Rumormill – Force Unleashed 3 Cancelled and Staff Axed

Sources suggest that after just two months in the job, new LucasArts boss Paul Meegan is making some pretty big changes to the studio.

Rumors are circulating that new LucasArts President Paul Meegan has cancelled development on the third installment of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and will be letting several members of the development team go when Force Unleashed 2 launches in October. A second, unnamed project has reportedly been put on hold, pending changes in management and reportedly following the departure of Haden Blackman last month.

Finally, outside development on LucasArts-owned brands is said to be coming to an end, with BioWare’s The Old Republic MMOG being the last game to not be made internally. This would mean no more LEGO Star Wars or Indiana Jones games, and no more episodes of Tales of Monkey Island as these have been handled by Traveller’s Tales and Telltale Games respectively. Sources suggest that morale at LucasArts has hit an all-time low under Meegan’s leadership, and that there are significant problems with communication. Apparently, many people only found out about the cancellation of Force Unleashed 2 on the PSP by reading about it on gaming news sites.

If the rumors are true, then LucasArts will presumably be focusing on internal development, but if that’s the case, then letting staff go doesn’t seem to make sense. It’s possible that Meegan wants to release a smaller number of titles each year however, which theoretically would need fewer staff. Speculation aside, if any LucasArts staff are about to lose their jobs, we hope they land on their feet.

Star Wars: Force Unleashed 2 pre-orders get Maulkiller

Eager beavers who pre-order Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II in the US will snag themselves a sweet new character skin, named Maulkiller, and a Lightsaber Crystal for enhanced Force abilities.

Maulkiller, according to the GameStop post (via 1UP), is a super-powerful clone hybrid created by Darth Vader from the combined genetic material of Darth Maul and (star of the game) Starkiller.

Apparently: “The resulting aberrant clone possessed traits from both warriors, but the crude fusion of two disparate Force users quickly produced physical and mental instabilities that led to the unfortunate clone’s destruction. For a brief time he struck fear into the hearts of all who faced him, even Lord Vader himself.”

Looks frickin sweet though, and the accompanying Lightsaber crystal you get in the deal turns his dual ‘Sabers silver and uses up less Force Energy meaning he can bust out those crazy Force skills for longer before needing a breather.

The deal is exclusive to GameStop in US and currently no plans have been announced for a UK deal.

Teaser Cinematic of Boba Fett in Force Unleashed 2 Unleashed Released..

Last week at ComicCon, LucasArts revealed that Boba Fett would be taking his backpack with jets to the consoles again and play a role in the upcoming Force Unleashed 2- much the the joy of pretty much everyone everywhere ever. Now those of us who weren’t lucky enough to get our pale, scrawny bodies through the doors of ComicCon this year can gaze our unwashed eyes upon the glory of the galaxy’s best bounty hunter (as long as we ignore all the times he fails) in next-gen form.

While his full role has yet to be defined, the game doesn’t come out until October 26th so LucasArts wouldn’t want to shoot their promotional laser off so early, it is still quite exciting to see. I enjoyed the first game, although felt it was a bit underwhelming, but I am certainly excited about being stalked through the universe by Boba Fett himself- and stalked I shall be, as the one thing that has been revealed is that Fett has taken on a very important bounty at the behest of Darth Vader. One that will most likely lead him to some direct, and hopefully plot relevant instead of just crowbarred in, contact with Starkiller and his midichlorians.

If I had to bet on how that will go, I would put a few hundred credits on “something is getting blown up with the Force” instead of my usual bet against the Knicks.

LucasArts says: ‘We’re trying to reinvent Star Wars’

The original Force Unleashed was the fastest selling Star Wars game ever, shifting seven million copies. But can the sequel finally provide the deep Jedi combat experience that its predecessor promised?

The original Force Unleashed represented what a lot of gamers have always wanted from a Star Wars game – a big, burly Jedi fest with megaton Force powers and a rip-roaring story of rage and betrayal. The first game to be based in the period between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, it centred on Starkiller, a young warrior recruited by Vader as a secret apprentice. When sent out to spy on the burgeoning rebel alliance, the brooding anti-hero gradually comes to sympathise with their viewpoint.

Although criticised in the gaming press for its one dimensional hack-n-slash gameplay, the mix of relentless third-person lightsaber battling with a twisting plot (which nicely explained the origins of the original Star Wars trilogy) brought in sales of 7m copies and a host of awards. A sequel was inevitable, but there was always going to be one problem: at the end of the original game, Starkiller is killed saving the rebel leaders. Though, of course, in the Star Wars universe, problems like this are never impossible to address…

“When we started Force Unleashed 2, we kicked around some ideas,” explains the game’s executive producer and lead writer, Haden Blackman. “We considered starting with a new character or going to a different time period, or even doing some weird thing where we start from the ‘evil’ ending of Force Unleashed 1, which actually then became the basis for a couple of our DLC levels.

“But ultimately we kept saying that Starkiller was a character we’d invested a lot of time into. I enjoyed writing for that character, we enjoyed working with Sam Witwer, the actor who portrayed him, and we thought there was still room to tell stories with him. It wasn’t a huge debate – once we’d put the idea forward everyone got behind it.”

So at the opening of the sequel, Vader seems to have a clone of Starkiller locked up in a holding cell on Kamino, the water planet from Attack of the Clones. When Starkiller escapes, his first thought – apart from wondering whether he actually is a clone or not – is to track down his love interest from the first game, Juno Eclipse, while rebel chief Rahm Kota wants to use him as a weapon against the Empire.

These contrasting missions see Starkiller travelling to Dagobah (where he apparently uncovers some uneasy truths about himself in the Dark Side Cave), and on to join a rebel fleet at the edge of the galaxy – just as it’s attacked by imperial bounty hunters. So, Starkiller just needs to locate Juno, save the rebellion and discover the truth about his own identity. “I was really happy with how the story turned out in Force Unleashed,” says Blackman, “But it’s a broad story in terms of the action focus. We don’t get into the heads of characters very much – apart from some new insight into Vader. I want to make this a much more personal story…”

At the heart of it all, the game engine has been upgraded, with an overhauled streaming system, as well as new lighting and physics. Like its predecessor, Force Unleashed 2 will combine three third-party physics engines, Havok, Euphoria and Digital Molecular Matter, to provide cutting edge human animation, materials effects and authentic physical forces. But this time round, the team feels it’s getting the most out of its triple engine set-up, with enemies flailing and scenic structures collapsing as you blast them with Force powers. “The biggest difference is that the team knows how to use this stuff!” jokes Blackman. “Whenever you’re building the first iteration [of a game series] and a brand new game engine at the same time, everything comes in hot and fast – we were literally figuring out how to get the most out of those three technologies all the way up to shipping. The DLC then helped us to learn more, and that knowledge has given us the biggest leap forward.”

As a writer though, it seems what Blackman is most excited about is the story behind Force Unleashed 2. During the pre-E3 hype for the game, he’s been telling reporters “this is our Empire Strikes Back”, which was always going to drum up interest. But what exactly is he getting at with this quotable soundbite? “Empire feels to me like a more personal story,” he says. “They introduce the romance between Han and Leia in a really meaningful way, and it’s a much darker story than A New Hope – so there are some of those elements that we wanted to carry over.

“But we always looked to Empire Strikes Back as our guiding star – a lot of the art direction in Force Unleashed was based on Empire. But we really made a conscious effort to say, ‘okay this is a sequel, how do we take some of the same steps forward that Empire did in terms of tone and character development?’ And to me, Empire may be the best movie of all time, so to set that as a goal was good for motivating the team!”

Like the first game, too, Force Unleashed 2 will create direct parallels with the movie saga. The original talked about the formation of the rebellion, but the sequel will move things on and explain other factors of the era immediately before A New Hope. As Blackman hints: “There are moments fans will look at it and say, ‘well I didn’t know it happened that way…’” He also mentions that several major characters from the movies will take significant roles in this game, though won’t be drawn on who. I ask about the demo, which shows the rebel forces about to be attacked by mercenaries – does this mean we can expect a certain favourite bounty hunter to appear? “You mean IG-88?” quips Blackman.

But it’s not all going to be about thrilling hardcore fans with recognisable cameos. Blackman insists that he wants Force Unleashed II to interest those who haven’t even seen the film saga. “We’re trying to re-envision and reinvent Star Wars in some ways,” he claims. “If you like the big OTT action games, I’m hoping you’ll like this one, and that the Star Wars setting is just a bonus. At the end of the day, we’re making a game not a movie. It’s the gameplay that has to really grab you.”

He also points out that there are both obsessive Star Wars fanatics and casual fans on the team, and that they have regularly looked outside of the series for inspiration: “We’re constantly referencing other movies and games when we’re trying to get a point across. We have a kind of short hand. If I say, ‘I want his reaction to be like Roy Scheider in Jaws when he fist sees the shark’ everybody knows what I’m talking about. There’s a moment we touch on in the story – this is one of my favourite moments – when Starkiller has a vision of Juno and she passes right through him and fades away. And I wanted his reaction to be reminiscent of the moment in Poltergeist, where the mother of Carol Anne, the girl who’s disappeared, feels her daughter pass through her. She closes her eyes and can smell her daughter around her. I wanted to get that same emotional punch.”

So what can we really expect from Force Unleashed 2? Demo footage from E3 suggests a strong physics system, some outlandish powers and a range of interesting destructible environments. But can the game really move us away from button mashing and toward a more refined system, like Bayonetta or Yakuza 3? We’ll need hands-on experience to gauge that.

What we do know is that, once again, there will be no multiplayer with the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 versions. Blackman says he wanted to concentrate on the single-player story, but as Red Dead Redemption has recently shown, it’s possible to have a very strong campaign-based game, but still make some room for a few offbeat online multiplayer activities. It seems that the Wii version will feature a four-player deathmatch, though, and there’s talk of a “Challenge” mode in the other versions which will feature an online leaderboard – perhaps little consolation to many gamers in this connected era.

But then, as the strongest element of the original game was its twisting cinematic narrative, there’s still going to be plenty of interest in this clearly intricately planned and crafted sequel. Blackman has been working on Star Wars games for 13 years and seems as excited by this one as anything that’s gone before. “I can’t wait to see the reaction to the ending!” he says. ” It ties directly into the saga, and to the character arcs of some of the main characters we know from the saga. I think we’ve made some bold, ballsy choices that are going to leave fans talking …”

• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II is released on DS, PC, PS3, Wii and Xbox 360 on 29 October

Spoiler Alert: Force Unleashed 2 has ‘bold’ ending

The Force Unleashed 2 has a “bold” ending that will leave fans “speculating about how the saga might continue,” says LucasArts.

Speaking to CVG, exec producer Haden Blackman claimed there are “untold stories that will unfold in TFU 2 and surprise fans” of all things Star Wars.

He said: “I think we surprised a lot of fans with that story [of the first game] because we showed the formation of the Rebel Alliance and introduce the concept of the dark secret apprentice.

“We wanted to have that some kind of impact with TFU 2 so there are meaningful ties to the saga.”

He added: “I can’t talk about details but we’ve made some really bold choices regarding the ending that are going to surprise fans and leave them speculating about how the saga might continue.”

Ooh, do you reckon the secret apprentice will be exposed as Obi Wan’s cousin’s bit on the side… or something?

In the same interview Blackman told us he’d like to see Force Unleashed characters make the transition to the small and big screen.

See the game in action via this Force Unleashed 2 trailer. It’s out on October 26.

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