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Rumour: LucasArts Dark Times Deja Vu 17 Aug, 2010 / 17 comments

Kotaku has posted a rumour that LucasArts are up to their old tricks. With the arrival of a new President, the tradition is that LucasArts have to cancel a lot of promising-looking games and axe a lot of staff. The Circle of LEC may be coming round again.

According to Kotaku's unnamed sources at the studio, new president Paul Meegan has cancelled the in-production Force Unleashed III, will let a lot of TFU2's staff go when that comes out this October, and has put another unnamed project (possibly fish-related) on hold.

These sources say "morale and productivity are at all-time lows" since Meegan took over...

... Which would be quite a feat after what happened the last time a Force Unleashed game shipped.

Just to make him Meegan seem completely insane and contradictory, after this in-house scrubbing and axeing session, this quote is the most worrying:

We've also been told that another sweeping change made by Meegan is that the majority of "external" development of Lucasarts properties is coming to an end, with BioWare's Old Republic MMO to be the last game not developed internally at Lucasarts. That would presumably mean, for example, no more LEGO Star Wars or LEGO Indiana Jones titles after the upcoming LEGO: Clone Wars, as those have all been handled by Traveller's Tales.

This would mean that, if true, a Tales of Monkey Island Season Two would not be happening.

Let's hope that these rumours prove untrue. After the departure of Darrell Rodriguez, many executives and Haden Blackman however, I wouldn't be surprised if there was truth in here.

Source: Kotaku

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17 Comments

  • Avatar
    Shmargin on 21 Aug, 2010, 06:20…

    Scummbuddy

    The Tingler

    ...disagrees with the Top Men.


    Who are these "Top Men"? :)



    Top men...Dr.Jones...
  • Avatar
    Scummbuddy on 20 Aug, 2010, 02:31…

    The Tingler

    ...disagrees with the Top Men.


    Who are these "Top Men"? :)
  • Avatar
    Kolzig on 19 Aug, 2010, 06:59…
    one has to remember that Clint Hocking joined Lucasarts so they have to be developing SOMETHING interesting in-house.
  • Avatar
    Fealiks on 18 Aug, 2010, 10:01…
    As long as Pipe Dream 2 happens, I'm happy.
  • Avatar
    elTee on 17 Aug, 2010, 23:50…
    There is no Thrillville 3.
  • Avatar
    valkian on 17 Aug, 2010, 23:22…
    Thrillville 3? let's hope not, let's hope it's all lies.
  • Avatar
    Shmargin on 17 Aug, 2010, 21:55…
    Wocka wocka wocka!
  • Avatar
    elTee on 17 Aug, 2010, 21:19…
    Wise and rational words, jp.
  • Avatar
    jp-30 on 17 Aug, 2010, 21:15…
    So, he's stopping external development AND firing internal teams / halting internal development?

    That makes no sense, unless the rumour is missing some vital information.

    the majority of "external" development



    The "majority" does not mean "all", so if this is true there's still a chance ToMI or more LEGO games are possible.

    On LEGO though, how much more is there to mine from LucasArts? I'd say the LEGO games will move into more Disney territory (Toy Story, Pirates of the Carribean etc).
  • Avatar
    Capn_Nacho on 17 Aug, 2010, 21:11…
    Fuck. Well, it's not like it really matters. LucasArts ain't comin' back to life no matter how many volts they put through it. Rodriguez sure took an interesting stab at it, though.

    AlfredJ

    Didn't those Lego-games make tons of money?


    That's what I always thought.
  • Avatar
    AlfredJ on 17 Aug, 2010, 16:13…
    This is one of those moments where I hate the fact that there are all sorts of business-reasons preventing companies (in this case both LA and TTG) from making actual statements.

    Didn't those Lego-games make tons of money?
  • Avatar
    The Tingler on 17 Aug, 2010, 13:58…

    Ascovel

    What are the benefits of stating that from now on you'll always be doing everything in-house? Especially when you don't really have any tried in-house development teams at hand? To me this rumor doesn't sound very convincing.



    I agree that the two parts to this rumour seems very contradictory - axeing major (and certainly profitable) internal games and staff, and yet somehow focusing on internal development only? Unfortunately, the management at LucasArts have proven time and again that they really don't have a clue. A president comes in, has a few great new ideas which come at the expense of the old ideas, and then they're brushed away in 2-3 years when something about them disagrees with the Top Men.
  • Avatar
    Ascovel on 17 Aug, 2010, 12:49…
    What are the benefits of stating that from now on you'll always be doing everything in-house? Especially when you don't really have any tried in-house development teams at hand? To me this rumor doesn't sound very convincing.
  • Avatar
    Jason on 17 Aug, 2010, 12:23…
    This seems overall really bad. I'm particularly worried about the the fate of future Steam/VC re-releases, which is probably such a small thing from a business perspective but as far as I'm concerned is the most important thing the company should be doing as far as their legacy is concerned. The one thing that kind of intrigues me though is the notion of LEC focusing (almost?) exclusively on internal development. Although most would agree that most of the good Star Wars games in the last decade were externally developed, am I the only one who thinks it could be a good thing if LEC resisted the riskless "let's license out the SW and Indy properties to other companies and collect the inevitable revenue" ventures and focused on making their own studio a formidable development force again? Maybe that's not what's going on here, but surely moving toward internal development is in general a good thing?

    But yeah, I'm terrified that we're not going to get any more much needed re-releases and that the team represented by the LucasArts Workshop blog is being relieved of the purpose they had under Rodriguez's direction. I don't know what this means for future Telltale collaborations though, since that situation was a little bit more special than a normal publisher-developer relationship. Still, it's been only a year since the MI5 that we were all convinced was never going to happen and that actually turned out good, so it's probably still early to be feeling to entitled to another installment.
  • Avatar
    Threepwood4life on 17 Aug, 2010, 12:15…
    I'm mixed about the external been dropped cause on one side LucasArts hasn't had a good success rate with games that have been made outside their studio and I would like more developed in-house like back in the day. The other side to the coin is that this could affect the partnership with TellTale and any future TOMI seasons as Tingler mentioned.
  • Avatar
    clone2727 on 17 Aug, 2010, 12:11…
    But we had just put the pitchforks and torches in storage!
  • Avatar
    elTee on 17 Aug, 2010, 12:03…
    Yeah I saw this, it's not the best news :-/

    Still, let's not get carried away just yet. Not just yet...

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