I say its about time that LucasArts went looking to the outside for help. After "Battle for Naboo", "Epi.1 TPM", and other obcenely bad games, it'd good to hear that they're licensing out the Star Wars title to the likes of Raven Software and Wizards of the Coast. Is it in time though?
Battle of Naboo is a big disappointment. But tpm? It's not the game designers fault. It was just that tpm made a bad video game.
How can you say that? The developers could have turned TPM into a good game. A bad movie doesn't make a bad game. A good movie doesn't make a good game either. GoldenEye, for example, was a sub-par Bond movie, but it became the best console fighter for a looong time.
LucasArts in the past two years has been having trouble. Most of their old programmers and designers left. They lost a lot of talent and experience. A big problem was churning out a ton of Episode 1 games. Combined with absolutely no communication with its fans, LucasArts was begging for trouble.
But I think they're on the right track now.
I agree that they seem to be on the right track now. They are hosting webchats with developers and welcoming feedback but most importantly the have aligned themselves with the experts in each particular genre to produce the latest games. Why compete with Age of Emipires, Quake III etc when you can build on them with the SW licience?
And, Battle For Naboo was developed in cooperation with a 3rd party, Factor 5.
Although it's great to see LEC branching out to third party developers, and loosening the reigns a bit on information flow!
I agree with OnlyOneCanoli. LEC barely communicates with fans at all. In the most recent LEC chat with Haden Christiansen he said that he visits JK.N and Massassi every day, and yet he never posts in any forums or sends any e-mails complimenting on the good work. He said the same about other LEC members. I don't quite understand it, but I guess it's their choice.
That might be a company policy thing.. They might be permitted to observe but not directly talk to them.
Like feeding the animals in the zoo. ;)
However, raven seem to be different
wardz
LEC employees have a strict non-disclosure agreement. If they were to go to message boards and post regularly, the questions would start rolling in. So to avoid that kind of situation, they just avoid showing themselves in the first place. That's my guess, anyway.
But official chat events and *gasp* message boards at LEC sites don't hurt.
I suppose if LEC had a forum entitled "Suggestions" their server would crash.
It would have to be heavily moderated. ;)
I also think LEC is on the right track. They may not post regularly on forums, but at least they have been reading those forums, and for the most part, taking on board some of our opinions. It makes perfect business sense to do so, too, because then they can find out what they did right, and what they did wrong, and try to improve on things in the future.
They also said in the chat log that they are not ruling out doing more games in the Dark Forces series.
As for NDAs, I think they are perfectly reasonable, and help to safeguard current projects.
I'm glad to see LEC working in partnership with other developers in order to make the games we really want.
Thanks LEC! Keep up the good work! ;)
LEC are amazing.....they finally worked out thaty their no good......and so got RAVEN on the case.....WELL DONE i reckon! :)
They were great a few years ago, lets hope they get back to that quality with the line up of third party developed games they have.
It was known that they read the forums, and they may be changing their NDA gradually, or at lest they let the Raven guys post in our forums, and that is a very good thing
Their homepage has changed a lot in the last months, but we are still far away from official forums there(specially after they got scared because of some death menaces ;))
I think they are talking over with the owners of the LG network so this sites and forums become a source of communication between the fans and LEC
Of course this is just something elusive I sense
I think they're getting back on track. Hopefully, Battlegrounds and Outcast will confirm this for us, but personally I suspect that the decision to surrender control to 3rd party developers was 90% of the battle.
There were posts in another thread that suggests we don't refer uo JK2 as outcast. There is another game by that name.
But on a forum dedicated to Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, I think any risk of ambiguity is minimal.
they just did select a very good developer this time, and i never saw a bad raven game before!
star trek had a lot, i mean A LOT of crappy games through interplay... (thats why i dont buy ST games) but raven's ST:voyager is sooo cool that i managed to get one myself! :)
heheh all i see is a one really cool JK game here! :)