Star Wars 1313 - For the Thinking Gamer

Listening to LucasArts' creative team talk about Star Wars 1313 brings a growing sense of hope that this game is going to be the real deal. Of course, we've been slightly disappointed by Star Wars games from LucasArts in recent years, but it's possible that one of the reasons for this malaise is a certain problem with the Star Wars universe as a whole, the lack of vulnerability among its central characters.

Look, the Star Wars universe is very cool - futuristic space opera, trans-species interactions, powerful political machinations, some fantastic characters -  it's great fun. However, (and I realize this is a personal view) the mystical stuff just leaves me cold. I really don't care about super-human beings roaming the worlds and moving furniture with their minds or communing with the ether to create spangly magic weapons. I like my heroes merely slightly-more-powerful than the rest of us. Human (or whatever) except more-so.

In Star Wars 1313, the protagonist (unnamed, as yet) is a bounty hunter on a quest. He has gadgets and weapons but no special-powers My colleague Anthony Gallegos described it as "Star Wars meets Uncharted" adding, after a demo at E3 that the game "just might be a new hope."

Dominic Robilliard, creative director at LucasArts told IGN, "The danger of this world needs to live in the moment-to-moment gameplay. And so we've got mechanics that are about a character who's limited by the range of human ability, and the extraordinary things you get to do are very much based around this bounty hunter gear and the gadgets. But ultimately he's honorable in a way that I think is easier to relate to."

In the movies, the Jedi's super-powers are made palatable by the struggles that come with The Force and the fact that superhuman powers are reasonably difficult to summon and their consequences are troubling. The struggles of the super-powerful are a familiar theme at the movies - see Spider-man and The Avengers - and you can argue among yourselves as to the socio-cultural reasons why this might be so.

However, in LucasArts' Star Wars games of recent years, such as The Force Unleashed series, the subtleties - if that's not too strong a word - of these interactions are lost, and so you become an extremely powerful figure who can basically do whatever the hell he wants. Ploughing through wave after wave of enemies becomes pretty boring even if they are gorgeously rendered and much-loved character-types.

We yearn to exist in this universe and to explore its wonders, but to have our powers somewhat curtailed.

Here's where Star Wars 1313 gets interesting, because the game eschews 'The Force', lightsabers and power waves, and puts us in the position of a regular man, albeit one possessing a certain swish when it comes to combat. There's no option here of crushing AT-ATs with a flick of a fingernail or sweeping Wookies to their deaths, en masse.

Producer Peter Nicolai says, "That's what Dominic and the team have been looking for, to try and ground the entire story and the experiences, with a lot less exposure to anything like Jedi powers, much more of a lethal environment, where a lot of the weaponry, the dangers of the world you're in, have a much closer impact on the player. It does add to that overall dark and gritty feel that we're going for. "

The game's setting is the star of the show. It's based on Coruscant, one of the Star Wars' universe's most fascinating planets, a city-world seething with corruption, described by the Star Wars Encyclopedia as "a bustling megalopolis that refuses to sleep." There are 5,000 levels to the city (1313 being just one) and this gives the game, literally, depth and verticality, something the action-previews have shown to great effect.

1313 is also going for a 'Mature' rating, great news for anyone who believes Star Wars' more child-centric offerings have been its most disappointing. For LucasArts this doesn't mean gore and sensationalism, it means adult-themes and stories, another reason for glowing anticipation. Robilliard says, "Sometimes games pursue an M rating because of this desire to do something gratuitously gory, and that's not what we're doing at all. I just don't think those kinds of things go with Star Wars. So when we talk about making something that's mature-themed, it really is about those characters, the type of story content we're going to be dealing with, and the kind of things they're motivated by. The world itself as well."

LucasArts has pulled together many of the creative clans that gather around the Star Wars brand, including  Lucasfilm Animation, Industrial Light and Magic, and Skywalker Sound. Nicolai explains, "We've been doing our best to let the game's needs drive where we look for that crossover opportunity. The idea of finding those places to leverage the artistic expertise, the additional technological backup that we need. We're always looking for that next high-bar expression to put the player in these amazing situations and this amazing world. It's been, actually, a wonderful experience so far. The folks who've jumped in to help out are gamers themselves, they're really interested in what's possible in real time technology with the engines these days."

He adds, "One of the benefits of being able to talk to everybody from the other companies and share amongst the technology and the art has been the opportunity to level up in a lot of the character performances. We wanted to be able to populate this world with a lot of strong characters that would help reinforce to the player the situations that they're in, the danger that they're having to deal with."

As always with Star Wars, the most important person to worry about, is the fan. Robilliard says, "Fan expectation is a privilege, really, but it is something that you have to be incredibly careful with. And we spend huge amounts of time and effort desperately trying to get that right, and get the tone right, and be authentic and convincing in the way we handle it."

From IGN