Star Wars 1313 - Star Wars tie-in stigma, next gen visuals and Coruscant's Dark Side

[Teajunkie]

It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment that LucasArts started to fall from grace, but it's easy enough to locate its lowest ebb.

2010's The Force Unleashed II failed to deliver the sequel we'd hoped for, and left the future of LucasArts looking unclear. Major studio layoffs combined with an emphasis on point-and-click re-releases left us wondering whether this would be the last we'd see of the developer's big-budget console games.

After years of relying on the sci-fi brand to bolster games that would have struggled to succeed without it, LucasArts is taking the label seriously again, promising to make a Star Wars game worthy of the name.
To do that, it's done away with half-measures and tracked down some of the best creative talent in the world. And luckily, it didn't have to look far to find it.



Industrial Light & Magic - a Lucasfilm division that works within the same office - has had experience with high-end visual effects that make most video games look like tarted-up Duplo. Originally founded in 1975 to work on the space battles for Star Wars, ILM has been an industry pioneer for more than 35 years, and created everything from Jurassic Park's dinosaurs to the crew members in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. And it's based in the same office as the games team.

This brought an entirely accidental advantage to LucasArts' 2010 cutbacks. When the much-reduced games team sat down to work on a game about a human bounty hunter in the world of 1313, it needed help. "We were working on the set-piece to show at E3, and there was an opportunity to brainstorm with ILM visual effects supervisor Kim Libreri and a guy called Scott Benza, who was the animation director on all the Transformers movies," explains creative director Dominic Robilliard. "That was my first contact, but after that I was advised to talk to another guy, then another guy, until this network of people on the team grew."

With a chunk of Hollywood's finest on the case, the team created a spectacular demo that became the talk of a sequel-infested E3. The ILM crew was keen to carry on, and got the nod from the Lucasfilm president to continue working on the game. Suddenly, the situation at LucasArts changed: transforming an on-the-ropes developer into one with the best graphics team in the world. It's a change that's too swift to even justify a montage, and the results are already blowing our minds.

A New Hope

LucasArts could have tried recruiting the ILM team a long time ago, but it would have been a massive waste of its time. Getting Hollywood's top CGI talent to work on an Xbox 360 game is a bit like asking NASA to come and fix your bike. As the next generation looms closer, however, the company has finally found the technology that makes its involvement worthwhile. The team outright refuses to discuss which platforms it will release on, which is as clear a hint as we'll get that it's coming to the next Xbox, not this one.

One of many highlights of the E3 demo, in which two bounty hunters face off against a group of droids boarding their ship in a spectacular mid-air battle, is the breathtaking level of realism seen in the characters.
It's an effect created by something more than a simple boost to graphics horsepower. Michael Koperwas has specialised in motion capture for films like Rango and Avengers, and he brought across the necessary skills and technology for Star Wars 1313.



"We have these cameras attached to a sort of head-rig that offers a close-up view of the facial mo-cap markers. These give us a really crucial window into what's going on with someone's face while they're acting," explains Koperwas.

Capturing facial movements and voice at the same time as body movements is a vital part of the process, he says, questioning the techniques used by other games studios: "If you try to imagine the same performance with someone sitting in a chair, it doesn't work. It looks wrong."

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