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Mar 26, 2008 10:54 AM | Report Abuse reply

Star Wars The Force Unleashed

Set between the stories of Episode III (Revenge of the Sith) and Episode IV (A New Hope), Star Wars: The Force Unleashed centers around a young apprentice on the Dark Side of the Force under the wing of Darth Vader himself. Yes, fans finally get a game focused around being bad. However, the apprentice holds a secret; he's tasted the dark power and now wants to kill the Emperor, taking hold of the galaxy for himself. One would imagine that the Emperor's underling (Darth Vader) seeks the same goal. Now there's a battle.

Mar 26, 2008 10:55 AM | Report Abuse reply

Star Wars The Force Unleashed

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is a next-gen Star Wars video game that takes place between the films Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Being the centerpiece of the Star Wars: The Force Unleashed multimedia project, the game is to be released on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Wii as well as the PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, and Nintendo DS. LucasArts is working in conjunction with Industrial Light & Magic, Pixelux Entertainment, and NaturalMotion to create a next-gen Star Wars experience. The game will showcase Digital Molecular Matter (DMM), an extremely detailed and realistic material physics engine developed by Pixelux, and euphoria, a realistic bio-mechanical A.I. engine by NaturalMotion. The Force Unleashed was originally slated for release in November 2007 and was delayed to the Spring of 2008, but it was once again delayed to the Summer of 2008.


Story

You will play as Darth Vader's secret apprentice and will help him exterminate the last of the Jedi. The story revolves around "redemption." The game will span several years.


Characters

The Secret Apprentice
"The young man has a knack for the Force and a dark slant to his attitude - making for a less-than-typical lead character for a Star Wars title." —IGN
"While your character is plenty evil-looking and wields a red lightsaber, company reps were quick to point out that he isn't a Sith at all. In fact, concept art shows the character wearing a sort of shackle on his wrist that Vader apparently uses to control him…" —GameSpot
In the game, the player shares a love interest with Juno Eclipse, an Imperial who pilots your ship, the Rogue Shadow.

Darth Vader
By the end of the game, you will supposedly have a deeper understanding of Darth Vader and how the events in the game affect his behavior in the original trilogy. Vader finally came to realize that the Emperor had tricked him into turning towards the dark side, but he "thinks" he knows it's too late to go back, so the only thing he can do is destroy Lord Sidious with another apprentice—i.e. the player.


Gameplay

You start off as a Dark Side Adept with the majority of powers at your disposal, from Force Push to Lightning. Throughout the game your powers can and will evolve to legendary strength. The choices that the player makes will affect the outcome of the game resulting in several alternate endings including the "true" (canon) ending. Shaak Ti is one of the major Jedi that the player must face. Vader is the only one who knows that the apprentice (you) exists. In order to keep it that way, he orders you to wipe out all witnesses. Everyone is the enemy.
In the February 2007 issue of Game Informer, it was confirmed that you can unlock new outfits.


Voice cast

Nathalie Cox – Juno Eclipse
Cully Fredrickson – Rahm Kota
Sam Witwer – Secret Apprentice
Matt Sloan – Darth Vader
Cam Clarke – Obi-Wan Kenobi
Mary Newman – Princess Leia
Zeb Drees – Secret Apprentice (Child)
Kari Wahlgren – Aayla Secura
Adrienne Wilkinson – Maris Brood


Sequels

As revealed at Celebration Europe, LucasArts is currently planning the next installment of The Force Unleashed storyline as well as other sequels.
"All these characters are going into the continuity, they’ll all be canon, and they’re all part of the Star Wars galaxy. So I can imagine that there will be other follow-ups with those characters. We’re already starting to toss around ideas about the next storyline and how some of these characters can resurface and have major roles in a sequel."
―Haden Blackman


Official Trailers

The first Official Trailer premiered on Entertainment Tonight and was featured exclusively (7/12/07) on the official home for Star Wars on Yahoo!, featuring an amazing view of what's to come as far as gameplay and story line. The trailer later appeared on the game's official website. Little has been revealed about this new action game from LucasArts. This all-new story revisits characters and locations that fans are familiar with, but also introduces new ones that add more rich depth to the Star Wars canon. You'll meet Maris Brood, an apprentice of fan favorite Shaak Ti, and come face-to-face with General Kota, a grizzled veteran who has much to teach. You'll set foot on Raxus Prime and see Felucia, a planet only touched upon in Episode III (also in Star Wars : Empire at War Forces of Corruption and in Star Wars Battlefront II), up close and personal.


Characters

Vader's apprentice.
Maris Brood
Jabba the Hutt
Juno Eclipse
PROXY
Rahm Kota
Palpatine
Shaak Ti
Darth Vader
Secret Apprentice
Yoda
Princess Leia
Obi-Wan Kenobi
Bail Organa
Jedi droid maker
Creatures
Rancor
Bull Rancor


Events

Great Jedi Purge


Locations

Coruscant
Jedi Temple
Felucia
Haroon
Kashyyyk
Naboo
Raxus Prime
Tatooine
Yavin 4
Nar Shaddaa
TIE Fighter Construction Facility
Bespin


Force Powers

Force Grip
Force Lightning
Force Push
Force Repulse


Organizations and titles

Galactic Empire
Emperor's Shadow Guard
Imperial Navy
Stormtroopers
Heavy stormtrooper
Jedi Order
Order of the Sith Lords
Alliance to Restore the Republic (Rebel Alliance)


Sentient species

Aleena
Felucian
Gamorrean
Human
Hutt
Rodian
Togruta
Ugnaught
Wookiee
Zabrak


Vehicles and vessels

All Terrain Armored Transport
All Terrain Scout Transport
CR90 corvette
Imperial I-class Star Destroyer
Oevvaor jet catamaran
Rogue Shadow
TIE/ln starfighter
Unstable Terrain Artillery Transport


Weapons and technology

Lightsaber
Tonfa-style lightsaber



In an interview released exclusively by IGN, Haden Blackman reveals more about the upcoming Star Wars game.

Based on the announcement of an action figure wave revolving around the content of the game, and an article in the March issue of Game Informer it is known that it will feature characters named Maris Brood a scantily-clad Zabrak woman with twin green lightsabers that appear to look like tonfas, General Rahm Kota, an elder Human "Samurai" Jedi with a blue lightsaber, and Juno Eclipse, a blonde Human female Imperial officer. The figures include a battle-damaged Darth Vader, Palpatine wearing a robe with alternating dark and light brown deco using Force lightning, an Imperial Guardsman wearing armor resembling Carnor Jax and armed with a red lightsaber, referred to by Hasbro toy catalogue and computer databases as an Emperor's Shadow Guard, a younger Human male Jedi with a blue lightsaber, and stormtroopers wearing armor that resembles a cross between phase II clone trooper armor and stormtrooper armor. One is referred to as a Heavy Stormtrooper.

The March 07 issue of Game Informer features the unveiling of this game and confirms the title. It also confirms that Shaak Ti, in control of rancors, will be one of the game's bosses.

Force powers in this game are going to be over the top. When you Force push somebody, it's going to like a cannonball hit them in the gut. As for Force Usage, there will be a bar, but it will constantly regenerate. Some powers have unlimited uses such as Push, but more advanced powers such as Repulsion will take a couple of seconds to recharge. The control scheme will be akin to Psi Ops.

In addition to toys, it will have a companion book and a comic. Although the game will have multiple endings, the book and comic will follow the sole canonical ending.

When the game is finished, it is estimated to feature over 1,000 new special effects.

The official website has been redesigned (7/12/07), featuring a darker atmosphere and further information about the game.


Game technology

The Force Unleashed uses 'Ronin', a game engine developed by LucasArts. It integrates the physics engines Havok, euphoria and Digital Molecular Matter.


Euphoria

The use of euphoria, from NaturalMotion, will give characters advanced bio-mechanical AI, allowing characters to realistically respond to changes in the environment.

"Well, you probably Force pushed a stormtrooper or two as Kyle Katarn in a Jedi Knight game, right? Imagine if that stormtrooper was able to stop his progress by grabbing onto a railing and then proceeded to grab a gun beside him and fire back at Kyle—all this because his biomechanical AI simply knew that that's the best thing for him to do. That's euphoria in action."
―Haden Blackman


Digital Molecular Matter

DMM creates truly interactive environments that behave as they do in real life. Materials in games usually break in predetermined ways. DMM calculates the breakpoint in real-time. It simulates what would happen to a material when broken, @#$%tered, cut into two, snapped, splintered, pushed, squeezed, etc. It is exclusive to LucasArts until September 2008.

"Now, imagine that Kyle pushes another stormtrooper into a building with so much force that you'd expect the stormtrooper to make a permanent dent in the wall. That happens with DMM, and no matter how many times you throw that stormtrooper into that wall, it will look different every single time, and still always look authentic. In fact, if you hit him hard enough and the building is dilapidated enough, the whole thing might collapse on the stormtrooper, because DMM also takes into account the actual physical mass of an object and the ways in which objects are constructed. Even with euphoria in place, there's no getting up from that!"
―Haden Blackman


Industrial Light & Magic

ILM is partnering with LucasArts to deliver movie-quality special effects in real-time for the game.

"In Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, the team is striving to raise the bar to deliver movie-quality effects. As much as possible, we want gamers to feel as if they are living the adventure unfolding before their controller, and with the added processing power of the next-gen platforms it is now possible to bring movie-quality effects and lighting to games. One of the advantages that we have at LucasArts is that we're a part of the same company, Lucasfilm, which owns Industrial Light and Magic (just in case you didn't already know). And for the first time in the histories of the two companies, LucasArts and ILM are teaming up to co-develop tools that will enable Star Wars: The Force Unleashed to feature polished effects, the likes of which have only been hinted at in previous games."
―Brett Rector

Mar 26, 2008 10:56 AM | Report Abuse reply

Nintendo Power
May 2007 / V215
Page 18

Dark Side Story
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed for DS reveals details about the franchise’s powers with a story crafted by George Lucas.

You have not seen the last of Darth Vader. In fact, In Star Wars: The Force Unleashed for the DS, he is your mentor for a round of Jedi-smashing action the likes of which you have never experienced. The game takes place during the story-rich period between Episodes III and IV, in which Vader tightens his grip on the Jedi. As the villain’s secret apprentice, you learn a Force that has been dramatically reimagined to let you lift targets, toss them, and even hit them with lightning bolts. Not only will your mastery of the Force affect other fighters, but it will stir up the environment, as illustrated in early concept art. Additionally, the story will change based on your actions. A new line of toys and comics will accompany the game’s release. George S.

Mar 26, 2008 10:57 AM | Report Abuse reply

New Star Wars game displays impressive technology
By Blake Snow
January 2008
(http://www.gamepro.com/news.cfm?article_id=158568)


LucasArts on Friday pulled the curtain on technology innovations to be featured in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed this summer.

Similar to other recent games, The Force Unleashed displaces multiple on screen objects in realistic fashion, something LucasArts calls "Havok" (think of it as Genesis Blast Processing for today).

The second technology, dubbed "Euphoria," promises advanced enemy behavior, such that if you throw a crate at an incoming storm trooper, the poor sap will either duck, grab on, or just freak out. "No two actions are ever the same," maintain developers in the below trailer.

Lastly, and most impressive, is a graphics engine that simulates authentic movement of environmental objects, like warped metal, splintered wood, or @#$%tered glass. The effect isn't entirely new to games, but what's on display here (particularly metal behavior) looks really good.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is scheduled for a summer release on Xbox 360 and PS3, with development afterthoughts (read: scaled down versions) on Wii, PS2, PSP, DS, and N-Gage.

Mar 26, 2008 10:58 AM | Report Abuse reply

Nintendo Power
February 2008 / V225
Page 22

Jedi Gone Wild
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Platform: Wii (Also on DS)
Publisher: Lucasarts
Developer: Krome
Release: April 2008

If you are a Star Wars fanatic like me, then you may have wondered why the Jedi and Sith never do very much with the Force. The most impressive things we saw in the movies were Vader throwing some crates around and Yoda pulling an X-wing out of the mud. So, after watching what the Force can do in any 10 seconds of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, its hard to go back to the movies.

This is an over-the-top version of the Force in which TIE fighters are thrown around like rag dolls and Star Destroyers are yanked out of the sky. You can use the Force to solve simple problems (like raising submerged junk to form a bridge across a toxic pond), to push enemies away, or even to charge up foes with lightning to use them as bombs.

If that last move sounds a little Dark Side, it is with good reason-you play as Darth Vaders secret apprentice. The game takes place between Episodes III and IV, during the rise of the Empire. Your mission is to hunt down and destroy the last of the Jedi, but through the storys many twists and turns you will begin to see the error in your ways. Big gaps in thee Star Wars timeline are filled in with some major shockers that longtime fans should enjoy.

The Force Unleashed introduces new characters to the Star Wars universe, such as Juno Eclipse, the pilot of your ship (the Rogue Shadow) and your love interest. Also, more of a focus is put on fan-favorite side characters like the Jedi Shaak Ti, and fans will recognize many familiar planets mixed in with the new locations.

Using the Force is cool, but of course, this just would not be a Star Wars game without a lightsaber. It is controlled by swinging the Wii remote up, down, left, and right, and by thrusting it forward. Rounding out the combat system are both lightsaber and Force Power combo attacks, and experience points can be spent on more Force Powers.

The Wii version of the game has an exclusive Duel mode, which is a one-on-one fighting game with 25 characters to choose from. Victory terms can be set so that the first to five wins, or based on a time limit.

There is also a DS version of the game, developed by N-Space, which follows the same story but plays very differently. Both titles release in April. So we should reviews for you soon. Until then, remember: the Force will be with you . . . always. - CHRIS SL.

Mar 26, 2008 10:58 AM | Report Abuse reply

The Game Has Changed
This summer, Xbox and PlayStation junkies will get to feel as if they’ve gone inside a Star Wars movie, one that in some ways has a mind of its own. As the author discovers firsthand, video games are entering a whole new universe.
by Frank DiGiacomo
March 2008
(http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/03/lucas200803)


To visit the San Francisco offices of LucasArts, the video-game arm of George Lucas’s entertainment empire, is to glimpse first-hand the dividends that his six-episode Star Wars saga has generated over the last 30 years. The $350 million state-of-the-technological-art Presidio campus that the company shares with its moviemaking brethren, Lucasfilm and visual-effects house Industrial Light & Magic, boasts a commissary with panoramic views of the city (including, on a clear day, the Golden Gate Bridge); an employee gift shop stocked with Skywalker Ranch olive oil, Star Wars merchandise, and other Lucasfilm swag; and a plush 350-seat theater where employees can test-drive video games on a full-size movie screen or watch the latest film releases after work.

In many cases, the employees themselves are byproducts of the influence of Star Wars: writers, designers, animators, and artists who, as kids and teens, were wowed by the movies and decided that they, too, wanted to create science-fiction and fantasy characters and visuals that were as fully formed and plausible as those that Lucas had put on movie screens. But instead of lining up behind the crowds jockeying to get into film school, these future storytellers chose as their canvas the much younger and more interactive medium of video games, a medium that increasingly overlaps with filmmaking—artistically, technically, and in terms of storytelling technique—but that also has its own rules, philosophies, and cultural touchstones. On the Presidio campus there stands a bronze statue of Eadweard Muybridge, whose series of consecutive photos taken at a horse farm in 1878—known today as “The Horse in Motion”—is a motion-picture prototype. The Muybridge of the video-game industry is arguably Nolan Bushnell, co-founder of Atari and the creator in the mid-70s of Pong, the first successful, if primitive, home video game: a digitally generated ball was knocked between two digitally generated paddles until one of the players was declared the winner or fell asleep from boredom. Along those same lines, Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man are the equivalent of silent-film stars, and, for a number of LucasArts executives, the Citizen Kane of 3-D video games is Nintendo’s Super Mario 64. Released in 1996 for what was then the groundbreaking Nintendo 64 game console, and designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, who has created some of the most enduring characters and games in the history of the industry, Super Mario 64 was not only the first true 3-D video game, according to LucasArts vice president of product development Peter Hirschmann, but also the game that established a number of conventions—“such as how you navigate a 3-D space and how a camera moves in 3-D space,” Hirschmann says—which game designers still use today.
But when it comes to mimicking real-life conventions—the laws of physics, the squishy dynamics of biology, the unpredictability of human behavior—video games are still struggling with their technical limitations. Take an action as simple, or at least in gaming as commonplace, as throwing a villain through a wooden door. No matter what combination of moves or punches the hero uses, the bad guy usually breaks through the door in the same stiff and unconvincing way—usually uttering the same stilted grunt or scream—each and every time the gamer plays through this point in the game. That’s because, in essence, most video games are composed of a series of brief, inter-related animations that are cued by the gamer. Some games provide multiple animations for a particular action, to give the illusion of spontaneity, but that is an expensive proposition.
The player’s suspension of disbelief is also tested in the way the door itself gives way when the villain flies through it. Instead of splintering in a way that resembles actual breaking wood, the door will typically come apart like separated pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

But these barriers to a much more realistic gaming experience, and, perhaps, a greater public interest in the medium, are about to fall, as I learn during an eye-opening two-day visit to Lucas’s Presidio campus. To observe the men and women of LucasArts in action—aside from noting their propensity to wear their security badges on bright yellow lanyards—is to realize that the process of making a video game is really the fulfillment of French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes’s dream of putting “the world into equation,” in the words of LucasArts lead software engineer Cedrick Collomb. Over the quarter-century the company (originally Lucasfilm Games) has been in business, that has become an increasingly complex and difficult proposition, as video-game consoles have become faster and smarter. The last generation of consoles, Sony’s PlayStation 2 and Microsoft’s original Xbox, were each outfitted with a single central processing unit (C.P.U.) and a single graphics processing unit (G.P.U.), but their successors, the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360, have the benefit of multiple C.P.U.’s and a much-advanced G.P.U. This means that the video games that run on them can be more complex, more challenging, and more three-dimensionally realistic. (Although Nintendo’s Wii does not have the C.P.U. and G.P.U. firepower of its competitors, it engages players in a level of interactivity not seen before in the video-game world by requiring them to mimic the action on-screen.)

As the consoles have become faster and better, the software developers have risen to the challenge of designing a better game experience, and one of the reasons I have come to San Francisco is to see two demonstrations of software that LucasArts is excited about incorporating into its next marquee game. The first program is called Euphoria, and was developed by NaturalMotion, a tech company based in San Francisco and Oxford, England. On a projection screen in a darkened auditorium, I watch as a digitally animated Imperial stormtrooper, the comically doomed cannon fodder of Lucas’s Star Wars universe, is lifted by an invisible force and dropped in various ways—on his head, on his back—and over various objects such as steel and wooden crates. Each time he is lifted, he struggles mightily, and then, every time he drops, he reacts differently. Dropped on his head, he grabs it with his hands before going still. And after being dropped on his back, on a metal box, he arches it in a way that suggests he is in agonizing pain.

His reactions are eerily lifelike, and I am told that what I am seeing is not animation but a kind of artificial intelligence generated by Euphoria, which enables the stormtrooper to react with an almost human uniqueness—in real time, no less—to obstacles and attacks. Dropped 100 times, the Euphoria-imbued stormtrooper will react differently 100 times, unless he is dropped in exactly the same way twice. When he is placed at the top of a sloping roof, he struggles furiously to gain purchase as he slides down, and actually grabs and hangs on to its edge for a few moments before falling to his inevitable fate. But the real pièce de résistance of the demonstration is when the stormtrooper is placed on an unsteady surface and actually begins to shift his weight and pedal his feet in order to maintain his equilibrium. “That’s not animated at all,” says Steve Dykes, the LucasArts senior engineer running the presentation. “That is actually a character trying to maintain his balance, physically simulated.”

Another demonstration begins—for a technology called Digital Molecular Matter (D.M.M.), developed by a Switzerland-based company called Pixelux Entertainment. D.M.M. makes it possible to assign the molecular properties of virtually any substance to any virtual object. In other words, doors can be made to splinter like oak, bend like soft steel, or @#$%ter like glass with a remarkable level of realism. For this demonstration, Pixelux chief operating officer Vik Sohal called up an on-screen control panel that enabled him to adjust the physical properties of a wall via such geeky-sounding parameters as Young’s Modulus (the measure of a material’s stiffness) and Poisson’s Ratio (a measure of “volume preservation”). First, Sohal made a brick wall. Then he began tossing what looked like human-weight versions of green plastic army men into the wall, which didn’t give much upon impact but cracked along the mortar lines. He called up the control panel again and gave the wall the physical properties of thin plastic. This time when the army men hit the wall it caved in and bent like a cheap aboveground swimming pool.

By the time the demonstration was over, I was left with the unmistakable sense that LucasArts was on the cutting edge of a huge leap forward for the video-game industry—a technological breakthrough, nearly as revolutionary as the introduction of sound in film, that could finally give gaming the kind of immersive realism that would enable it to join movies and television as a form of mainstream entertainment. The company has incorporated Euphoria and D.M.M. technologies into an ambitious video game called Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, which is scheduled to be released this summer. In addition to groundbreaking software, the game will employ Industrial Light & Magic’s facial-likeness technology and motion-capture expertise, which will give the digitally animated characters remarkably lifelike expressions and movements. And perhaps most important of all, the game has a compelling, movie-like story line, involving a secret apprentice to Darth Vader and the formation of the Rebel Alliance, which provides a visual and narrative transition between Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope. It is being billed as the “next great chapter” in George Lucas’s space saga, one that, according to the project’s art director, Matt Omernick, “aims to convince players that, ‘Oh my God, I’m actually, finally, in a Star Wars movie.’ ” And not only that: it will be a Star Wars movie with a life of its own.

Mar 26, 2008 10:59 AM | Report Abuse reply