Another LucasArts President steps down
http://uk.ign.com/articles/2012/08/02/lucasarts-president-steps-down-2
Hope restored?
LucasArts has just announced that President Paul Meegan has decided to step down from his position at the company. Mich Chau, President and Chief Operating Officer for Lucasfilm had the following to say:
Paul has been a valuable member of the Lucasfilm leadership team and we wish him the best in his future endeavors. We remain committed to our current projects and will be re-evaluating LucasArts’ leadership needs to ensure that we make the right decisions to keep the studio focused.
Hope restored?
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"Look behind you, a three-headed wookiee" just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Transfer your hope and expectations elsewhere.
Terminal Reality did Kinect Star Wars and Zynga did Indiana Jones Adventure World.
Though, that probably goes through the Lucasfilm licensing department rather than LucasArts.
Well there was that one guy who greenlit the Monkey Island Special Editions AND Tales. Even though he was forced to(?) step down shortly afterward.
Darrell Rodriguez, our last hope, we got Monkey Island Special Editions, Tales and Lucidity on Xbox Live, which has brilliant design, just needed a bit of extra work on the execution.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wagkBedzwI8
That's all we wanted in the first place. The Monkey Island license lent to Telltale once again (and Telltale hopefully dropping all that Fables/King's Quest/Walking Dead BS immediately for this
As for anything else that may come from a new LA president, I'm OK with it and actually rather optimistic. LucasArts can't do worse than in the last years. Whatever new idea might strike the successor, I'll take a good look at it before I might dismiss it.
Good god, man, haven't you watched any films at all? That's the second WORST thing to say, right after "nothing can possibly go wrong" and right before "there's no turning back now"!
Now, this president will probably go and resurrect all our favorite series and kill off all the characters just to ensure that no more games that aren't Star Wars will ever be made. And then will declare the KOTOR continuity null and void and destroy all evidence before making another Force: Unleashed game.
Actually, it will probably be worse than that. I'm not very good at worst case scenarios.
Hey, at least we'd have closure!
I did say I'm not good at worst case scenarios. Maybe they'd just renew all the licenses and then put them in an old warehouse to gather dust.
May he be even more ineffectually evil! HAHA!
If they revive all the old franchises and horribly mess them up (or cease production in the middle of the process), at least they tried. Which I've been told is better than doing nothing.
Everytime Lucasarts even DOES something new with an adventure game franchise, something bad always happens. They either get canceled or the process of the development stops in the middle of production. Do I really need to explain what happened with Grim Fandango 2, Full Throttle: Payback, and Sam and Max Freelance Police?
1. Bring back Battlefront 3
2. Licence another Tales series with Telltale
3. Do NOTHING else. Literally nothing. Anything else they will do they will likely screw up and make everyone hate them even more.
See its easy. (I should be the new president! XD)
Before LA can grow as a game maker again, I would expect they'll have to spread a lot of shit first. But they were lacking even this apart from their recent Mass Effect cloning efforts.
No, honestly, go LucasArts. We might laugh about those efforts for another decade still, but EFFORT is the key phrase here. "Lend out Star Wars license and get 30% off the top" is not a business model that even needs a company name.
They need to revive their adventure department and keep creating new games outside the Star Wars franchise.
That's probably never going to happen. The best we can hope for is that the new guy will strike up a deal with GOG to get some of their game archives back in circulation.
There's always Steam though. It would be nice to have more classic LucasArts games available than the handful that are there now.
When Loom, The Dig, and Indiana Jones popped up on Steam, it looked like they were gearing up to re-release their old adventure catalog (Save for MI1 and MI2, since they'd most likely want to push copies of the SE versions), but then they just... stopped. They could be waiting for 20th anniversaries to try to sell more titles, or perhaps they just decided that they'd rather sit on them some more. It's hard to tell with LucasArts.
I think we can safely blame Paul Meegan for that. It sounds like every new president kills the pet projects of the last president.
The thing is, it didn't work. Things are much worse off now than they were in the early 2000's when Jim Ward changed everything. They only publish two games a year, and rarely make any internally developed titles. On top of that, they spend millions of dollars licensing technology for their internal development (Euphoria, Unreal Engine 3), but with so little being done internally there's no way they aren't hemorrhaging money.
Someone needs to come in and assess the situation like Jim Ward did, but come to a different conclusion. The licensing of Star Wars and Indiana Jones comes from Lucasfilm licensing, so LucasArts isn't useful for that. As a publisher, LucasArts isn't too useful either. There's no reason Lucasfilm can't just turn LucasArts into a mere label and publish Star Wars games themselves. If they want to continue being a developer, they really need to look back at worked for the golden age LucasArts/Lucasfilm Games, mainly keeping the film and game division separate entities. Having LucasArts work as a shovelware developer for Lucasfilm just isn't working out for them.
I'd say their heyday was before Battlefront – they started going downhill in my eyes after the releases of Grim Fandango and X Wing Alliance and while Escape from Monkey Island is derided a bit by fans, I thought it still had some pretty funny bits in it.
A revival is pretty much impossible – at the end of the day they’re a business that needs to make money and Star Wars is a licence to print money. The one hope for classic series like Monkey Island are the likes of Telltale being given the licence, which seems like a no-brainer to me. Why be so precious about holding onto them if you’ve got talented developers ready to use them and earn you a commission? That said, there have been rumours of a new entry to the X Wing series which excites me as they are amongst my favourite games ever, but I’m also pretty confident that it wouldn’t be faithful to the originals in terms of gameplay and would take place in the awful prequel timeline (or at best between III & IV). I’m old-school and think Star Wars was pretty much ruined by the new films and a lot of the extended Universe.
One thought I’ve had though is, surely there’s enough of a market out there for adventure games to make it a worthwhile pursuit for someone, and with todays technology I’d imagine that doing a quality 2D adventure game would be quick and cheap. You see single people do great things using Flash, so imagine what a team of a dozen or so could do? I may not be alone in thinking that The Curse of Monkey Island was the best looking of that series, in many ways even more so than Tales, and that’s got to be 15 years old! I’m hardly an expert in how games are made, but if you had a collection of artists design the backgrounds you’re halfway there aren’t you? No messing about designing 3D models, just a palette drawing straight into the computer...
As well as that, as much as we’d all like to see new sequels to classic games, don’t underestimate how much you may love a whole new project. Grim Fandango was a one off but is considered one of the best Adventure games ever (not necessarily the best example, given it was a commercial flop!). The original Broken Sword is still earning Revolution money by selling it on the app store, so it shows there’s a market for them.
Specifically, I most enjoy the prequel fan edits by L8wrtr.
Personally, I think his The Republic Divided fan edit is the best of the three, even though Revenge of the Sith is better than Attack of the Clones.
You and me both, dude. I'd like to see what TTG was up to considering how they ended ToMI.
However, right out of the box I will tell you that L8wrtr has points over Phantom Editor by naming it Shadow of the Sith instead of The Phantom Edit; and for having a prologue-style opening crawl instead of notes from the editor. (Incidentally, there are notes from the editor, but they are in a special feature).
EDIT: I'm not going to bother with Attack of the Phantom. First, it's a dumb name. Second, L8wrtr's The Republic Divided is fantastic, so there's no need.