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A few months before Free Radical Design cratered, founder Steve Ellis set up a new studio and parked the domain for "Pumpkin Beach." Well, he and 20 former FRD coders now have jobs there.
UK developer Free Radical Design, the team behind Haze and the Time Splitters franchise, have closed their doors, apparently permanently, according to a number of inside sources.
While downloadable content for Star Wars: the Force Unleashed has mainly consisted of new costumes so far, LucasArts has announced the release of a new single-player level for the game - and more new costumes.
The new level takes place on the Planet Coruscant inside of a Jedi Temple, where the Secret Apprentice travels in search of information about his father. Searching through the rubble he is forced to face his own inner demons, which I'm guessing are much more unpleasant than his outer demons.
New character skins included in the pack range from a Lightsaber training droid to the bad mother himself, Mace L. Windu. Hit the link for some screens of the new level and costumes, and hit the jump for a complete list of who you can be now.
Virgil Griffith is a hacker. You might not know him by name, but you may well know him by deed, he's the guy behind WikiScanner, the tool that lets you find out who's been tinkering with Wikipedia entries. His background in exploiting security systems could see him labelled a hacker. He prefers the term "disruptive technologist". Either way, the guy had one hell of an education, as he got his start playing around with code with a game that's very dear to my heart:
I remember in particular there was a 'Star Wars' game, X-Wing...Only one of my computer-controlled wingmen was any good. My very first hack at age 9 was noticing there was a file for each pilot, and I simply copied the pilot file for the good wingman 20 times, giving me a plentiful supply of the best wingmen from then on.
Developers BioWare and LucasArts are once again joining forces, this time for MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic. The still undated game is underdevelopment at Bioware's Austing studio, the both BioWare and LucasArts hope to put out a World of Warcraft killer. Both must be daunted by the task. "Daunted? I don't know if I'd use that word," said LucasArts online boss Tom Nichols. I'm bullish, I'm optimistic... It is, in a sense, overwhelming sometimes when you think about it, when you think about the amount of work that we have to do, and the amount of content that we're building, all the things you have to have in place to successfully launch a large-scale MMO: that's a lot of work, absolutely."
KOTOR MMO is "overwhelming," says Lucas boss, but the opportunity is "huge" [VG247]
We're a decade on from the undisputed greatest year in video gaming, a year in which we saw the release of the Tim Schafer designed Grim Fandango just one of 1998's many, many highlights. Schafer, perhaps feeling the sting of nostalgia of the release of Grim Fandango, has graciously released the classic adventure game's original design document, submitted to LucasArts for in 1996.
Telltale Games has been churning out the episodes of their Sam & Max and Strong Bad series; GameSetWatch talked to Mike Stemmle, LucasArts veteran and current Telltale writer and designer, about the Telltale design process, the veteran-friendly atmosphere (unsurprisingly, the Telltale ranks are full of other LucasArts veterans), and the potentials for non-licensed IP. On the inner workings of Telltale, Stemmle has this to say:
Darth Loser...Tatooiny...C-Creepio...fuck you, George Lucas. I know, you didn't make this game, but still. You led us down the path that led to this game. Which led to this trailer.
After the "big reveal" at the San Francisco LucasArts office, we were given the chance for Q&A with BioWare and LucasArts on details for the KOTOR MMO. Which was kind of silly, since they largely refused to answer any of the questions with anything besides "We can't talk about that yet."
So here's what we don't know:
—The level cap
—The release date
—The type or total number of classes (so far, only Jedi and Sith have been officially announced)
—If or what kind of vehicles and spaceships users will be able to own/access/build
—If or which races will be faction-specific
—What kind of business models the MMO will employ (subscription, micro transactions, etc.)
As for what we do know, you'll have to hit the jump to find out.
Now that we've got a name and a genre to go with the Bioware/EA Star Wars title, we can move onto other questions. Like this one: will Star Wars: Old Republic be making its way to consoles? EA are playing it coy, EA Games president Frank Gibeau saying that, along with a console version of Warhammer Online, it's "under consideration". Hardly committal, but then, these are early days. So give it time. If we had two money-printing licenses sitting around on PC, and could theoretically port them to consoles, we'd have them "under consideration" too.
Console Star Wars MMO "under consideration", says EA exec [Eurogamer]
