This project was cancelled before Fallen Order was released to glowing praise and sales that exceeded expectations.
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Kotaku (Jason Schreier): Sources: EA Canceled A Star Wars: Battlefront Spinoff Last Year
- Thread starter poklane
- Start date
It wasn't just one thing or one documentary. I've heard it from the Visceral team, I heard it from the Battlefront team, I heard it from the Fallen Order team, and I've heard it from the Old Republic team. The thing is, their "overseeing" impacts some people on the development team more than others. Someone who is a character modeler or animator is going to have a much more frustrating time waiting for approval for days on end when there's important work to be done than a level designer making a "less-important" desert planet that looks like Tatooine, especially as that's some of the harder work to do for a game and suddenly it's pushed back further and further into the "crunch" period. You can get by with a blurry texture or a poor model in a dense junk level, but players immediately will notice if you didn't have the time to polish an important character or story scene.
And, yeah, ALL license holders have some degree of oversight. Capcom talked about how Marvel has a giant list of restrictions and rules for their characters when designing Marvel vs Capcom - up to and including the position of Doctor Strange's fingers during spells and the animation of his hands. The difference, they said, was that Marvel gave them the big giant list of requirements for every character - what was allowed, what wasn't - and Capcom then had to just do one cycle for feedback to see if their approach fit Marvel's criteria. For Lucasfilm and their Star Wars projects, I've heard that wasn't the case. As a designer, nothing frustrated me more than designing "in the dark" without direction or rules, only to submit it for approval and get feedback that was the equivalent of "not what I'm look for, give me another round of ideas, I'll know it when I see it. Change their shirt color or something. Make the walk cycle cooler."
So in isolation, one example of "make the speed of Force Push faster" isn't that bad. But I often hear it's far more than that. EVERY thing must get approved by Lucasfilm - every character, story beat, alien world, ship design, weapon design, hair design, clothing design, creature design, plant design, voice line, voice delivery, etc. - and that just naturally slows things down. Good games can take years to make even if everything is going smoothly with fast approvals.
Which is a testament that, yeah, Battlefront 2 got good and Fallen Order was solid, which is a massive achievement given the extra hurdles needed to get it to store shelves, and likely a reason why they were both still released in a rough state.
Which is why EA should have had more faith in the development team and license instead of jumping the gun and thinking these type of games aren't viable.
Besides sports games and Star Wars, what other licensed games do they do?
Well if you took away the sports IP they'd probably go out of business.
No, they just wouldnt be the most popular/successful publisher
Fairly sure they'd be taking losses the last time I was looking at their books. They don't do a great deal else and their handling of Star Wars is way too temperamental.
I mean, i can relate but based on what i've heard it isn't as dire as you're describing.
I wouldn't attribute the flaws of those titles to tje fact that they had to get approval from Lucasfilm people who were involved with the project from the get go,
EA was never wrong about they said wasn't viable compare to the changing market trends.
Around 2008 is when the StarWars license went to crap because LucasArts themselves shifted focus from mid-tier games to going after a few AAA games (always cancelled Battlefront 3 and trying to push Force Unleased as AAA)
LOL I love multiplayer shooters. Battlefront 1 was not a complete game while 2 at launch was complete but terrible game
Thats the problem, EA owns the license everything doesn't need to be a AAA release.
They have engines, mechanics and assets of a FPS and flight games.
why not do a cheap little EA's Star Wars Starfighter with all those assets, or EA's Star Wars Imperial/Rebel Commando?
EA wants everyone to focus and buy their 1 big AAA.
I replied to someone who said they have done nothing good with it. Goalpost moving is fun though.
And needing to go back 16 years to base your argument around games from 2003 is telling.
I mean, sure, but it's not like 2003 was the last good year. We got KOTOR 2 in 2004, Republic Commando and Battlefront II in 2005, Empire at War in 2006, Force Unleashed in 2008, Force Unleashed 2 in 2010, The Old Republic in 2011, etc...
I'd rather take the 7 years from 2003-2010 than the 7 years from 2013-2020.
Sure, I get that.
But saying EA literally did nothing worthwhile with the license a few months after releasing what will absolutely go down as one of the greatest Star Wars games is pretty poor commentary.
I certainly won't say Fallen Order is a bad game (it's very good, in fact), but... I'm going to wait for the honeymoon period for it to die down before I label it as one of the greatest ever. Months later and it's still supremely rough in places, clearly unpolished and broke and glitchy, and definitely should have been held back several more months to get much-needed polish and bug-testing.
I'll agree with the critics that said that it's a decent game that seems much better than it actually is because everyone was so hungry for a good Star Wars experience that it inflated their opinion of an above-average game into one of the "best" games of the year, when it's merely a solid 6 or 7/10 (but that's basically an oasis on Tatooine for Star Wars players who haven't had a single-player game THAT good in nearly a decade.)
Definitely a step in the right direction, but I'm not sure I would even count it among the top 10 best Star Wars games I've played.
Fallen Orders' game director disagrees with that assertion
Lucasfilm wanted Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order to be a very different game at first
"You might as well ask us to start building a racing game at this point"
www.gamesradar.com
"I pitched, 'Hey, what if we do a game about Jedi and Force powers?' And they were not super comfortable with that. They kind of threw it back and were like, 'What about blasters, and maybe bounty hunters?' I was like, that's not the background of the team that we built. You might as well ask us to start building a racing game at this point. I don't think anybody's really gonna be happy with the results of that.
"What I came to learn and find out is that, for them, the Jedi is the Holy Grail. To make a game about Jedi, you've gotta earn it. There was a little bit of a back and forth but they could see where I was coming from. So they said, 'Alright, we can start having a conversation about making a game about Force users. But not Jedi.' Then the game comes out and its name is Jedi, so obviously there was a big relationship that needed to be built there."
"They own the license. It's their responsibility that we stay in line and play by the rules," Asmussen explains. "At work I might be like, 'Yeah, I spoke with Lucasfilm and they gave us a hard no on this one thing.' Why? Why can't we do this?' Sometimes we didn't get a very good explanation, and that's because they couldn't tell us why. Which is a very fair response when you're working with such a big franchise."
Fallen Orders' game director disagrees with that assertion
Lucasfilm wanted Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order to be a very different game at first
"You might as well ask us to start building a racing game at this point"
"I pitched, 'Hey, what if we do a game about Jedi and Force powers?' And they were not super comfortable with that. They kind of threw it back and were like, 'What about blasters, and maybe bounty hunters?' I was like, that's not the background of the team that we built. You might as well ask us to start building a racing game at this point. I don't think anybody's really gonna be happy with the results of that.
"What I came to learn and find out is that, for them, the Jedi is the Holy Grail. To make a game about Jedi, you've gotta earn it. There was a little bit of a back and forth but they could see where I was coming from. So they said, 'Alright, we can start having a conversation about making a game about Force users. But not Jedi.' Then the game comes out and its name is Jedi, so obviously there was a big relationship that needed to be built there."
"They own the license. It's their responsibility that we stay in line and play by the rules," Asmussen explains. "At work I might be like, 'Yeah, I spoke with Lucasfilm and they gave us a hard no on this one thing.' Why? Why can't we do this?' Sometimes we didn't get a very good explanation, and that's because they couldn't tell us why. Which is a very fair response when you're working with such a big franchise."
I remember BF2 devs also speaking out about it, they blamed Lucas for the lootboxes because they wouldn't let them sell cosmetics, something about "we can't have a pink darth vader" or some such.
From a quality perspective, sure. I'd love smaller games instead. Hard to say that it's the wrong fiscal decision, though. Battlefront, Battlefront 2 and Fallen Order all sold over 10 million copies (the first two considerably more than 10 million), and the multiplayer titles have been bringing in substantial service revenues from microtransactions for years.
Oh geez, this. "They told us it would "break the canon"."
As if Darth Vader fighting Anakin Skywalker on Bespin while BB-8 rolls around didn't already do that.
Is there no Battlefield this Fall to launch next gen ☹
BF4 (and Resogun) will always be the game that I remember from the PS4 launch. That skyscraper collapse was just wow and felt next gen at 60fps.
Saying EA did nothing with the franchise is disingenuous.
Saying that they squandered it is on the nose.
BF1 should have had more content.
BF2 had a lot more work put into it so kudos for that but it generally seems to be a pretty weak game at heart despite that. People are still enjoying it but I loved BF1 gameplay and atmosphere and BF2 loses a lot of that for me and many others.
2 lackluster shooters in the same series.
Fallen Order is more what we wanted. However that's the tail end of the movie releases. I see 2008 onwards keeps getting brought up but those years didn't have the added benefit of a bunch of super hyped new movie releases, locations and characters to pull from. Yes EA squandered it.
Saying that they squandered it is on the nose.
BF1 should have had more content.
BF2 had a lot more work put into it so kudos for that but it generally seems to be a pretty weak game at heart despite that. People are still enjoying it but I loved BF1 gameplay and atmosphere and BF2 loses a lot of that for me and many others.
2 lackluster shooters in the same series.
Fallen Order is more what we wanted. However that's the tail end of the movie releases. I see 2008 onwards keeps getting brought up but those years didn't have the added benefit of a bunch of super hyped new movie releases, locations and characters to pull from. Yes EA squandered it.
That article literally proves what I said about the gross exaggeration of working with Lucasfilm.Fallen Orders' game director disagrees with that assertion
Lucasfilm wanted Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order to be a very different game at first
"You might as well ask us to start building a racing game at this point"
"I pitched, 'Hey, what if we do a game about Jedi and Force powers?' And they were not super comfortable with that. They kind of threw it back and were like, 'What about blasters, and maybe bounty hunters?' I was like, that's not the background of the team that we built. You might as well ask us to start building a racing game at this point. I don't think anybody's really gonna be happy with the results of that.
"What I came to learn and find out is that, for them, the Jedi is the Holy Grail. To make a game about Jedi, you've gotta earn it. There was a little bit of a back and forth but they could see where I was coming from. So they said, 'Alright, we can start having a conversation about making a game about Force users. But not Jedi.' Then the game comes out and its name is Jedi, so obviously there was a big relationship that needed to be built there."
"They own the license. It's their responsibility that we stay in line and play by the rules," Asmussen explains. "At work I might be like, 'Yeah, I spoke with Lucasfilm and they gave us a hard no on this one thing.' Why? Why can't we do this?' Sometimes we didn't get a very good explanation, and that's because they couldn't tell us why. Which is a very fair response when you're working with such a big franchise."
Anakin wasn't playable until years after the initial release.
... That doesn't mean I still can't make this crazy canon-destroying scenario happen, which is their big argument against cosmetics.
This is again, years after the initial discussion about certain cosmetics breaking canon. The concern was never "certain characters should never fight" it was always "all costumes should fit the canon"... That doesn't mean I still can't make this crazy canon-destroying scenario happen, which is their big argument against cosmetics.
That's not what they said.
When asked about why they didn't do cosmetics, I quote:
Meanwhile, in comics:
That image is broken for me. And again, they have cosmetics now that strictly follow canon but were pursuing a different revenue model at first. Hell they had cosmetics they just didn't go ham and come up with Force Unleashed tier alts for the character.That's not what they said.
When asked about why they didn't do cosmetics, I quote:
Meanwhile, in comics: