"Excel sheets don't work for us very well because they're so big, so we have to build very robust processes," Mitchell said. "The more specific you are about your process, the better the tools you're going to get out of it. You're going to build a better GUI and better cinematics design tools if you're specific about what you need for localization up front."

Electronic Arts announced that it is taking over all publishing, marketing, and distribution responsibilities previously held by LucasArts Ltd. for upcoming MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic.

EA says it updated its global publishing agreement with LucasArts in order to have these publishing duties "centralized for efficiency", claiming that this will benefit customer service and other operations. LucasArts, as the licensor of the Star Wars property, will continue to collaborate on the online game's design and marketing.

Whatever went down behind the scenes, the result is a game that sometimes resembles a flavorless tech demo for The Force Unleashed – not a worthy successor. While there are certainly pleasures to be had in The Force Unleashed II, they come off as the dregs of a concept that has run its course. The series was bound to exhaust itself someday, but the fact that it happened this early is a brutal disappointment.

The story I found so captivating in The Force Unleashed, is dragged back into life for the sequel, undermining much of that epic tale's original take. The level design, while not broken, is something far worse: Bland. Even the voice acting, which I loved in the original game, started to grate on my nerves halfway through the surprisingly short jaunt.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II takes nearly every complaint we had about the original and fixes it or gives us something better. We finally feel like a proper, force-wielding one-man army. It’s still short and doesn’t take us on a truly grand tour of the Star Wars universe, but the storytelling holds up in quality and fits right in to the existing mythology.