Hopefully the full trailer will be as awesome as this one was.

Of course, we all know that the quality of the actual film is another question entirely....

Looking back, I could fault that trailer for featuring the worst parts of the film in it, like that Jar Jar stupidity and puppet Yoda. But I guess optimism prevailed for the trailer makers. The new trailers seem to only have good things to show.

From the new trailer, I'm tad worried the new movie will be too much of a nostalgia trip, but I guess that's what sequels suppose to be (?) by referencing the previous work. I hope Harrison Ford will have energy and some of his former bravado in this film because, in his recent outings, he seemed lethargic. If he has to be pumped full of speed to give a good performance so be it.

Did the original Imperial logo represent how expansive the Empire is with the notches (like how many systems they own or something)? If that's the case, I'm thinking the new logo means the Empire grew even more after the Battle of Endor?

The new Tie Fighter panels reminds me of coroplast, the stuff that they use for those yard campaign posters for a local up and coming wannabe politician.

Am I the only person who thinks this movie looks awful already?

No, as the Imperial cog was a derivation of the CIS cog.

I'm reserving judgement until I'm told what to think by a professional movie critic.

Yes.

Hopefully they make a Wing Commander sequel to attach it to.


The movie is backed by Disney, it's being made by the same Star Wars fan who made the last two Star Treks as a dry run for it, with a screenplay written by Lawrence Kasdan. Star Wars movies have never been quote-unquote "good", but If what you're looking for is "good enough", i.e. a carefully researched and immaculately cast 2 hours of straight-from-the-1980s fan service, I frankly can't imagine how you're going to be disappointed. If J. J. Abrams has proven one thing over the past few years, it's that he's more than capable of delivering the exact movie that Star Wars fans want, even if none of them are willing to admit it.

It will be delightfully inoffensive.

As for the new Battlefront, I'm sure it will be a beautiful-looking mess of a game. Like Battlefront 2 (and arguably Battlefield 4). I'm guessing EA has this down to a science in terms of how much effort is needed as a minimum for a functional game versus future profits earned.

Is it worth the time playing soapbox-on-the-internet warrior (which I like to do) by mentioning that EA is promoting pre-order DLC 7 months before release-day? It's a new record!

Yeah, that's kind of ****ing remarkable. We haven't even seen gameplay footage and they're pimping the goddamn dlc. Christ, this is what we deserve.

Well until people stop giving their money away long before the game is released into the wild, it's only going to get worse. The whole pre-order mentality and exclusive DLC system needs to be abolished.

What? You dislike our culture of giving Fortune 500 retailers zero-interest loans that never mature?


Ideally price discrimination can be abolished by decreasing consumer surplus. Unfortunately, I can't think of anything we could do that EA hasn't already tried.

Seriously, though. In this, our worst-of-all-possible-worlds, where people buy on layaway and unironically preorder housing in exchange for parking stall DLC, where the average person's memoirs would be taken as a compelling argument for eugenics if only they were literate enough to write them, I can't imagine any strategy possibly working on the consumer side. The best we can hope for is that today's price discrimination is superseded by something less objectionable. Like shareware in the 90s and expansion packs in the 90s, the discrimination strategy of pre-order is dictated by the modern economics of the game industry; studios are game-poor, never accumulating enough capital to survive even a single AAA flop. This has a lot of other negative externalities too, like press corruption and erosion of the first sale doctrine. This means solving major problems with game production and financing, with reduced consumer expectations and greater software and art asset reuse, a sort of game equivalent to a studio backlot. Despite my poor opinion of EA, they are actually doing the most to move the industry in this direction.

Basically marketing matters more than anything else because consumers are stupid and don't learn.

http://www.starwars.com/news/rogue-one-details-revealed-at-star-wars-celebration-anaheim?linkId=13642635

Seems like they're finally going to sort out the situation that there are like a thousand different "Death Star plans" plots in the SW:EU.

A shame they didn't just fully canonize Dark Forces, but alas.

wait preorder housing? what am I missing here?

I don't blame people too much, it's basically a one-sided war that's fought. hell give me a couple million and some college graduates and i'll make some marketing happen

Condo presales. Often include bonuses like parking stalls and sometimes even a car to park there.

Well, I mean... at least games don't start at $375k... So I guess there's that.

Jesus Christ. I had no idea this was for real. Just shows how much consumerism is based on fantasy (as in, the product is selling the "realization" of the condo fantasy).

In regards to Star Wars, I'm glad they're releasing the unaltered trilogy on Blu-ray. I'm going to actually purchase that.

tl;dr Marx realized no good is ever just a good, the good is also the fantasy. Marx was right on here. The fantasy is, quite indisputably, the product of crowdsourcing

Wait, I thought LucasFilm destroyed the masters in order to make the 1997 special edition (as hinted at in the supposed "last" original release of the O.T.).

Have they actually said anything about those whatsoever since that one time when Disney took over?

The Harmy Despecialised ones are pretty good I hear.

oops seems i got caught up in a rumor

harmy's for life then

Sam Clafin is being considered for one of the roles... with some makeup he could pass off as a younger Katarn. I have never seen him in anything so I have no idea if he would be good for the role or not.

"Pass off a younger Katarn".

Kyle's a generic white guy with brown hair and a beard.

I like how people expect Hollywood screenwriters to take cues from glorified fan fiction.

AKA the undeservedly high-paid ultimate glorified fan fic writers.

Kyle Katarn is a fine guy to play as in a Dark Force but I don't think it's our more respectable impulses that would make us want to see a movie of him?? I think if you think about it you'd be like "oh wait, no yeah, he's fine where he is."

Desaan should be the villain in the next Star Wars spinoff movie though, that guy was a cool complex character. Did I spell that right?

Kyle wouldn't fit into the canonical Star Wars universe. Kyle's universe is too gritty. IMO DF and DF2 showed a more interesting universe than the new trilogy

Dis ann, yo bizzle.

-opus

It's not the character, it's that he broke the rules in ways that made playing as him fun. He used guns, light side power and dark side power simultaneously.

I'm more interested in why the hell no game has implemneted saber combat like JK2. Everything else since then has felt incredibly clunky. It worked well for button mashers and enthusiasts alike. I want another game with JK2/JA style interface.

Has there been any game with saber combat whatsoever since then apart from The Force Unleashed?

Fair point. Lucas Arts went into full blown "avoid doing anything profitable at all costs" mode for a while there.

The combat in TFU wasn't as fun. It felt more like that old Mask/Legend of Zorro game.

No, I don't think Katarn will be in the spinoff. But if he is, it will be very interesting to see how that ties into the new trilogy, if at all (probably at most, a mention of his passing).

That's because it was Star Wars God of War. Lucas Arts was run by people who were so terrified of originally that they were incapable of authorizing anything but the occasional Star Wars themed clone of what ever game happened to be popular at the time.

i too miss the originality that gave us Doom Forces and X-Wing Commander.

Hey, at least those games were really efforts and made meaningful attempts to move the genre forward. Heck, wasn't Dark Forces the first fps with vertical elements to the level design.

I don't care if Star Wars games are derivative. They just need actual effort put into them to be successful. Hell, I hate COD, but they could have taken a reasonable shot of their bow with some effort. Too many missed opportunities, and only low effort clones, and an incredibly expensive MMO that no one wanted. They let incredibly successful franchises die out for no reason. Jedi Knight, KOTOR, Rouge Squadron, X-Wing, ect. Even without creativity or innovation, they could have coasted for a lot longer than they did.

What do you mean by vertical elements? Marathon made use of height, and System Shock had sloped surfaces and 3D models you could walk on. Dark Forces had deep pits but that's really the Star Wars aesthetic rather than anything specific they were trying to achieve.

Well, heres the thing:

LucasArts only ever made Star Wars themed clones of whatever happened to be popular at the time. I agree, this was fine as long as the clones were good, but it's been a very long time since they have been.

Basically the problem is that Lucas couldn't retain talent, whether internally or through their third party business relationships. We'll probably never know exactly why (non-disparagement contracts, woo) but I've heard stories that personally blame George Lucas for being a big indecisive baby, ordering rolling changes to products in late development. Not just stuff like the characters, which apparently changed a lot, but questions like "what popular game will we clone?" changed practically monthly. But, you know, just rumors. Regardless of why, we know the entire JK team quit, and the one person I know who worked on TFU lasted a couple of months.

Most of the games you've listed were made by third parties:

KotOR series - Bioware/Obsidian
Rogue Squadron series - Factor 5
X-Wing series - Peregrine Games (later Totally Games)
Jedi Knight series - last two by Raven

And all of these business relationships fell apart while **** was still profitable. We'll never know exactly why, but Bioware, at least, felt they were sacrificing more for the Star Wars IP than it was worth. (TOR wasn't made by Bioware, it was made by a different EA subsidiary they re-branded 'Bioware').

This is probably the best way to describe the debacle of LucasArts. Sadly, Lucas just kept falling more and more apart. I think it was all about ego at the end of the day, after being in the spotlight for so long, taking undue credit for things he barely influenced, Lucas just couldn't live with people coming up with ideas that others considered better than his, so he simply shunned them. I even get the impression that he simply disregarded external ideas because they came from another source.