E3 Day Two – LucasArts
Events
Giving my sore feet and aching eyes a much-needed rest, LucasArts pulled the gathered members of the press into a theater themed after the interior of a Star Wars space shuttle. Through the windows, you could see a gradual descent through a seemingly endless series of layers, diving down deeper into what we soon learned was Coruscant. Hovering in the main screen were the words “Star Wars 1313.”
The presenters told us that in this game, there would be no Jedis, and no Force—only a bounty hunter’s trek through the most dangerous place in the galaxy: the seedy 1313th level of Coruscant’s massive planet-city.
As their cargo ship descends the layers, two bounty hunters find themselves under attack from above. They must protect and subdue a particularly nasty-seeming ward from an enemy team of masked men led by a droid of some kind, eventually abandoning their crumbling craft to board the enemy’s. The team exhibited the full power of their motion-cap system with a short video explaining the process, and the results are damned impressive.
Facial expressions and bodily tics add character and dimension to the dialogue, which isn’t overloading you with information. Gameplay, however, looked like it took its cues from the Uncharted series, with cover-based shooting and cinematic, linear platforming.
Not that this is a problem, of course, as even the guy running through the demo managed to get himself killed in the process, speaking at least to the difficulty and brutality of the combat. I’m interested to see what other features that LucasArts will include in Star Wars 1313, which seems like a return to the dark and dirty setting that drew people in to the original Star Wars series.