The International House of Mojo

I hate Jim Ward, since he works by LucasArts! This fucking Star Wars!

Interesting username for a Star Wars hater.

Yes, but I think SWKOTOR is a good game. But LucasArts is only a publisher of the game.

But still :)

The last original title from LucasArts was EMI, I think.

The last in-house non-licensed game would be Gladius, I think. Pretty good reviews from those who like turn bast RPG combat games too.

No. It was the last great one, though.

Yes, I meant it so.

(Armed & Dangerous)

Made by Planet Moon, though.

Ah, true. A&D was very good.

So say many, but I couldn't bring myself to finish it though for some reason. I just can't get past the chunkiness. I really want to like it :(

All im hearing from lucasarts is, oh we lost that waggon, bohoo, here is another friggin star wars game, chew and spit out.

Why dont you grow a pair of balls you low level scum of the earth.

Why don't they just sell their old adventure game IP? They can't create anything with them - all the creative people have left, and are working on their own IPs...

in emi the voodoo lady said she had a 5 game contract with lucas arts, obviously this must not be true. And what happened to the sequel to grim fandango we were promised???

So with Lucas pulling back on it's previous adventure IPs, will this leave the door open for other companies, like BBE, to pick up the ball and run with it? I would rather see Tim Schaeffer, Ron Gilbert, Jonathan Ackley, David Fox or any one besides the guys responsible for the last Indiana Jones games get the rights.

EB

So, basically renew Indy Jones, keep star wars up, and make new franchises, while the old ones we love are left out to hang

so i dont get it? does this meen there wont b a monkey island 5?? or what cos im confused?

Correct. It's probable that the old internally developed characters - Ben, Guybrush, Tentacles, Manny etc wil never be used in another LucasArts video game. But the good news is that part of the future strategy for LucasArts is to develop all new non-licensed characters / games. Though not Adventure Games, one would summise.

At last, some good news for a change.

"Hey, Jim Ward, look out behind you!"

Hey his tag's sticking out!

Also from the interview: "...We clearly had gotten to a point at LucasArts where, very honestly, the quality of our product was not at the level it should have been. We were managing too many STAR WARS games. Too many mediocre STAR WARS games. We weren't having as much luck with the new IP (Intellectual Properties) and we certainly weren't doing anything new with the Indiana Jones IP..."

I wouldn't be so hard on the guy. How would you dig LucasArts out of the guaranteed-enormous financial pit it's currently in? I don't expect anything mind-blowingly brilliant or unique out of LucasArts, at least not in the next couple of years, but maybe now they won't just die off and license all their properties to EA or something.

This is all pretty positive as far as I'm concerned. I hope they hire a damn good marketing team too, to drive sales of their new IP.

And as mentioned elsewhere, the LucasArts adventures may be dead, but their legacy will live on and grow through Autumn Moon, Telltale, Double Fine etc.

Is mixnmojo still part of the Lucas FAN Network? Ahahaha... *ahem* Sorry about that. Seriously, though; I share the general skeptism.

Man, I was just thinking before I read this article about how they are never going to make a Monkey Island 5 and probably don't have a good enough team to do so.

Where does the quote mention priority? It says that making original games is one of three main goals, not their third and last priority.

reinvigorate? "going to reinvigorate the Indiana Jones IP..."

"The third leg of this is definetely new IP. There's a heritage built into the DNA of LucasArts, and that's creativity and innovation."

Erm, so.., their third goal is to continue to use "creativity and innovation"? Well, as remi said, if they havent been creative for about 7 years, (that would be 2005-7=1998, saying Grim Fandango,) it would mean something which I dont know what it is. I dont know what happened in the LEC/Lucas world in or after 1998, but something made people leave and you know the outcome, poor games. So what decition was made back then, I dont exactly know, but something like "sw games i priority". Well I dont know. But, Im trying to say it seems like he is talking over a shadow of things he aint mentioning. Anyway its just a brief interview part in this mojo newstory, so it could be highly speculative/wrong or something.

Uhm, perhaps I misunderstood his words on new IP, but it was a bit unspeciffic.

the lec chief Jim Ward said:
"We need to move beyond the IP that we have. We certainly lost that."
They lost the IP? its free? its gone public? Or does he mean they lost the abillity to be as creative and demoted as it requires to do a high quality sequel? I dont know which. Or did he mean he lost its market? meaning us. I dont know what he mean. But lost is a good word =) for their heads. ha ha ha =) anyway, I'm just commenting this news a bit to perhaps understand lec a little more.

I believe he means that they failed to carry over their old original IP to the console market, and since it's been 7+ years since they were puting out those original Adventures, they've lost (or alienated) their old fanbase, and hense effectively lost the reason to re-use that old original IP.

Which is entirely true.

Erk. As far as Indy goes, I've only played Fate of Atlantis and the Eternal Machine demo, and wasn't too thrilled by either.

I loved Fate of Atlantis. Infernal Machine was crap. Emperor's Tomb has some great bits, but frustrations in controls, menus, savegames meant I gave up on it - probably to return to it one day.

I'm still hoping one day to see an RPGesque Indy game with parties, quests, exloring locations, finding artifacts, puzzles, dialogue trees. Sort of like an Indy version of KOTOR. Maybe with twitchy combat, I dunno...

But I guess we'll be getting these Tomb Raider style games for a while yet, albiet ever more pretty ones.

Er what's wrong with what he said about Indiana Jones, Remi? Well, unless he somehow literally seriously meant "a game a year starring Indy," but that would be a little bit impossible I'd think... That said they have about 80 billion Indy stories to "draw from," from the young adventures stuff to the 80 billion comic books and adventure novels, if they wanted to do a billion games. So that could be overkill to the max.

Their second priority is Indy. If you think that's a good thing, then well... Good for you.

As mentioned by DustCropper above, where in that excerpt is any mention of priority? I think that's just being overeagerly read into what Ward was saying.

To be honest it's always been the biggest thrill to play with new characters in new settings. Secret of MI, Grim Fandango, The Dig, Full Throttle, Sam & Max Hit The Road. And (sort-of) Day of the Tentacle, which bore little resemblance to Maniac Mansion.

So if the MI series is over (as we've all suspected for years), I don't really care so long as LucasArts can make fun, interesting, well made games with their own new IP again.

Yes, I know it won't be point-and-click adventures any time soon (or ever), but I don't really see this Jim Ward news as anything shocking or worthy of getting upset or annoyed about.

When was the last time LucasArts made any fun or interesting? KOTOR possibly, but it wasn't made by LEC. Nor was Mercenaries. Nor was Armed & Dangerous.

I think the real answer is to look at studios like Double Fine, Telltale and Autumn Moon, all of which seem to go for creativity, something LEC hasn't had for... oh... 7-8 years?

Sure, but this may (if the talk actually pans out) arrest that long downward slide that the internal studio has been slipping down for those 7-8 years.

And from what I've heard, the last of the known internal titles, Republic Commando, seems a nice solid title. Innovative, no.

I dunno - given the main thrust of the quote is that their old adventure game IPs are dead, which we already knew considering for LEC the whole genre is dead, I'm actually quite happy to read that they will be shoring up the quality of the Star Wars license, further expolring the Indy Jones francise and looking to develop all new IP.

Oh, and also we know that LucasArts has no plans on making any adventure games.

"After careful evaluation of current market place realities and underlying economic considerations, we've decided that this was not the appropriate time to launch a graphic adventure on the PC"

So if any of that old IP was going to be used, it would have been used in a Full Throttle 2 style Action Adventure at best and I shudder to imagine an "at worst" scenario.

Face it - with LucasArts adventures dead, it's probably for the best that their adventure game IP stays dead too.

Dammit. Well, they say they'll make some new original games. They say.