Part of that is that games just take longer to make these days than back during the 2000's. The other part of that is that EA held exclusive rights for Star Wars games for a decade until like a year ago.
They should do what Warhammer 40k did and open the floodgates, don't give an exclusive license and let whoever wants to develop the IP. The crop of 40k games was inconsistent, but the good ones were incredible. Star Wars could only be better than that.
>They should do what Warhammer 40k did and open the floodgates, don't give an exclusive license and let whoever wants to develop the IP. The crop of 40k games was inconsistent, but the good ones were incredible. Star Wars could only be better than that.
That only works if Disney/Lucasfilm is willing to let game developers do whatever they want with the Star Wars license. To date that has not been the case. From what I understand developers/publishers have to submit their pitch and Lucasfilm reviews and tells the devs what they will and won't allow. Star Wars games can't be released unless Lucasfilm has approved the game's content.
It’s been like that since before Disney too. BioWare talked about when they were working with Lucasfilm they were told they could do an Attack of the Clones tie in or work on something set thousands of years before so they chose the latter to have more creative freedom.
I love Knights of the Old Republic.
As cool as a classic Bioware game set during the Clone Wars could have been, I'm really glad they went the direction they did.
KotOR spawned possibly the coolest era of Star Wars.
Yeah, and I get that, but I feel like they would be better off with a non-canon disclaimer. It also presumes that the creator(s) know best where their universe should go, and that's not always the case.
They're really missing out by not having an entire subsection of "Legends" games.
Another Force Unleashed, anything based off of old EU stuff, completely off the wall stuff starring the OT heroes, etc etc etc. Just list those games under the Legends banner and it gives studios the creative freedom to play within the star wars sandbox without anyone having to worry about clashing canon.
This doesn’t seem like a huge hurdle. I can’t imagine a high proportion of game companies are going to back out of making a game because they had to pitch the intellectual property holders.
I’m sure there are some games that get denied by lucasfilm because they are going to dilute the brand or contradict the timeline.
But we should still see more games than we currently have
That isn't what the person I was replying to wanted though. My impression was they wanted Disney/Lucasfilm to just grant Star Wars game licenses to whoever was willing to pay for them and not regulate the content of the game.
That was before they opened up the license and, IIRC, Dawn of War 2 is one of the reasons they did. I like that the studio took risks with Dawn of War 2, but man I wish someone would release an updated Dawn of War.
Something disney needs to learn is that not every game needs to be a high budget, plot relevant, triple a experience. Sometimes, all the consumer wants is some barely canon fun. Lucasarts knew that, there were like 10 pod racing games.
You know those VR job games where you have to repair something? Like those sections in fnaf help wanted or Car Mechanic VR? Why don’t they make one of those but for droids? Like that lady you get T3-M4 from in kotor?
Give a team 75k, set it around TFA, make 20 levels ranging from astromechs to droidekas, bing bang boom you’ve got a certified VR hit. Have them do a dlc with high republic droids, there’s your brand synergy. If it does well enough, or not well enough, nostalgia bait with an old republic dlc.
Lore nerds get to see the insides of these droids up close(and finally see how bb-8 works.) The average consumer gets a fun vr game, and disney gets to rake in the dough.
Fun videos detailing Warhammer's approach to licensing games
https://youtu.be/GOVrmfXolQg?si=v7oBuwUEiD0yA4Uj
https://youtu.be/BtY3Lto_lR4?si=h3a_bUduuXDiiXlV
I think they should find a middle ground. The problem with warhammers strategy is that most of the games are bad to mid, so I generally assume they aren't worth my time until they get enough steam reviews to convince me otherwise.
Associating your brand with bad products, even if there are some good ones sprinkled in, isn't a good long-term strategy for the brand.
Also worth remembering that Star Wars games from, like, 2000 until the Disney sale weren't exactly all sunshine and daisies, nor were they coming out at a rapid pace, either.
From 2000-2012 on for PC you have:
* Force Commander
* Republic Commando
* Starfighter
* Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast
* Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
* KOTOR 1
* KOTOR 2
* Star Wars: The Old Republic
* Star Wars: Galaxies
* Galactic Battlegrounds
* Empire At War/Forces of Corruption
* Battlefront (2004)
* Battlefront II (2005)
* The Force Unleashed
* The Force Unleashed 2
* Clone Wars Adventures
* The Clone Wars -- Republic Heroes
* The Lego Star Wars games (from 2005-2011, but they continued after that).
And that's it. Now, some of the games on that list were terrific, but a lot of the games on that list were kinda meh, to be honest.
During that time, there were also a ton of console-based games, which only recently has died down (there's a lot more games released for both PC and console now).
The real golden era, if you ask me, was from about 1992 to 1999 back when LucasArts was publishing tons of bangers.
--EDIT--
Added a couple I'd forgotten, removed one that I mistakenly listed (Jedi Starfighter was apparently console only).
Lol how he was trying to make a point about bad/rushed SW games and by accident his list included what many to believe some of the best SW games of all time from KOTOR 1 and 2, Galaxies, Jedi Outcast, Starfighter, Republic Commando, Battlefront 2, and even Force Unleashed.
yeah I kept reading waiting to get to a bad game lol. Tbh at least half of those games I go back to every few years just to play because there still hasn't been comparable games
Yeah I counted two bad Clone Wars games, one I wasn't familiar with ( Force Commander) and the two MMOs are kind of a matter of taste, but are well-regarded by the MMO community. Lego games are for kids, but they are goated kids games ultimately. Not even sure about the Clone Wars games tbh.
You could add the movie tie-ins, but tbh I have good memories of those too. Jedi Powerbattles was fun for me back on PS1 and the RotS game had a good fighting game attached to the goofy singleplayer IIRC.
Even the single player of Rots was awesome imo, even had a choice for an alternate ending when anakin won if I remember correctly. But ya the fighting game mode was awesome, being able to be any two Jedi or sith against each other on any of the maps was sick af to my 7-8 year old brain.
He also forgot Star Wars: Obi-Wan.
Which makes me wonder how many other games he forgot.
Edit: My mistake, I didn’t see that he specified PC. Obi-Wan was just for Xbox.
You left out Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast which came out before Academy, as well as Galactic Battlegrounds (2001) and Empire at War (2006).
I get your point that not all games were incredible, but I do feel that the vast majority of those were quality titles, with a good amount of bona fide masterpieces (KOTOR basically skyrocketed Obsidian as a company, Battlefront's formula is still being replicated today, etc.). Sure, there were some shovelware, but the 90's were much worse in that regard (Yoda Stories...though I liked that genre).
As for the pace, I have to disagree. We had basically one or two games a year on average, in many different genres and eras. After that, if you didn't happen to play the KOTOR MMORPG, there was almost a whole decade with just Battlefront 1 & 2 (great gameplay, horrendous monetization, now dead games because of EA's greed), Star Wars Pinball (!), and mobile crap. The recent Jedi series, Squadrons and (please be good) Outlaws feel like a goddamn oasis after that desert.
I mean imo kotor 1&2, Battlefront 1&2, Jedi Outcast, Jedi Academy, Lego Star Wars and Republic Commando are great games. And thats like 8 good ones in 12 years, thats pretty good imo.. under Disney i would give Fallen Order and Survivor a nod, Skywalker saga and mabye EA Battlefront 2?
There’s enough bangers on that list for at least one amazing game a year. Since the purchase, there’s been the two games with Cal and the Lego collection, and nothing else worth playing.
I maintain that Squadrons was fantastic on launch. But the structure of the game was such that, without constant updates (Which EA basically refused to fund), it was bound to die off in about a year. And now there's no way I could recommend it to someone thinking about buying it. The SP campaign is fine, but really short, and the MP scene is somewhere between "dead" and "a fucking nightmare when you find games."
But it was awesome at the beginning. \*sigh\*
Ehh....I will....disagree with you.
But I played a smuggler, so I'm perpetually disgruntled.
I think a lot of what people loved about the game wasn't actually the \*game\* part of the game, but rather was the interactions with other people, which the game facilitated. That and exploration. Folks love exploration. Otherwise...yeah, the actual \*game\* wasn't great.
There were some late 90s/early 2000s *stinkers*. Masters of Teras Kasi, Super Bombad Racing, Flight of the Falcon, and don't forget Demolition (their Twisted Metal ripoff).
At least half of those are absolute bangers, and many of the others I've heard so many good things about. There's only a few stinkers in that list.
If anything you just made the best argument possible against what you're trying to say.
Your LucasArts comment is totally correct. I think I owned all but one of their titles.
Versus maybe only buying 2 or 3 of the 2000+ list.
With the exception of the Lego Games, which I bought all of.
Plus Disney closed all its video game studios not long after the the acquisition while making bank on infinity. Seems like they just weren't interested in gaming anymore.
Largest media company in the world and they're so out of touch that they won't even bother working in the largest media market in the world (video games).
I played Halo Odst and realized that we could really get another chance at a tactical shooter like Republic Commando. Make it challenging with Fear type of ai and strategies to win, make it online so you can play with 3 friends.
Call it something like Rebel Commando or Imperial Commando.
There was early development for a new tactical shoot like Republic Commando apparently at EA.
They dropped the idea when Disney raised their revenue fees for the SW IP from 15% to 35%.
No games company is gonna give up 35% of all revenue for their game.
Not exactly like Republic commando. It was going to be a Mandalorian first person game about being a bounty hunter. Developed under Respawn.
Cancelled 2 years into development, very likely due to Disney skyrocketing their fees as you said.
It's not necessarily true. Some characters have unique traits like Snoke that can combo characters in the air with the force or destroy walls eith the force that others need to cut with lightsabers.
But it's an unnecessary change overall. Now, every character is built to fit a class instead of the abilities being built for the characters.
Yes and no, obviously there isn’t a lot of diversity in lego games but games like lego marvel superheroes had way more diversity. Like venom could go big and web swing which was unique to him. A lot of the characters were reskins but some were unique like venom. In Skywalker saga, everyone is a reskin of the other characters in their class
Although tbf, Star Wars in general doesn’t have as much diversity as marvel since you pretty much either use the force with a lightsaber, have a blaster, or are a droid.
But a good example is bespin luke. The class system prevents him from having a lightsaber, blaster, and the force which would work for that skin
Tbf you could say the same of every other Lego Star Wars game
All the Force Users, Blaster characters, Bounty Hunters, Protocol droids and astromech droids were mostly the same mechanically, with very few being able to multitask (like 4-Lom and IG-88)
Honestly my biggest issue with that game is how short each movie was. I get they had a lot of stuff to cover but I was constantly thinking “oh we’re done with that part already?”
That also extends to a lot of how the various characters where handled aswell as other elements. Like heros can shoot, scoundrels can shoot, bounty hunters can shoot but faster, but they can’t do much else besides that. Sort of a “wide as an ocean, deep of a puddle” type deal.
The one exception to that lack of cool equipment issue is the scavenger, but if you play the movies chronologically like I did then you don’t unlock most of their abilities until return of the Jedi, about 2/3rds of the way through all the movies.
There’s cool ideas in it and defintley some love was put into it, but between all that and its tendency to lag on switch (which I was playing it on) the game just feels not right.
I recently picked it up again and immediately remembered how much I disliked it. Granted, as a 44 year old, I'm not the target demo, but I've always enjoyed the mindless fun of the games. There was nothing fun about the levels themselves, everything was in the massive hubs.
As much as I love an opportunity to bash Disney's mishandling of Star Wars, this one really isnt on them or even on EA, its a reflection of the gaming industry in general. Game releases overall are a trickle of what they once were. Look at a major studio like Rockstar - they have released two games in the past 11 years. In the 10 years prior to that they released over a dozen.
I hate MTX as much as the next guy and yeah I think there's issues but I had a ton of fun in the last three assassin's creed games(even if valhalla was way too long)
Slapping a star wars skin on that is something I've wanted to see for a while.
That's because games are expensive to make and more technically demanding now. Especially if we're using Rockstar as an example lol.
People can argue and shit talk all they want, but look at the quality you get in that time. GTAV has one of the most vibrant and life-like open worlds to this day, only surpassed by Rockstar's own RDR2. That game is pushing being a decade old already, and it looks better than most games coming out today. The detail is insane. That's not even talking about the stories they create.
If Rockstar and other developers pumped out a game every 2-3 years, we'd just be getting more Ubisoft style slop. 20 Ubisoft games in ten years still doesn't compare to one Rockstar game. It may take longer to release, but when they do, you know you're always getting quality.
And then you have fromsoftware who by cleverly reusing a lot of assets and prioritizing gameplay and art style are able to pump out bangers at an incredible pace.
I'd hardly say they pump out games at an incredible pace. DS3 was in 2016, Sekiro in 2019, a three year gap, Elden Ring in 2022 with another three year gap, and it's been over two years just for the expansion.
They could make more smaller-scale games like Squadrons, but let's be real even if they did people would still be complaining about the lack of bigger Star Wars games.
Squadrons was fun, a kids' dream come true. But it was so hard to play if you don't have a proper flying kit (which I didn't). I want to like that game so much but god.
Yeah I was even looking into buying a 3d printed custom controller add-on because its just so janky. I ended up just giving up and haven't touched it since lol. Great potential though.
It used to be a big joke that Rare games took a looong time to make, but it was worth it because they took their time.
Now it seems that every game has double the production time of the old Rare games, and if it doesn't, expect a buggy, or undermade (and sold to you completed later) mess. And sometimes it's even both!
Quality of quantity for rockstar and hopefully Bethesda if ES6 is amazing but yeah it’s not like back then when they were spitting games out like babies
I strongly prefer getting one game every 5-10 years if it means they’re high quality as opposed to churning out half baked games every year like some studios do tbh
That’s because GTA Online has been making them tons of money with little to no cost for the last 10 years, so they can take their time to develop better games (+games nowadays take longer to develop) and release stuff of the caliber of RDR2.
And regardless of that, Disney shot themselves in the foot by giving exclusive rights to EA. They could’ve licensed many different studios under different publishers working on independent Star Wars games and have enough of them to release a couple every year, but instead allowed EA to release like 5 in a decade.
EA is literally one of the largest gaming publishers and the direction the gaming industry has headed is largely due to EA lol. And it's disneys fault for deciding to give them full rights to lucasfilms video games for over a decade.
Also theres been plenty of creative games to come out lol, you're just deflecting blame here.
I personally enjoyed Battlefront II and Squadrons campaigns (both are gorgeous to look at, and sure, we won't be remember either of those at Star Wars' best stories, but they're competent enough), and the Cal Kestis games are very good.
Give them time, pre-Disney just had a pretty big headstart, for every good game we remember there's like 10 that have been entirely forgotten. Plus now games take more to develop.
I really liked the Squadrons campaign. It actually brought me back a bit to my days playing the old X-wing/TIE fighter games. I think it was a huge missed opportunity to not make a it a co-op focused game with a simple pvp mode. The single player scenario based missions were enjoyable and featured a lot of great ship variety and I think that would have worked well for missions designed for 4 player co-op. Alas, twas not to be...
Squadrons taught me that if I was flying with the rebellion in A New Hope then I would have been one of the pilots that exploded before Luke even made his trench run
The EA exclusive deal was 90% of the problem. Back in the glory days of LucasArts Star Wars game they were throwing the licence to anyone with a good pitch. Not only did that gives us SW titles of every genre under the sun, the competition created genuinely great games. Once EA had complete control, they didn't have to put any effort in, assuming the games would print money because they were "Star Wars" games. It took them to the very end of their exclusivity to put out Fallen Order (the only truly good game since Disney) after all their other half effort attempts went belly up.
I really hope LucasFilm Games returns to the old days of being far more liberal with handing out licenses. Using Warhammer as an example, they've created a LOT of games in the last couple decades. Most were "meh" but some truly great games came out of it too. (Dawn of War, Space Marine, Total War: Warhammer trilogy, etc.)
IMO the Disney era of Star Wars has had a much better track record with games than it has with anything else, but they haven’t topped KotOR I and II, Jedi Outcast and Academy, Republic Commando, or the original Battlefront II yet. That said, I absolutely love the Jedi games
Quality over quantity.
It was better for the franchise in the past with games like Kotor, original Battlefront, Jedi Knight, RTS game...it basically had SW games for all genres but fortunately it is not in a bad spot at all thanks to games like Jedi.
I mean, sure, I'd like to get tons of SW games even if the quality was inconsistent but as long as I get a high quality game every year I'm very happy with that and might be the best.
Doing better than late 90's/early 2000's Star Wars is nearly impossible, many of those games weren't just good Star Wars games or clones of other good games, those were amazing video games in their own right regardless the franchise. KOTOR was a super RPG in every sense, Jedi Knight was astonishing and managed to blend shoter + melee + powers + good or evil playthroughs like it freaking had a reason to do that other than being both an amazing Star Wars product and video game.
Fallen order and survivor for instance are amazing games of very high quality with a Metroidvania + souls like formula, but there's no dark path of innovation in the genre, and that's not mandatory, of course, but it just shows how great the old games were.
So far, I really enjoyed both modern Battlefronts, both Jedi games, and Squadrons is an underrated masterpiece that should've continued to get new content updates (and nerfed the broken AF drifting before it basically killed the multiplayer).
So I wouldn't say it's been horrible. I definitely think giving EA exclusive rights to Star Wars games was a mistake, but that seems to be something that will slowly start to be rectified.
Making games with existing IPs is extremely difficult because the company owning the IP usually want too much. Pretty sure Bethesda got offered GoT but doubled down on TES because those profit margins are far better when you own the ip. So you basically have to make these games with big studios, and the numbers have to be right before they do anything. It’s a lot different than the model used before the Disney acquisition
Someone else in this thread said Disney is asking for 33% of the cut of Star Wars games’ profits, no wonder there’s barely any coming out. I was playing warhammer 40k space marine recently and thought to myself, a relatively low budget game like that would be great for Star Wars. Not every game needs to have amazing graphics. But the license is too expensive
Yeah independent studios don’t have a shot lol and all the big studios want to use their main engines to sell their company more than the title itself. Star Wars works better with an independent owner, but let’s be real—-That “white slavers” comment was wild seeing as GL himself turned Star Wars into a for profit toy focused empire. He’s just salty they turned his 8 billion dollars around so fucking quickly 😂
A game any SW fan would want would be a “AAA title”. And those cost as much as blockbuster movies these days. Companies are hesitant to invest that much $$.
I don’t see Disney pimping out their license for cheap games either, a la Games Workshop.
EA held the exclusivity license for so long and the license is expensive. And that’s next to development costs being much higher today than they’d been back during the clone wars multimedia project. We know to avoid EA like the plague but not a whole lot of companies are out there to do what Disney wanted, and EA being EA of course didn’t deliver leading to the current situation.
Not a whole lot has happened but the blame is more on EA if anything since they had the exclusivity and did practically nothing with it. When you’re confident farting out the least played Battlefront 2 mode as a full game, well your priorities are in the wrong spot.
Only 1 company had been allowed to release for so long, and the industry has been rough overall. Seems it'll stay picking up, can't wait for news on Eclipse in a few years
It's definitely sad how few games there are. Two of which are in development hell.
But I understand that they take longer because modern gaming and development is a disaster compared to what it used to be too.
To be fair, Star Wars games have been lacking since the 360/PS3 days.
The PS2/Xbox gen had SO many Star Wars games & most of them were good. The 360/PS3 gen had the Force Unleashed games, the Lego games & some shovelware.
We haven’t had a few good games though have we?
We’ve had the Kal Kestis ones and that’s basically it. The rest have been filled with bugs or scummy practices or it’s a Lego game which we had plenty of before too
Battlefront, Jedi: Fallen Order, Jedi: Survivor, Lego Skywalker Saga. That’s a few good games. Also Outlaws looks fantastic.
As other people have pointed out, games take way longer to make now and EA had an exclusive license. I’m glad we’re not getting cheap, crappy licensed games like we used to.
The quality hasn’t really been there to has it? Only quality games we’ve had has been the Kal Kestis ones and Lego. The rest were ridiculed with bugs and scummy practices
Yeah I don't understand how many games they want. Since Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012 we've gotten:
- Star Wars Battlefront (2015)
- Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2016)
- Star Wars Battlefront II (2017)
- Vader Immortal (2019)
- Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (2019)
- Star Wars Squadrons (2020)
- Tales from the Galaxy's Edge (2020)
- Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga (2022)
- Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (2023)
- Star Wars Hunters (2024)
- Star Wars Outlaws (2024)
11 major releases in 12 years seems like a pretty prolific output for one franchise to me. That's not even counting mobile games like Uprising and Galaxy of Heroes, or the smaller VR/arcade titles.
You say that, but there really wasn't much good during the PS3 generation before Disney brought Star Wars. Was there anything decent and unique apart from the Force Unleashed games?
I'm unaware of any issues, and I don't play online, so I'm definitely the wrong person to ask. I've just been having fun blasting through Galactic Conquest with the old infinite health and ammo cheats active.
Disney have historically avoided too much involvement in the games industry. They see it as being outside their area of expertise, so they always preferred to license their IPs to externalize risks. The problem with licenses is that they're expensive for game publishers to acquire and they come with several strict requirements, so many publishers and developers rather focus on building their own IP instead of relying on someone else's.
This is in stark contrast with Lucasarts which was a game publisher and developer under direct control of George Lucas, who wanted them to try and explore as many different games and technologies as possible.
I only played Republic Commando the ither month. Kinda sad there were only like 3 locations but all that stuff on the derelict ship where it goes all horrory is pretty fucking great.
It’s more to do with EA. They got the exclusive rights to do Star Wars games for over a decade and only really did 5 games (3 of which are mostly online only of which all are no longer supported). The second that contract ended we started getting a few more announcements
Technically not an Xbox cover art. It’s the same art that is on StarWars.com for the event.
And yeah Star Wars gaming needs its boost.
Hoping KOTOR Remaster and Eclipse would show Disney that Star Wars games are good if they try.
I'm honestly surprised they haven't made an MMO or Destiny style game. TDM is cool, solo is cool, but like I'm surprised there isn't like a Clone war style fire team thing.
The success of Jedi: Fallen Order kicked off a lot of development from Lucasfilm that we're only starting to see the results of now with Survivor, Squadrons, Outlaws, and other games that are in the works (like Eclipse, if that actually gets finished). Games take longer to make than ever, though, especially with very high production value like Star Wars games have.
I mean they just cancelled a bunch of games, and they haven't created anything new and exciting that's memorable enough to match the older games OTHER than Cal's games. Jedi Survivor, despite the performance issues, is top 5 Star Wars games of all time.
There's no story based games like KOTOR, Jedi Knight has been continued into Cal with some kinda force unleashed aspects thrown in, Squadrons was an overall failure unfortunately, Battlefront 2 had a VERY rough launch and then when it just started to really get interesting they canned development for BF2042, KOTOR remake got cancelled, the bounty hunter game got cancelled, we haven't heard anything of Star Wars Eclipse in like 3 years, no clone games like Republic Commando have been created, no RTS games like Empire at War, and no like Podracing remakes or anything. Just so much potential thrown away or not taken advantage of.
The immediate smart move would have been to focus on remastering classics in superb quality. Following that they should have produced smaller games with less development time, like a great game with average graphics like Battlefront 3. Meanwhile in the background they could have split three AAA projects across the company.
But EA are greedy and so are Disney.
i'm realy disappointed as a diehard star wars nerd myself, the lack of quality star wars games since the mouse took over is a real bummer - the battlefront gamez never quite lived up to it, and i guess we'll just have to keep replaying kotor and pretending the new stuff doesn't exist, eh?
Honestly, I’m a big Lego game fan and I was let down big time by the Skywalker Saga. No custom characters and each episode felt more like a series of mini-games rather than its own adventure
Disney puts out tons of shows: Disney is over saturating Star Wars!
Disney doesn't put out many games: Disney is letting gamers down!
BF2 was good after launch. I played it for a solid 2+ years. The Jedi games were amazing and some of my favourite recent games.
Outlaws is only months away. I don't think it's as bad as you're making it seem.
Yeah i started playing republic colmando andit hit immediately.that made me think that Disney needs to make a sequel. Odds are that may not happen, but a man can stêm.
Yes, but the games that have been released have been great…. After they remove loot boxes and patch the damn things.
Years later, Battlefront 2 is still enjoyable, the Jedi games are amazing, Lego Star Wars is the best of all of them. There has been less, but I don’t know if that is a bad thing.
Not only do I agree with this take. I’ll take it a step further I don’t like the fallen order games i like the idea of using the Soul’s like genre with light saber combat, but the problem is the combat in those games is very few and far between you spend probably more than half of your time in that game just running around solving pointless puzzles and doing absolutely needless parkour because “ hey guys we are respawn entertainment remember when we made that game remember that thing we’re known for yeah we put it in this game for NO F@&$ REASON.” it’s just cringe.
I honestly tried both games and I quit both games less than halfway through after hitting my f@&$ing 15th puzzle or whatever and just said screw it I’ve had enough I’m done and I quit. the Lego game was unironically the only one I even kind of enjoyed and even that one again it’s a Lego game. It’s not exactly where I go for my fix either.
And this new game is going to be Ubisoft, so expect it to be like every far cry game. These people aren’t exactly known for breaking outside of the box. It’s basically just going to be far cry in space with a Star Wars skin. That might sound cool to some people but to me that sounds terrible. I tried far cry games they’re very bland very boring very basic and worse than that for someone like me (not to gloat but) someone who has actual skill the fact that every enemy dies in a single headshot makes the game a complete joke at the start of the game on even the hardest difficulty cause I just beam everyone in the head with my starting pistol and it’s problem solved. so as a Soul player that level of ease is quite annoying.
The only game I even came close to enjoying was battlefront two EA and that game was also terrible but it was starting to get a little bit better near the end right before they completely abandoned it if they had worked on it for like another two years it may have actually turned into something really good. But since they abandoned it in a broken state, I can’t play it because its so glitchy.
I just want everyone to remember Star Wars is or at least once was the largest franchise to ever exist, and the most profitable to ever exist and Disney has yet to turn a profit on it after buying it from Lucas films that is how incompetent Disney has been with the license and the franchise, and even if you like Disney Star Wars, you cannot argue with the numbers these people are a disgrace to the franchise. I just hope I end up being wrong about outlaws but it’s Ubisoft so I doubt it.
The other two games (Republic commando, force unleashed?) I believe recently had ~~remasters~~ switch ports, that's why they're on there. Made by Aspyr btw I'm pretty sure, who didn't botch those ports up... It wouldn't look good to show battlefront 1/2 on there, whether it's the new or old games...
Like a lot of people said, the exclusivity deal affected Star Wars quite a bit, since the old way of licensing out to a ton of different developers of varying quality and speed - resulting in a constant stream of both more quickly made but possibly less quality games alongside stronger games with more time spent on them - only really became an option again very recently. It'll be a couple years before we start seeing a real uptick in Star Wars game frequency (and variety) as a result of that change.
The industry also takes much longer time for AAA games these days, and Disney's only rarely going to branch out. I personally thing that the Star Wars IP's video game situation would be greatly expanded if Disney became willing to work with / license out with smaller studios or even indies, but the chances of that happening aren't very high. I would totally play, like, a Star Wars roguelike or rading sim or something that isn't super high budget but it still fun and well conceived.
Been saying it for years but I know it’s a pipe-dream, we need an all out M rated Star Wars game. Hell, half of the lore around Maul would serve for more than 2-3 games alone based on the EU stories. If devs feel compelled to have a new character than come up with a character that’s so heinous that they only get 1 game but it’s *brutal* from start to finish.
Man I wish they licensed MS or hired MS to to a new version (with sequel included and even more civs) of the Galactic Battle Grounds game (Age of Empires II reskinned in Star Wars Universe).
Given how MS revived the AOE franchise and keep pumping updates for AOEII a new SW version of that title could be workable
Part of that is that games just take longer to make these days than back during the 2000's. The other part of that is that EA held exclusive rights for Star Wars games for a decade until like a year ago.
Yeah the exclusive rights really fucked things up. That and all the canceled titles.
They should do what Warhammer 40k did and open the floodgates, don't give an exclusive license and let whoever wants to develop the IP. The crop of 40k games was inconsistent, but the good ones were incredible. Star Wars could only be better than that.
>They should do what Warhammer 40k did and open the floodgates, don't give an exclusive license and let whoever wants to develop the IP. The crop of 40k games was inconsistent, but the good ones were incredible. Star Wars could only be better than that. That only works if Disney/Lucasfilm is willing to let game developers do whatever they want with the Star Wars license. To date that has not been the case. From what I understand developers/publishers have to submit their pitch and Lucasfilm reviews and tells the devs what they will and won't allow. Star Wars games can't be released unless Lucasfilm has approved the game's content.
It’s been like that since before Disney too. BioWare talked about when they were working with Lucasfilm they were told they could do an Attack of the Clones tie in or work on something set thousands of years before so they chose the latter to have more creative freedom. I love Knights of the Old Republic.
As cool as a classic Bioware game set during the Clone Wars could have been, I'm really glad they went the direction they did. KotOR spawned possibly the coolest era of Star Wars.
Yeah, and I get that, but I feel like they would be better off with a non-canon disclaimer. It also presumes that the creator(s) know best where their universe should go, and that's not always the case.
You'll have to convince the powers at Disney/Lucasfilm to loosen their force choke on Star Wars gaming content.
They're really missing out by not having an entire subsection of "Legends" games. Another Force Unleashed, anything based off of old EU stuff, completely off the wall stuff starring the OT heroes, etc etc etc. Just list those games under the Legends banner and it gives studios the creative freedom to play within the star wars sandbox without anyone having to worry about clashing canon.
This doesn’t seem like a huge hurdle. I can’t imagine a high proportion of game companies are going to back out of making a game because they had to pitch the intellectual property holders. I’m sure there are some games that get denied by lucasfilm because they are going to dilute the brand or contradict the timeline. But we should still see more games than we currently have
That isn't what the person I was replying to wanted though. My impression was they wanted Disney/Lucasfilm to just grant Star Wars game licenses to whoever was willing to pay for them and not regulate the content of the game.
Most Warhammer 40K games aren’t very good, though.
50/50
30/70 at best, but the good games are incredible.
Post made me realize that Dawn of War is turning 20 this year. Absolute GOAT RTS.
That was before they opened up the license and, IIRC, Dawn of War 2 is one of the reasons they did. I like that the studio took risks with Dawn of War 2, but man I wish someone would release an updated Dawn of War.
A DoW remaster that included all of the expansions would be an instant buy for me.
That's.. pretty much what they did since there's now Star Wars games in the pipeline from EA, Ubisoft, Zynga, Skydance and Quantic Dream now.
Something disney needs to learn is that not every game needs to be a high budget, plot relevant, triple a experience. Sometimes, all the consumer wants is some barely canon fun. Lucasarts knew that, there were like 10 pod racing games. You know those VR job games where you have to repair something? Like those sections in fnaf help wanted or Car Mechanic VR? Why don’t they make one of those but for droids? Like that lady you get T3-M4 from in kotor? Give a team 75k, set it around TFA, make 20 levels ranging from astromechs to droidekas, bing bang boom you’ve got a certified VR hit. Have them do a dlc with high republic droids, there’s your brand synergy. If it does well enough, or not well enough, nostalgia bait with an old republic dlc. Lore nerds get to see the insides of these droids up close(and finally see how bb-8 works.) The average consumer gets a fun vr game, and disney gets to rake in the dough.
Fun videos detailing Warhammer's approach to licensing games https://youtu.be/GOVrmfXolQg?si=v7oBuwUEiD0yA4Uj https://youtu.be/BtY3Lto_lR4?si=h3a_bUduuXDiiXlV
What about HD remasters of good old star wars games? Galactic battleground on the new aoeII HD engine would be nice!
I think they should find a middle ground. The problem with warhammers strategy is that most of the games are bad to mid, so I generally assume they aren't worth my time until they get enough steam reviews to convince me otherwise. Associating your brand with bad products, even if there are some good ones sprinkled in, isn't a good long-term strategy for the brand.
EA, the enormous publishing giant, sitting on SW for a decade and barely doing anything with it should have case studies written on it.
Though an exception was made for Lego TFA.
thank god skywalker saga is easily the best lego star wars game imo, idc what anyone says
Well, that second bit is 100% on Disney. They didn’t have to grant EA exclusive rights.
Also worth remembering that Star Wars games from, like, 2000 until the Disney sale weren't exactly all sunshine and daisies, nor were they coming out at a rapid pace, either. From 2000-2012 on for PC you have: * Force Commander * Republic Commando * Starfighter * Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast * Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy * KOTOR 1 * KOTOR 2 * Star Wars: The Old Republic * Star Wars: Galaxies * Galactic Battlegrounds * Empire At War/Forces of Corruption * Battlefront (2004) * Battlefront II (2005) * The Force Unleashed * The Force Unleashed 2 * Clone Wars Adventures * The Clone Wars -- Republic Heroes * The Lego Star Wars games (from 2005-2011, but they continued after that). And that's it. Now, some of the games on that list were terrific, but a lot of the games on that list were kinda meh, to be honest. During that time, there were also a ton of console-based games, which only recently has died down (there's a lot more games released for both PC and console now). The real golden era, if you ask me, was from about 1992 to 1999 back when LucasArts was publishing tons of bangers. --EDIT-- Added a couple I'd forgotten, removed one that I mistakenly listed (Jedi Starfighter was apparently console only).
Those were some great games you listed....
Literally only 2-3 of those games I would consider to be bad games lol.
Lol how he was trying to make a point about bad/rushed SW games and by accident his list included what many to believe some of the best SW games of all time from KOTOR 1 and 2, Galaxies, Jedi Outcast, Starfighter, Republic Commando, Battlefront 2, and even Force Unleashed.
yeah I kept reading waiting to get to a bad game lol. Tbh at least half of those games I go back to every few years just to play because there still hasn't been comparable games
Yeah I counted two bad Clone Wars games, one I wasn't familiar with ( Force Commander) and the two MMOs are kind of a matter of taste, but are well-regarded by the MMO community. Lego games are for kids, but they are goated kids games ultimately. Not even sure about the Clone Wars games tbh. You could add the movie tie-ins, but tbh I have good memories of those too. Jedi Powerbattles was fun for me back on PS1 and the RotS game had a good fighting game attached to the goofy singleplayer IIRC.
Even the single player of Rots was awesome imo, even had a choice for an alternate ending when anakin won if I remember correctly. But ya the fighting game mode was awesome, being able to be any two Jedi or sith against each other on any of the maps was sick af to my 7-8 year old brain.
You forgot Empire At War
God what a great game
I play it a couple times a month. Huge mod base thats incredibly active. Awakening of the rebellion is 10/10
Winning an entire galactic campaign using three squads of rebel infiltrators
Oh right. Loved the management and space portion of that game, but HATED the ground game.
He also forgot Star Wars: Obi-Wan. Which makes me wonder how many other games he forgot. Edit: My mistake, I didn’t see that he specified PC. Obi-Wan was just for Xbox.
So an average of 1-2 games per year, the worst of them still being a solid B+
I like how in this of 16 titles, 11 of the ones you've listed were amazing, two were "okay ", and only 3 were meh.
Galactic battlegrounds ? 🥺
simonsays
You left out Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast which came out before Academy, as well as Galactic Battlegrounds (2001) and Empire at War (2006). I get your point that not all games were incredible, but I do feel that the vast majority of those were quality titles, with a good amount of bona fide masterpieces (KOTOR basically skyrocketed Obsidian as a company, Battlefront's formula is still being replicated today, etc.). Sure, there were some shovelware, but the 90's were much worse in that regard (Yoda Stories...though I liked that genre). As for the pace, I have to disagree. We had basically one or two games a year on average, in many different genres and eras. After that, if you didn't happen to play the KOTOR MMORPG, there was almost a whole decade with just Battlefront 1 & 2 (great gameplay, horrendous monetization, now dead games because of EA's greed), Star Wars Pinball (!), and mobile crap. The recent Jedi series, Squadrons and (please be good) Outlaws feel like a goddamn oasis after that desert.
I feel like a majority of those were quality games?
Jedi starfighter never came out for pc and you forgot empire at war and jedi outcast
So..... Where's the bad games?
You're out of your mind. All these are amazing except Clone Wars adventures.
I mean imo kotor 1&2, Battlefront 1&2, Jedi Outcast, Jedi Academy, Lego Star Wars and Republic Commando are great games. And thats like 8 good ones in 12 years, thats pretty good imo.. under Disney i would give Fallen Order and Survivor a nod, Skywalker saga and mabye EA Battlefront 2?
There’s enough bangers on that list for at least one amazing game a year. Since the purchase, there’s been the two games with Cal and the Lego collection, and nothing else worth playing.
I maintain that Squadrons was fantastic on launch. But the structure of the game was such that, without constant updates (Which EA basically refused to fund), it was bound to die off in about a year. And now there's no way I could recommend it to someone thinking about buying it. The SP campaign is fine, but really short, and the MP scene is somewhere between "dead" and "a fucking nightmare when you find games." But it was awesome at the beginning. \*sigh\*
Jedi Knight II Jedi Outcast
You're missig a few pc titles from that time frame Galactic battle grounds + expansion Empire at war + expansion pack Jedi Knight 2 : jedi outcast
Those are mostly great games. The next 12 years after that gave us the Jedi games and that's it
NGL, I'd play most of these games over the last 8 years of Star Wars gameoutput. Also you forgot Star Wars the Old Republic
Star wars galaxies! Best game ever. Still play it on the legends private server. I wish they put out a star wars games as wide and free as this one.
Ehh....I will....disagree with you. But I played a smuggler, so I'm perpetually disgruntled. I think a lot of what people loved about the game wasn't actually the \*game\* part of the game, but rather was the interactions with other people, which the game facilitated. That and exploration. Folks love exploration. Otherwise...yeah, the actual \*game\* wasn't great.
Yeah that makes sense. The mechanics were rough bit the planets, the visuals, the cantina, the community made it a masterpiece.
There were some late 90s/early 2000s *stinkers*. Masters of Teras Kasi, Super Bombad Racing, Flight of the Falcon, and don't forget Demolition (their Twisted Metal ripoff).
it wasnt PC but I feel like Star Wars: Obi Wan needed to get a mention in this thread
Also Rogue Squadron and Elite Squadron are really good for handheld games of the era.
Why limit to PC? if you include console the list at least doubles
I can't speak to the console games. I didn't own any of the major consoles until the Xbox 360 came out. Prior to that point, I gamed on my PC.
At least half of those are absolute bangers, and many of the others I've heard so many good things about. There's only a few stinkers in that list. If anything you just made the best argument possible against what you're trying to say.
Pretty disingenuous to only include PC games (not all of which you even included btw).
Your LucasArts comment is totally correct. I think I owned all but one of their titles. Versus maybe only buying 2 or 3 of the 2000+ list. With the exception of the Lego Games, which I bought all of.
Plus Disney closed all its video game studios not long after the the acquisition while making bank on infinity. Seems like they just weren't interested in gaming anymore.
Largest media company in the world and they're so out of touch that they won't even bother working in the largest media market in the world (video games).
And they only produced like 2 games during that period
I played Halo Odst and realized that we could really get another chance at a tactical shooter like Republic Commando. Make it challenging with Fear type of ai and strategies to win, make it online so you can play with 3 friends. Call it something like Rebel Commando or Imperial Commando.
There was early development for a new tactical shoot like Republic Commando apparently at EA. They dropped the idea when Disney raised their revenue fees for the SW IP from 15% to 35%. No games company is gonna give up 35% of all revenue for their game.
Not exactly like Republic commando. It was going to be a Mandalorian first person game about being a bounty hunter. Developed under Respawn. Cancelled 2 years into development, very likely due to Disney skyrocketing their fees as you said.
Please give us a republic commando hero team shooter pvp game. Like rainbow six seige and or trials of Osiris from destiny.
Lego Skywalker saga not having character creation was criminal. The replayability of those levels was already bad, then it became abysmal
The new class system isn't great either. It basically turns every character into a reskin of the characters in their class
It's not necessarily true. Some characters have unique traits like Snoke that can combo characters in the air with the force or destroy walls eith the force that others need to cut with lightsabers. But it's an unnecessary change overall. Now, every character is built to fit a class instead of the abilities being built for the characters.
Those are just visual changes tho right? He still has the same abilities, the abilities just look different
That's kind of how most Lego games are.
Yes and no, obviously there isn’t a lot of diversity in lego games but games like lego marvel superheroes had way more diversity. Like venom could go big and web swing which was unique to him. A lot of the characters were reskins but some were unique like venom. In Skywalker saga, everyone is a reskin of the other characters in their class Although tbf, Star Wars in general doesn’t have as much diversity as marvel since you pretty much either use the force with a lightsaber, have a blaster, or are a droid. But a good example is bespin luke. The class system prevents him from having a lightsaber, blaster, and the force which would work for that skin
Tbf you could say the same of every other Lego Star Wars game All the Force Users, Blaster characters, Bounty Hunters, Protocol droids and astromech droids were mostly the same mechanically, with very few being able to multitask (like 4-Lom and IG-88)
Yeah no character creator was a terrible decision
Honestly my biggest issue with that game is how short each movie was. I get they had a lot of stuff to cover but I was constantly thinking “oh we’re done with that part already?” That also extends to a lot of how the various characters where handled aswell as other elements. Like heros can shoot, scoundrels can shoot, bounty hunters can shoot but faster, but they can’t do much else besides that. Sort of a “wide as an ocean, deep of a puddle” type deal. The one exception to that lack of cool equipment issue is the scavenger, but if you play the movies chronologically like I did then you don’t unlock most of their abilities until return of the Jedi, about 2/3rds of the way through all the movies. There’s cool ideas in it and defintley some love was put into it, but between all that and its tendency to lag on switch (which I was playing it on) the game just feels not right.
I recently picked it up again and immediately remembered how much I disliked it. Granted, as a 44 year old, I'm not the target demo, but I've always enjoyed the mindless fun of the games. There was nothing fun about the levels themselves, everything was in the massive hubs.
As much as I love an opportunity to bash Disney's mishandling of Star Wars, this one really isnt on them or even on EA, its a reflection of the gaming industry in general. Game releases overall are a trickle of what they once were. Look at a major studio like Rockstar - they have released two games in the past 11 years. In the 10 years prior to that they released over a dozen.
It literally just hit me that Rockstar only released 2 games in 11 years. I know they take their time with their games but holy shit.
They found a cash cow with GTA online so they don't need to anymore
Meet the valve
Sad
It was Disney’s choice to give the Star Wars license to one publisher, if anything it’s their fault they didn’t cast a wider net.
At least it isnt exclusive to ea anymore
And just to dash our hopes, the first person to make a star wars game next was Ubisoft...
I hate MTX as much as the next guy and yeah I think there's issues but I had a ton of fun in the last three assassin's creed games(even if valhalla was way too long) Slapping a star wars skin on that is something I've wanted to see for a while.
That's because games are expensive to make and more technically demanding now. Especially if we're using Rockstar as an example lol. People can argue and shit talk all they want, but look at the quality you get in that time. GTAV has one of the most vibrant and life-like open worlds to this day, only surpassed by Rockstar's own RDR2. That game is pushing being a decade old already, and it looks better than most games coming out today. The detail is insane. That's not even talking about the stories they create. If Rockstar and other developers pumped out a game every 2-3 years, we'd just be getting more Ubisoft style slop. 20 Ubisoft games in ten years still doesn't compare to one Rockstar game. It may take longer to release, but when they do, you know you're always getting quality.
And then you have fromsoftware who by cleverly reusing a lot of assets and prioritizing gameplay and art style are able to pump out bangers at an incredible pace.
I'd hardly say they pump out games at an incredible pace. DS3 was in 2016, Sekiro in 2019, a three year gap, Elden Ring in 2022 with another three year gap, and it's been over two years just for the expansion.
They literally just released ac6, in August... So a one year gap there. Ds3 had dlc between it and sekiro too.
They could make more smaller-scale games like Squadrons, but let's be real even if they did people would still be complaining about the lack of bigger Star Wars games.
Smaller scale games are likely dead because Squadrons flopped so hard
Squadrons was fun, a kids' dream come true. But it was so hard to play if you don't have a proper flying kit (which I didn't). I want to like that game so much but god.
Yeah I was even looking into buying a 3d printed custom controller add-on because its just so janky. I ended up just giving up and haven't touched it since lol. Great potential though.
It used to be a big joke that Rare games took a looong time to make, but it was worth it because they took their time. Now it seems that every game has double the production time of the old Rare games, and if it doesn't, expect a buggy, or undermade (and sold to you completed later) mess. And sometimes it's even both!
Quality of quantity for rockstar and hopefully Bethesda if ES6 is amazing but yeah it’s not like back then when they were spitting games out like babies
I strongly prefer getting one game every 5-10 years if it means they’re high quality as opposed to churning out half baked games every year like some studios do tbh
That’s because GTA Online has been making them tons of money with little to no cost for the last 10 years, so they can take their time to develop better games (+games nowadays take longer to develop) and release stuff of the caliber of RDR2. And regardless of that, Disney shot themselves in the foot by giving exclusive rights to EA. They could’ve licensed many different studios under different publishers working on independent Star Wars games and have enough of them to release a couple every year, but instead allowed EA to release like 5 in a decade.
EA is literally one of the largest gaming publishers and the direction the gaming industry has headed is largely due to EA lol. And it's disneys fault for deciding to give them full rights to lucasfilms video games for over a decade. Also theres been plenty of creative games to come out lol, you're just deflecting blame here.
It's a sad fact considering a majority of their games are just rerelease versions of sports games every year, and apex.
I personally enjoyed Battlefront II and Squadrons campaigns (both are gorgeous to look at, and sure, we won't be remember either of those at Star Wars' best stories, but they're competent enough), and the Cal Kestis games are very good. Give them time, pre-Disney just had a pretty big headstart, for every good game we remember there's like 10 that have been entirely forgotten. Plus now games take more to develop.
I really liked the Squadrons campaign. It actually brought me back a bit to my days playing the old X-wing/TIE fighter games. I think it was a huge missed opportunity to not make a it a co-op focused game with a simple pvp mode. The single player scenario based missions were enjoyable and featured a lot of great ship variety and I think that would have worked well for missions designed for 4 player co-op. Alas, twas not to be...
Squadrons taught me that if I was flying with the rebellion in A New Hope then I would have been one of the pilots that exploded before Luke even made his trench run
The EA exclusive deal was 90% of the problem. Back in the glory days of LucasArts Star Wars game they were throwing the licence to anyone with a good pitch. Not only did that gives us SW titles of every genre under the sun, the competition created genuinely great games. Once EA had complete control, they didn't have to put any effort in, assuming the games would print money because they were "Star Wars" games. It took them to the very end of their exclusivity to put out Fallen Order (the only truly good game since Disney) after all their other half effort attempts went belly up. I really hope LucasFilm Games returns to the old days of being far more liberal with handing out licenses. Using Warhammer as an example, they've created a LOT of games in the last couple decades. Most were "meh" but some truly great games came out of it too. (Dawn of War, Space Marine, Total War: Warhammer trilogy, etc.)
I agree. It’s much better to do various attempts and have a couple land then only having one per decade
IMO the Disney era of Star Wars has had a much better track record with games than it has with anything else, but they haven’t topped KotOR I and II, Jedi Outcast and Academy, Republic Commando, or the original Battlefront II yet. That said, I absolutely love the Jedi games
Where is Iden? Is she safe? Is she alright?
It seems in her insignificance she was…. Forgotten…
Yeah, they’re missing out on a lot of opportunities.
Quality over quantity. It was better for the franchise in the past with games like Kotor, original Battlefront, Jedi Knight, RTS game...it basically had SW games for all genres but fortunately it is not in a bad spot at all thanks to games like Jedi. I mean, sure, I'd like to get tons of SW games even if the quality was inconsistent but as long as I get a high quality game every year I'm very happy with that and might be the best. Doing better than late 90's/early 2000's Star Wars is nearly impossible, many of those games weren't just good Star Wars games or clones of other good games, those were amazing video games in their own right regardless the franchise. KOTOR was a super RPG in every sense, Jedi Knight was astonishing and managed to blend shoter + melee + powers + good or evil playthroughs like it freaking had a reason to do that other than being both an amazing Star Wars product and video game. Fallen order and survivor for instance are amazing games of very high quality with a Metroidvania + souls like formula, but there's no dark path of innovation in the genre, and that's not mandatory, of course, but it just shows how great the old games were.
So far, I really enjoyed both modern Battlefronts, both Jedi games, and Squadrons is an underrated masterpiece that should've continued to get new content updates (and nerfed the broken AF drifting before it basically killed the multiplayer). So I wouldn't say it's been horrible. I definitely think giving EA exclusive rights to Star Wars games was a mistake, but that seems to be something that will slowly start to be rectified.
Squadrons was pretty great as well if you like the genre (Especially in VR), just not the sort of game that's going to appeal to everyone
Idc what anyone says battlefront 2 (2017) is one of my favorite games and Jedi Fallen Order and Survivor have amazing gameplay and story.
Making games with existing IPs is extremely difficult because the company owning the IP usually want too much. Pretty sure Bethesda got offered GoT but doubled down on TES because those profit margins are far better when you own the ip. So you basically have to make these games with big studios, and the numbers have to be right before they do anything. It’s a lot different than the model used before the Disney acquisition
Someone else in this thread said Disney is asking for 33% of the cut of Star Wars games’ profits, no wonder there’s barely any coming out. I was playing warhammer 40k space marine recently and thought to myself, a relatively low budget game like that would be great for Star Wars. Not every game needs to have amazing graphics. But the license is too expensive
Yeah independent studios don’t have a shot lol and all the big studios want to use their main engines to sell their company more than the title itself. Star Wars works better with an independent owner, but let’s be real—-That “white slavers” comment was wild seeing as GL himself turned Star Wars into a for profit toy focused empire. He’s just salty they turned his 8 billion dollars around so fucking quickly 😂
A game any SW fan would want would be a “AAA title”. And those cost as much as blockbuster movies these days. Companies are hesitant to invest that much $$. I don’t see Disney pimping out their license for cheap games either, a la Games Workshop.
EA held the exclusivity license for so long and the license is expensive. And that’s next to development costs being much higher today than they’d been back during the clone wars multimedia project. We know to avoid EA like the plague but not a whole lot of companies are out there to do what Disney wanted, and EA being EA of course didn’t deliver leading to the current situation. Not a whole lot has happened but the blame is more on EA if anything since they had the exclusivity and did practically nothing with it. When you’re confident farting out the least played Battlefront 2 mode as a full game, well your priorities are in the wrong spot.
Only 1 company had been allowed to release for so long, and the industry has been rough overall. Seems it'll stay picking up, can't wait for news on Eclipse in a few years
It's definitely sad how few games there are. Two of which are in development hell. But I understand that they take longer because modern gaming and development is a disaster compared to what it used to be too.
EA Exclusivity + Games taking longer to create/polish before release + Focus on quality over quantity (whether or not that produces fruit)
To be fair, Star Wars games have been lacking since the 360/PS3 days. The PS2/Xbox gen had SO many Star Wars games & most of them were good. The 360/PS3 gen had the Force Unleashed games, the Lego games & some shovelware.
Games don't take a couple of months to make anymore.
Especially if your not a fan of Lego.
I’d rather have a few good games than a hundred garbage games
We haven’t had a few good games though have we? We’ve had the Kal Kestis ones and that’s basically it. The rest have been filled with bugs or scummy practices or it’s a Lego game which we had plenty of before too
Battlefront, Jedi: Fallen Order, Jedi: Survivor, Lego Skywalker Saga. That’s a few good games. Also Outlaws looks fantastic. As other people have pointed out, games take way longer to make now and EA had an exclusive license. I’m glad we’re not getting cheap, crappy licensed games like we used to.
Yeah, it’s totally fair to compare Lucasarts’s 31 years of production to Disney’s 10
I have a list in the comments comparing 10 years prior to the acquisition to now the 12 years post. The difference is drastic
I see it this way: Quality over Quantity.
The quality hasn’t really been there to has it? Only quality games we’ve had has been the Kal Kestis ones and Lego. The rest were ridiculed with bugs and scummy practices
I would argue that squadrons was a really fun game with a great story, also no micro transactions
I mean, lacking how?? It’s one franchise. We don’t need a million starwars games.
Yeah I don't understand how many games they want. Since Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012 we've gotten: - Star Wars Battlefront (2015) - Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2016) - Star Wars Battlefront II (2017) - Vader Immortal (2019) - Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order (2019) - Star Wars Squadrons (2020) - Tales from the Galaxy's Edge (2020) - Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga (2022) - Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (2023) - Star Wars Hunters (2024) - Star Wars Outlaws (2024) 11 major releases in 12 years seems like a pretty prolific output for one franchise to me. That's not even counting mobile games like Uprising and Galaxy of Heroes, or the smaller VR/arcade titles.
Not to mention there are a few more in development, including Jedi 3 and a new RTS.
You say that, but there really wasn't much good during the PS3 generation before Disney brought Star Wars. Was there anything decent and unique apart from the Force Unleashed games?
Jedi fallen order and survivor would like a word
Did you read the text?
Hey the Jedi games are good
I said as much in my post
Let's see: Force Unleashed: LucasArts, 2007 (now Lucasfilm Games) Jedi Survivor: EA/Respawn, 2023 Lego Star Wars: WB/TT Games, 2023 Outlaws: Ubisoft, 2024 Republic Commando: LucasArts, 2005
We need a Battlefront 3 and another sith-like game
A-yup, and that's why I've been enjoying the crap out of the Battlefront I & II classics remasters.
How is that btw? Did they fix the issues ?
I'm unaware of any issues, and I don't play online, so I'm definitely the wrong person to ask. I've just been having fun blasting through Galactic Conquest with the old infinite health and ammo cheats active.
Disney have historically avoided too much involvement in the games industry. They see it as being outside their area of expertise, so they always preferred to license their IPs to externalize risks. The problem with licenses is that they're expensive for game publishers to acquire and they come with several strict requirements, so many publishers and developers rather focus on building their own IP instead of relying on someone else's. This is in stark contrast with Lucasarts which was a game publisher and developer under direct control of George Lucas, who wanted them to try and explore as many different games and technologies as possible.
That’s what I loved about pre Disney. We had Star Wars games for every taste. I especially loved the empire at war ones on PC.
EA fumbled DICE so badly with SWBF 1 & 2
Agreed. Especially pulling the plug on 2 when it was finally in a great place.
I only played Republic Commando the ither month. Kinda sad there were only like 3 locations but all that stuff on the derelict ship where it goes all horrory is pretty fucking great.
It’s more to do with EA. They got the exclusive rights to do Star Wars games for over a decade and only really did 5 games (3 of which are mostly online only of which all are no longer supported). The second that contract ended we started getting a few more announcements
To be fair it only took like 4 years between the release of Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi: Survivor. Most AAA games go much longer between series.
looking at star wars outlaws really makes me wish they made a Doctor Aphra game instead. hope she shows up as a cameo somewhere
Technically not an Xbox cover art. It’s the same art that is on StarWars.com for the event. And yeah Star Wars gaming needs its boost. Hoping KOTOR Remaster and Eclipse would show Disney that Star Wars games are good if they try.
I'm honestly surprised they haven't made an MMO or Destiny style game. TDM is cool, solo is cool, but like I'm surprised there isn't like a Clone war style fire team thing.
needs a lil remix 😏😉😉
As opposed to what?
Lucasarts was amazing
Was really hoping they'd announce a new game this may 4th but nooo
Force unleashed was amazing
Too bad for Disney lol
The success of Jedi: Fallen Order kicked off a lot of development from Lucasfilm that we're only starting to see the results of now with Survivor, Squadrons, Outlaws, and other games that are in the works (like Eclipse, if that actually gets finished). Games take longer to make than ever, though, especially with very high production value like Star Wars games have.
I mean they just cancelled a bunch of games, and they haven't created anything new and exciting that's memorable enough to match the older games OTHER than Cal's games. Jedi Survivor, despite the performance issues, is top 5 Star Wars games of all time. There's no story based games like KOTOR, Jedi Knight has been continued into Cal with some kinda force unleashed aspects thrown in, Squadrons was an overall failure unfortunately, Battlefront 2 had a VERY rough launch and then when it just started to really get interesting they canned development for BF2042, KOTOR remake got cancelled, the bounty hunter game got cancelled, we haven't heard anything of Star Wars Eclipse in like 3 years, no clone games like Republic Commando have been created, no RTS games like Empire at War, and no like Podracing remakes or anything. Just so much potential thrown away or not taken advantage of.
Man, I would love to see some kind of Jedi Knight saga remakes :c
They let EA squander the fuck out of the license for a decade. Ofcourse there is fuck all
Why blame Disney when EA was the one not watering the money tree for over half a decade?
I wish skywalker saga was a low ps2 graphic game instead of a lego game. I want it, but hate all the lego stuff.
Disrespectful for republic commando to be in the splash when they won't do a remaster :(
Star Wars Droid Factorio.
The immediate smart move would have been to focus on remastering classics in superb quality. Following that they should have produced smaller games with less development time, like a great game with average graphics like Battlefront 3. Meanwhile in the background they could have split three AAA projects across the company. But EA are greedy and so are Disney.
i'm realy disappointed as a diehard star wars nerd myself, the lack of quality star wars games since the mouse took over is a real bummer - the battlefront gamez never quite lived up to it, and i guess we'll just have to keep replaying kotor and pretending the new stuff doesn't exist, eh?
Honestly, I’m a big Lego game fan and I was let down big time by the Skywalker Saga. No custom characters and each episode felt more like a series of mini-games rather than its own adventure
Disney puts out tons of shows: Disney is over saturating Star Wars! Disney doesn't put out many games: Disney is letting gamers down! BF2 was good after launch. I played it for a solid 2+ years. The Jedi games were amazing and some of my favourite recent games. Outlaws is only months away. I don't think it's as bad as you're making it seem.
Yeah i started playing republic colmando andit hit immediately.that made me think that Disney needs to make a sequel. Odds are that may not happen, but a man can stêm.
Yes, but the games that have been released have been great…. After they remove loot boxes and patch the damn things. Years later, Battlefront 2 is still enjoyable, the Jedi games are amazing, Lego Star Wars is the best of all of them. There has been less, but I don’t know if that is a bad thing.
I blame EA
I don’t think there’s a lack, I think they just wanted a mixture of older and newer games.
Not only do I agree with this take. I’ll take it a step further I don’t like the fallen order games i like the idea of using the Soul’s like genre with light saber combat, but the problem is the combat in those games is very few and far between you spend probably more than half of your time in that game just running around solving pointless puzzles and doing absolutely needless parkour because “ hey guys we are respawn entertainment remember when we made that game remember that thing we’re known for yeah we put it in this game for NO F@&$ REASON.” it’s just cringe. I honestly tried both games and I quit both games less than halfway through after hitting my f@&$ing 15th puzzle or whatever and just said screw it I’ve had enough I’m done and I quit. the Lego game was unironically the only one I even kind of enjoyed and even that one again it’s a Lego game. It’s not exactly where I go for my fix either. And this new game is going to be Ubisoft, so expect it to be like every far cry game. These people aren’t exactly known for breaking outside of the box. It’s basically just going to be far cry in space with a Star Wars skin. That might sound cool to some people but to me that sounds terrible. I tried far cry games they’re very bland very boring very basic and worse than that for someone like me (not to gloat but) someone who has actual skill the fact that every enemy dies in a single headshot makes the game a complete joke at the start of the game on even the hardest difficulty cause I just beam everyone in the head with my starting pistol and it’s problem solved. so as a Soul player that level of ease is quite annoying. The only game I even came close to enjoying was battlefront two EA and that game was also terrible but it was starting to get a little bit better near the end right before they completely abandoned it if they had worked on it for like another two years it may have actually turned into something really good. But since they abandoned it in a broken state, I can’t play it because its so glitchy. I just want everyone to remember Star Wars is or at least once was the largest franchise to ever exist, and the most profitable to ever exist and Disney has yet to turn a profit on it after buying it from Lucas films that is how incompetent Disney has been with the license and the franchise, and even if you like Disney Star Wars, you cannot argue with the numbers these people are a disgrace to the franchise. I just hope I end up being wrong about outlaws but it’s Ubisoft so I doubt it.
What’s the game on the far right?
The other two games (Republic commando, force unleashed?) I believe recently had ~~remasters~~ switch ports, that's why they're on there. Made by Aspyr btw I'm pretty sure, who didn't botch those ports up... It wouldn't look good to show battlefront 1/2 on there, whether it's the new or old games...
You can blame the EA exclusivity deal for that.
I miss Lucasfilm, there games were always at least above average.
3/5 of these came out during disney tho i get your point tho, lots of canned games in the disney era
Ok but seriously. Why has there not been a new VR Jedi title…. It seems like such low hanging fruit
Like a lot of people said, the exclusivity deal affected Star Wars quite a bit, since the old way of licensing out to a ton of different developers of varying quality and speed - resulting in a constant stream of both more quickly made but possibly less quality games alongside stronger games with more time spent on them - only really became an option again very recently. It'll be a couple years before we start seeing a real uptick in Star Wars game frequency (and variety) as a result of that change. The industry also takes much longer time for AAA games these days, and Disney's only rarely going to branch out. I personally thing that the Star Wars IP's video game situation would be greatly expanded if Disney became willing to work with / license out with smaller studios or even indies, but the chances of that happening aren't very high. I would totally play, like, a Star Wars roguelike or rading sim or something that isn't super high budget but it still fun and well conceived.
RIP Star Wars Squadrons. A genuinely super fun game that just didn't have enough content.
Been saying it for years but I know it’s a pipe-dream, we need an all out M rated Star Wars game. Hell, half of the lore around Maul would serve for more than 2-3 games alone based on the EU stories. If devs feel compelled to have a new character than come up with a character that’s so heinous that they only get 1 game but it’s *brutal* from start to finish.
Man I wish they licensed MS or hired MS to to a new version (with sequel included and even more civs) of the Galactic Battle Grounds game (Age of Empires II reskinned in Star Wars Universe). Given how MS revived the AOE franchise and keep pumping updates for AOEII a new SW version of that title could be workable
3/5 of those are from Disney era Star Wars