Star Wars 1313 Message Board

It has jump zooms, the Inception noise, a squeaky pulsing noise to denote horror and excitement, then an uncomfortably long sequence where nothing is on screen. Welcome to the trailer to end all trailers, a new look at the gritty shooter Star Wars 1313 that just strutted out of Trailer University waving a degree over its head. It’s keen to show you all the trailery tricks it learned in as short a space of time as possible. All it’s really missing is a voice over from That Guy and it’d be complete.(more…)

While he’s most known for the rightfully divisive Far Cry 2 (me, I’m glad it exists but never, ever want to play it again), Clint Hocking is a fascinating games-brain whose trajectory is well worth following. Not purely because he played a big role in the first three Splinter Cells, but also because interviews and talks suggest a restless, ambitious mind that seems taken up with the sort of emergent, open world, experimental experiences we generally crave here on RPS. So, while a bit odd, the news two years back that he was joining LucasArts was rather exciting. With Georgey-porgey’s bunch having lately dropped any number of balls both in terms of Star Wars and, well, anything else, Hocking’s presence was surely just what this hobbled giant needed. Only now he’s bally left without any projects coming to light.(more…)

When Star Wars 1313 was announced just prior to E3, I’d been crossing my fingers Far Cry 2 designer Clint Hocking’s name would be attached to it. That never happened, and now Hocking’s revealed he’s no longer with LucasArts.

“I recently left my job at LucasArts and am moving on to something new,” he revealed on his blog. “Unlike last time, (and mercifully less wordy) I already have something lined up and I am currently in the process of dealing with the living hell of relocation.”

It’s never been clear what Hocking was working on at LucasArts. The systems-loving designer seemed an odd fit for LucasArts in the first place, but hopefully it won’t be long until we hear from him.

“I will let the world know where I am going once I get there,” he said. “Unless you already know.”

Someone want to tell me?

First it was trendy to malign this year's E3 for being too big, too out of touch, too gauche, or too boring. Then maligning the people doing the maligning became the thing to do. I suspect we'll be yelling at the people who are yelling at the people who are yelling about E3 soon enough, but before this snake of negativity begins to eat a second tail it didn't even know existed, let's cut through all the nonsense and admit that whatever issues the video game industry and the expo itself may have, there were more than enough games to get excited about scattered around the show floor.

The two most memorable moments of E3 actually happened back-to-back for me on the afternoon of the first day, when I first got to talk to John Carmack about his homemade head-tracking VR unit, and then get a look at the absurdly gorgeous Star Wars 1313 demo. But we've covered those things plenty, so let's move on to a handful of the other stuff that I thought was most impressive at the show.

I grouped these together because they're the two PSN indies I had a chance to spend some real time with, but also because they exemplify how well Sony is approaching and supporting small games and small developers lately. I've heard over and over how easy Sony makes it for indie studios to get onto the platform, and both of these games seem to show off what a small group of people can create when they've got the support and confidence of the platform-holder.

You can't really get smaller than a team of one guy, Shawn McGrath, who's making Dyad. The game made a big splash back at GDC, and now having played it myself I can easily see why. It basically does for Tempest what Geometry Wars did for Asteroids, bringing the tube-racing format into high definition with a pounding, adaptive soundtrack and lots of neon lights. More importantly, the basic rules of the game never seem to stop evolving, so the mechanics you rely on in one level may have flipped upside down or completely given way to some other objective a couple of levels later. McGrath said that nonstop reinvention continues right up to the end of the several dozen levels in the game. Sounds like fun to me.

The Unfinished Swan is also coming from a small team, but one that's had the benefit of literally setting up shop inside Sony's famed Santa Monica Studio. Five minutes with the game made it clear this is going to have the same appeal as Journey, with its dreamlike emphasis on exploring an environment at your own pace. There's a storyline, but it seems like you're only going to see as much of it--and indeed as much of the world that contains it--as you're interested in revealing for yourself. The stark, minimalist art style is really joyous to see; I can't wait to see more of it.

The idea of being able to import commodities like electricity from your neighbor's city is enough to get me interested in playing a new SimCity. It's such a sensible and thematically appropriate way to incorporate multiplayer into the game, beyond some really basic sort of "check out the layouts of all your friends' cities!" functionality. But the thing that really impressed me about SimCity when I sat down for a 15-minute demo was just how elegantly put-together everything seems to be.

The interface looks like it will be a beautiful exercise in minimalism. All of the controls I saw were arranged along the bottom of the screen in a tidy little row that sort of looked like the Windows taskbar. The only interface elements I noticed that actually get in the way of your city pop up in the form of little info cards that float around near the thing they're describing, almost in an augmented-reality sort of style. Combine that with the everything-is-tiny effect of the tilt-shift photographic filter they're using, and the droll sense of humor with rockabilly criminals running around and such, and I will be very happy to waste an absurd number of hours on city planning and governance in February next year.

There's not a lot to say about this one that you can't see for yourself in the lengthy demo, especially since Ubisoft wasn't showing anything else or really revealing any other information afterward. Like seemingly everyone else, I'm excited about Watch Dogs purely for the reason that it's something other than a sequel. But beyond that, the information-warfare aspect looks both really entertaining from a gameplay standpoint and also distressingly prescient as we barrel into the over-connected digital future. Though, the part in the demo where Watch Dogs went from imaginative cybercrime stealth game to standard-fare third-person shooter is where the game lost me a bit, but I'm remaining hopeful that slow-motion shootouts will be only one of multiple ways to address your objectives. I'd rather hack into power grids and disrupt communications from the shadows to get my dirty work done. With all the nifty high-tech tools at your disposal, it would be shame if you're railroaded into blowing a bunch of guys away every 30 minutes.

All that stuff would be reason enough to keep an eye on Watch Dogs, but that little tease at the end of the demo implying some kind of dynamic cat-and-mouse multiplayer makes this seem like it could be one of the most exciting new properties to come along in quite a while. We need to see a lot more of this game to be sure it works as advertised, but what's out there now sure is promising.

Even if this game looked like poop, it'd deserve a mention here just for the 90 seconds Trey Parker and Matt Stone spent rescuing Microsoft's press conference from the robotic executive doldrums that were dragging it down. But considering how deeply involved those guys are in the actual writing and production of the game itself, is it any wonder this thing actually looks completely fantastic? OK, so it's probably not the toughest feat to nail the dinky construction-paper aesthetic of the TV show, but still, they did it. Most importantly, the trailer seems to show off exactly the right mix of subversive and ludicrous humor that's kept South Park going on television for what, 15 years? It's mindboggling that the show is still even remotely good or relevant, but it is, and if you combine those sensibilities with the spot-on presentation of the show and what sounds like some well considered RPG mechanics, The Stick of Truth honestly sounds like it could be the video game South Park has deserved since its very beginning.

The Sony press conference demo was merely OK, with its focus on killing everyone in your way as brutally as possible, but it was the much longer, closed-door demo I got to see with Patrick and Alex that convinced me The Last of Us is going to be something special. For me, step one of establishing that I really want to play this game was confirming that no, you don't have to shoot every bad guy you encounter in the face with a shotgun. In fact, you don't have to shoot them at all, or even engage with them in any way; sneaking around roving groups of enemies will be a perfectly acceptable way to deal with them. The unexpected step two for me came in the realization that while you may elect to play The Last of Us as a pacifist out of moral responsibility, you'll be making a very real mechanical sacrifice to do so. Those bandits may be carrying some very precious supplies that you won't get access to if you don't take them forcefully, and what's more, those guys are scrounging the area for the same found items you are. So if there are bandages or bullets in a drawer somewhere and they get to that drawer first because you were busy hiding in a closet waiting for them to pass, you've lost your chance at getting those items. It sounds like a game that will ask you to make a lot of tough decisions on your feet, and that's more interesting than gunning down hundreds of thugs could ever be.

However underwhelming or one-note this year's press conferences were, however offputting the treatment of certain show staffers was, however repetitive and unimaginative the product cycle may be getting this late in the hardware cycle, at least there were still more individual great-looking games to see than one person could reasonably have time for. Top of my list of games I'm sorry I missed, there's XCOM: Enemy Unknown, The Cave, and Far Cry 3. And plenty of neat stuff barely missed making this list, like Pikmin 3, Halo 4, and Assassin's Creed III (which I didn't even bother to go look at, because, come on, who's not going to play that?).

There's talk that E3 may move cities next year, if Los Angeles goes ahead with its plans for more downtown stadium development. In light of all the criticisms about how this year's show played out, maybe a change of venue is just what E3 needs. What could make for a bigger shakeup than literally picking up and moving to a new stage? Wherever E3 ends up next year, and whatever wild hardware shows up there, I'm at least confident coming out of this year's show that we'll have plenty to play and talk about until then.

The game that seems to be getting the most buzz here at E3 all of a sudden is Star Wars 1313, and there's a good reason it's grabbing a bunch of headlines: it looks absolutely goddamn amazing. I'm not blowing hyperbolic smoke, just making a quantitative statement about the kind of raw visual fidelity LucasArts is achieving by adapting a bunch of Industrial Light and Magic's film-industry rendering techniques and throwing them at the best PC hardware you can get right now. Lucas is being all cagey about when this game is coming out and what platforms it will actually sell on, but it's obvious that the demo on display at the show is targeted at machines a hell of a lot more powerful than the ones in your home right now.

Reading a lot of effusive language about nice video game graphics is kind of boring, right? Instead, here's a pretty good cross-section of the demo being shown at E3 so you can just get an idea for yourself how good the game looks. The craziest part about this footage is how much detail you can't see simply due to the compression in the video. Seeing this thing running in person, the natural look of the lighting, character skin and so on is pushing the graphical quality near the level of photorealism. It's absolutely something else to see when the camera goes in close and you can barely tell that the guy you're looking at is a video game character. (That has as much to do with the advanced performance capture LucasArts is doing in collaboration with ILM as it does with advanced pixel shaders and camera effects.)

Actually, forget the graphics. There's other stuff about 1313 to get excited about, primarily the fact that everything about its aesthetic and tone made it feel like the prequel trilogy doesn't exist, and that this is based directly on the original movies. It reminded me of that wonderful heyday of Star Wars PC games in the '90s that included stuff like X-Wing, TIE Fighter, and Dark Forces, purely due to things like classic-looking costume and spaceship design, and the focus on telling a unique story with new characters in some unknown corner of the Star Wars universe (in this case, the seedy criminal underworld of the city-planet Coruscant). The people making this game want to steep it in a moral grey area, rather than the black and white morality that goes along with the jedi in the movies. Come to think of it, the phrase "no jedi, no Force" was used in the demo I saw, and I'm perfectly fine with that. It's time for something else. Something with more blasters and more attitude!

The playable demo of 1313 being shown here paints the game as Star Wars Uncharted, split as it is between cover-based third-person shooting against mercenaries boarding the player character's ship, and the sort of superhuman climbing and gymnastics that you see Nathan Drake engaging in on a regular basis. That might sound more reductive than it should--I'd be perfectly happy to play a well executed game like that, if the story is on point. Though, I do hope the full game has some more potential for exploration at some point.

In any case, LucasArts really stepped it up at what's honestly been a bland E3 overall, coming in with a demo that's extremely impressive largely because it's utterly different in at least one respect from everything else at the show. It's a tantalizing glimpse at what the next generation of hardware might offer, and it makes me hopeful that there might once again be a Star Wars game worth getting legitimately excited about in the not-so-faraway future.