Force Unleashed slips to next spring 08 Mar, 2007 / Comments: 7
The upcoming Star Wars FPS, originally scheduled for this November, has been delayed until Spring 2008. Just last month the same thing happened to the new Indiana Jones game, only here there's no movie that can be used as an excuse. It's almost as if, gasp, the game is actually delayed, for the same reason other games are!
Sounds pretty reasonable to me. After all, isn't it better to release a game that's late but quality than timely but buggy? I mean to me the only way something like this would make you look bad is if you publicly slammed every developer who did the same or something.
Knowing Jim Ward's MO the game pushback will be more to do with marketing strategy (there's going to be an action figure line and book / comic tie-ins) than the game not being finished bt November.
In fact - even more likely - it may even be timed to coincide with an unrelated, though much bigger, Star Wars 'event' such as the first of the 2 TV series hitting our screens.
Jim Ward's "MO" doesn't hold much water when there's no indication that he's going to live up to it. How many LucasArts games have been released or put in development since that quote? Now, how many out of those have been delayed or cancelled?
Is LucasArts holding back Force Unleashed to take advantage of the TV shows? Maybe, but it doesn't seem to me something to delay a game six months for. And anyway, Star Wars is ALWAYS going to have something on the horizon. Does that mean that every time a LucasArts game gets delayed I should just assume that it's because it's potentially going to piggyback the promotional push of another Star Wars thing, because that's what Jim Ward's "philosophy" (which we haven't really seen in action) would have me believe? If you read the Gamespot preview for the game that was put up today, they note that the game is - and looks - in very early development, and they think that the extra time will benefit it. That the delay is specifically for extra development is speculation on Gamespot's part, but it seems reasonable to me.
This comment is way too long because I like to think that I post what I do not because I have a personal vendetta against LucasArts, but because I see things as they are. I do not mind that Force Unleashed is being delayed (I wasn't really interested in it in the first place, but that's beside the point...), and I think that if a game needs more time it should have more time. As the post said, I'm totally for giving extra time to games that need it and think that Force Unleashed was delayed for a legitimate reason. Just like with any other game developer, it might have gotten delayed because of internal problems, or because something took longer than expected, or because of something that couldn't possibly be foreseen. It seems to me that when Jim Ward (a newcomer to the games industry, right?) lashed out against any game developer that committed the sin of missing deadlines, he might have been talking about something he knew little about.
We make kick-ass games, but on time and on budget. Failure on any one of those three points is failure for the project.
Pretty big words, and while EA is the only developer he pissed on by name he was talking basically like it was an open letter to the whole games industry.
Heh. Yeah.