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Edited by Recon Number 54: 4/11/2013 3:59:59 PM
7

Disney killed Battlefront 3

NOTE: there's nothing wrong with your speakers; the video has no sound. [url=http://kotaku.com/the-last-months-of-lucasarts-472038151]The game had significant progress, and mother-blam!-ing Disney killed it:[/url][quote]In November, just after purchasing LucasFilm, Disney CEO Bob Iger held a company-wide meeting. During the meeting, according to a source in attendance, a few people asked what was going on. What was going to happen to them? What was the future of LucasArts, the LucasFilm subsidiary and 30-year-old video game studio responsible for a number of beloved games? “It’s business as usual,” Iger answered, according to our source. Disney Shuts Down LucasArts, Cancels Star Wars 1313 And Star Wars: First Assault Disney has laid off the staff of LucasArts and cancelled all current projects.Read… Six months later, Disney shut down LucasArts. All games in production were cancelled. Business as usual. *** In late 2011, then-LucasArts president Paul Meegan told the website MCV that he had overhauled the studio's teams and started production on a number of different games. “We should be making games that define our medium, that are competitive with the best of our industry, but we’re not. That has to change,” he said. “Star Wars lends itself to all kinds of games – connecting players and giving them deeper experiences. Stay tuned.” When Meegan made those proclamations, LucasArts was working on a number of different games, multiple sources have confirmed to Kotaku. One of those games was Star Wars 1313. Another was Star Wars: First Assault. And then there were others, like Outpost, a social game that was to be the Star Wars version of FarmVille. There was an iOS game, and a project headed up by well-respected Splinter Cell designer Clint Hocking. In the coming months, every single one of these games would be cancelled or overhauled. Star Wars 1313 shifted directions multiple times, while First Assault was scaled down significantly. Outpost and the iOS game were axed. Hocking left the company, and Meegan would go on to leave too. Still, LucasArts intended to announce Star Wars: First Assault as an XBLA title in late September of 2012. They planned to release the game this spring. But hours before the scheduled announcement, word came down that it was on hold. “We just got the worst case of blue balls,” said a source. “We had no idea what was going on.” A couple months later, Disney announced that they had purchased LucasFilm and all of its subsidiaries, including LucasArts. That's when staff started to worry about their future there. "Everything Disney would tell us would be, 'business as usual, business as usual,'" a source said. "We lost any transparency we had to the executive level." We reached out to Disney and LucasFilm this morning, but they declined to comment for this story. In the coming months, up until just a couple of weeks ago, LucasArts staff were working on three projects: Star Wars: First Assault, Star Wars 1313, and a smaller project internally referred to as “Version Two,” according to two sources familiar with the situation.[/quote][quote]In the video, you can see all sorts of vehicle combat: the player, looking from a first-person perspective, zips around in X-Wings and AT-AT Walkers while shooting down TIE Fighters and other Star Wars-y vehicles. The art isn't final, but the combat looks very cool: one section, for example, shows multiple players riding on hoverbikes and shooting lasers at everything in their paths. First Assault, as we reported a few weeks ago, didn't have any vehicles. Version Two did. This is because, according to multiple sources, developers at LucasArts planned to turn Version Two into Star Wars: Battlefront III, the highly-anticipated third game in the Battlefront shooter series that has shuffled from developer to developer over the past few years. This time, LucasArts hoped to make it themselves. “[There’s] a very vocal audience that's clamoring for Battlefront III,” said a source. “We were hoping to eventually give it to them.”[/quote][quote]Last week, Disney shut down LucasArts. Although LucasFilm says they could license out games like Star Wars 1313 or First Assault to be finished by other developers, I’ve talked to three sources who don’t think that’s likely.[/quote]

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