fool.
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This was reported for the first time less than an hour before I made the thread.
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Just saw it ...
The great era of LucasArts might have been long gone (though 1313 looked like a silver lining) but still it brings a tear to my eye to hear that the company might is no more ...
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Pretty much what some of the others have said - LucasArts hasn't made anything interesting (for me) in ages, and the era of games like X-Wing has been long gone with or without the Disney thing. It's not like LA planned on making other X-Wing sequels and now won't get around to it, so while I am sorry if someone lost his job over this, that's about the extent of it.
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Speechless...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ta5HnoQ3rYg
RIP LucasArts :/
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This was reported for the first time less than an hour before I made the thread.
Doesn't mean anything. The events on this very forum have shown that there are still people that don't know how April's Fool is supposed to work.
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Weren't they supposed to develop a space sim based on Star Wars? I assume the project has been cancelled?
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As far as we know, every project undertaken by LucasArts got axed & canned.
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Shameful.
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Might be for the best. LA hasn't produced anything remotely good since Republic Commando in '05. Any other developer that wouldn't have produced anything good in 8 years would have been axed long before.
That's many devs laid off though.
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In the last link it says:
"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."
If I understand that right, as I'm honestly not sure, does that mean they're going to pretty much let other game developers bid for the right to produce Star Wars games? As a whole, I've never thought much quality has been released under the Star Wars name. And as a game developer, wouldn't you you just love to take a crack at making a Star Wars game? It could bring in some real innovation and fresh ideas/concepts to revitalise Star Wars based games.
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Bioware and Obsidian have shown that outsourcing SW games can have interesting results. It can hardly be worse than anything Lucasarts could have achieved in its current state anyway. We'll have to wait and see how this develops.
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still want my battlefront 3
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still want my battlefront 3
Me too. I think that got scrubbed anyway, so this isn't going to negatively impact the chances of getting one.
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I was looking forward to the space sim they were supposed to develop. Damn it.
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I'm pretty sure they said that they were planning to do this, months ago.
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still want my battlefront 3
Pretty much this
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I'm actually not disappointed LA disappeared. I felt much of their products have declined to a state where they really weren't worth half-a-damn, which is a shame.
...Does anyone know what the rights are with respect to LA intellectual property? I assume it now simply belongs to Disney, though one may be hoping for glorious abandonware.
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They didn't kill LucasArts, they took it to the vet and had it put down. Now we can enjoy our wonderful memories of playing with it in the park without it constantly whining in pain, throwing up on the carpet and occasionally....WHAT THE **** IS THAT SMELL!
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(http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hIy7u3cqpnA/T2-acuI64SI/AAAAAAAAAYg/zCnAA9CZ9bo/s1600/Yeller3.jpg)
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I was going to make that comparison but I don't think enough people have watched Old Yeller. :p
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It's defs vintage :P
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I just hope Koch Media puts out the winning bid for a new X-Wing game and they hand the reins off to Volition. :D
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I just hope Koch Media puts out the winning bid for a new X-Wing game and they hand the reins off to Volition. :D
Ha ha, that would be awesome!
I was going to make that comparison but I don't think enough people have watched Old Yeller. :p
I never have, but I still got the reference. I even knew exactly where that still was from, despite never having seen it. Though to be fair, I do live in the US.
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I just hope Koch Media puts out the winning bid for a new X-Wing game and they hand the reins off to Volition. :D
I don't think Volition is currently in a state where they would be able to do a good space sim. There's noone left from the FS crew. I'd rather if someone fails a new X-Wing, it not be a company I love :/
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I just hope Koch Media puts out the winning bid for a new X-Wing game and they hand the reins off to Volition. :D
I don't think Volition is currently in a state where they would be able to do a good space sim. There's noone left from the FS crew. I'd rather if someone fails a new X-Wing, it not be a company I love :/
The most important part of making FreeSpace 2 awesome is still there!
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Raven has released the source code to Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy: http://kotaku.com/lucasarts-closure-convinces-developers-to-release-awes-468994505
We need to get Totally Games to do the same with the X-Wing games.
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Oh wow. Source code to Jedi Academy. That game was a huge part of my life for years!
*Downloads.*
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Man, this brings me back.
And that's the point. The fact that it "brings me back" tells me this company hasn't been doing anything remotely interesting for the past years.
So the canning is welcome.
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Raven has released the source code to Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy: http://kotaku.com/lucasarts-closure-convinces-developers-to-release-awes-468994505
So that's like the bit where we find out Old Yeller had puppies then. :p
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someone psoted this:
I think people jumping on the "who cares, they haven't made a decent game in the last decade/this isn't news" are missing the point: the end of Lucasarts means a definitive end to an era. It's that sense of finality, that the company which brought us some incredible games, is finally gone. Functionally it had been over for a long time, certainly since the development staff were culled, but that doesn't mean such a concrete action as this isn't pretty significant. It would be like complaining a celebrity on life support died after several months "not being news" because they might as well have been dead.
I agree....
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It would be like complaining a celebrity on life support died after several months "not being news" because they might as well have been dead.
... it would indeed not be news, so I don't see what is actually your point here ?
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I think people jumping on the "who cares, they haven't made a decent game in the last decade/this isn't news" are missing the point: the end of Lucasarts means a definitive end to an era. It's that sense of finality, that the company which brought us some incredible games, is finally gone. Functionally it had been over for a long time, certainly since the development staff were culled, but that doesn't mean such a concrete action as this isn't pretty significant.
I agree....
Seconded, it's a very good point. It doesn't matter whether or not LucasArts hasn't achieved anything in the past few years; it's still the end of an era.
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it's still the end of an era.
The era was over when they released X-Wing Alliance. Pretending that the time after that point really counts as part of "the era of Lucasarts" is just insulting the memory of what the company once was.
The end of the company cannot signify the end of their era unless they went out in the fashion that they came in. Plenty of people have had their eras end before they themselves.
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They didn't kill LucasArts, they took it to the vet and had it put down. Now we can enjoy our wonderful memories of playing with it in the park without it constantly whining in pain, throwing up on the carpet and occasionally....WHAT THE **** IS THAT SMELL!
Pretty much this.
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I was going to make that comparison but I don't think enough people have watched Old Yeller. :p
Is HLPs general audience really that young? That movie is a classic. So's the book.
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Young, or not that much into american pop culture from ages ago (I am able to infer what old yeller was from context. I have no inclination to ever learn more about it).
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Young, or not that much into american pop culture from ages ago (I am able to infer what old yeller was from context. I have no inclination to ever learn more about it).
You're currently reinforcing a particular stereotype about Germans, E :P
To be fair to you, Old Yeller may be a classic but it isn't particularly well-written or profound.
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Sad news :(
To be fair, LucasArts has been a shadow of its former self for a long time, but I was hoping it'd last long enough for the old-timers still working for them to retire or jump ship; Don't know how many of them have.
I don't mean people like Schafer, Gilbert, Grossman and Holland who we know made it out and formed their own companies, but the more behind-the-scenes guys like Chip Hinnenberg, Brett Tosti, Justin Chin, Peter Chan and Jo Ashburn or near-legendary sound and music guys Michael Land, Clint Bajakian and Peter McConnell and voice actors like Danny Delk (aka. Darth Vader and Murrey the Evil Skull :D).
I still have e-mails from people like Tabitha Tosti when I was trying to sort out problems with the awesome but buggy game that was XvT. An e-mail from someone whose name appears in the credits! How often does that happen?
Heck, I can't remember the last time I had a real support person working for an actual company helping me over e-mail; You wouldn't get that these days!
LEC is one of the few companies that I remember names of the people that made the games from; I guess I built up a bit more of an emotional tie to LucasArts.
It sucked watching their decline; The last good game I think I played from them were the last few Jedi Knight games, and also Republic Commando (Although technically they're Raven games), but their best games were always the non-SW stuff.
Telltale does a good job of continuing the legacy of the point and click stuff but is a bit hit-and-miss. The Wallace and Gromit game felt really half-assed and the 3rd series of the Sam and Max has been a fairly half-hearted slog for me (The writing needs work and the voice actor for Sam BADLY needs to be changed or fixed), but on the other hand the Tales of Monkey Island and Back to the Future games are excellent and need to be played! (Do eeet, doit nao!)
Double Fine games have that classic problem where the games should be awesome but are let down by one game-killing flaw; Psychonauts and especially Brutal Legend are good examples of this. Brutal Legend in particular pissed me off; It starts off perfectly but then the game turns into what amounts to a **** RTS which basically ruins it. If they can get the licence for Battle Zone, those ideas could work, but it doesn't fit an adventure game! The more recent game which is sortof a Lost Vikings-esque game has great ideas but doesn't feel fleshed out. Admittedly I've only played the demo, but it's not doing anything for me.
The closure feels unworthily anticlimactic to me; Not with a bang but with a whimper as the cliché goes. It almost feels like there should have been some sort of ceremony! Whatever anyone says, this marks the end of an era in gaming history for me.
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I picked up Jedi Outcast on the holiday steam sale and really enjoyed it, so maybe something good will come of the source code release.
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To be honest, it could go either way, whilst the name LucasArts used to be synonymous with the X-Wing or Tie-Fighter series, they sort of lost the plot over the years, clutching at some very dubious straws to maintain a franchise that was practically designed to be turned into computer games, though not a MMO, I might add, that was a bad idea, most of the Star Wars Universe exists to be terrorised, saved or killed by the few.
Outsourcing the Franchise is a two-edged sword, it depends on who gets those rights, but it could be a very positive thing in the long run.
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They didn't kill LucasArts, they took it to the vet and had it put down. Now we can enjoy our wonderful memories of playing with it in the park without it constantly whining in pain, throwing up on the carpet and occasionally....WHAT THE **** IS THAT SMELL!
I imagined this being said in Will Smith's voice.