The projects to survive those early cuts included two games developed internally, Republic Commando and the official Revenge of the Sith tie-in game, as well as Pandemic Studios’ Battlefrontand Obsidian’s Knights of the Old Republic II, which was already quite deep into development and ultimately pushed out the door. This was LucasArts’ 2004-2005 slate. Stream your Star Wars favorites right here! The Knights of the Old Republic series would live on with a MMORPG from BioWare called The Old Republic in 2011, but many don’t consider that game a true successor. For example, cutting out several talented third-party developers, such as Raven Software, Obsidian, BioWare, and Factor 5, led to the end of many of the publisher’s best franchises, most notably the Rogue Squadron and Jedi Knight series. It wasn’t necessarily an unreasonable goal (this is the Star Wars license, after all), but a string of questionable decisions pulled LucasArts farther away from that dream. The company, which enjoyed critical success in 2003, thanks to games like Knights of the Old Republic and Jedi Knight II, wanted to make a mega-blockbuster game that could compete with the Haloseries, a financial phenomenon in gaming at the time.
As I mentioned in a previous article about The Force Unleashed, 2004 was the beginning of the end: corporate restructuring led to big cuts in staffing and budgets at LucasArts by a chain of command, which, it would be fair to say, understood dollars and marketing much better than video games.
This is a good time to remember just how special this somewhat forgotten Clone Wars game really was.Ī game I consider to be among the best LucasArts had to offer in its later years, Republic Commando arrived at an interesting time in the company’s history. More than 15 years after being released on the original Xbox and PC, Republic Commando is finally making its way to PlayStation and Nintendo platforms for the first time, thanks to Aspyr, the studio behind several other successful LucasArts-era Star Wars ports for consoles and mobile.
0 kommentar(er)
