IGN has gotten to take a close look at The Force Unleashed and they have good things to say about it. Check out this 3-page preview here.

With about 100 employees laid off in June, LucasArts stated that they are still committed to internal development with The Force Unleashed as well as Indiana Jones. However it has been revealed that a number of employees working on The Force Unleashed had been cut just as the game was wrapping up with development. Hopefully these layoffs will not affect the quality of the game. However if the game becomes a hit and LucasArts decides to do a sequel, the current team will not have enough personnel to undertake the project.

via Joystiq

LucasArts has released a new video for The Force Unleashed, detailing the story and character development during the game. This video will have massive spoilers so don’t watch if you don’t want to be spoiled, but if you like to know ahead of time what’s going to happen then head on over to GameTrailers.

TheAgeBlog recently had the chance to have an interview with the lead programmer at Krome Studios for the Wii version of The Force Unleashed, Trevor Powell. You can read the whole interview here. Below is an excerpt.

What was Krome’s brief when first given the project by LucasArts?

Just as a background, I previously worked for Melbourne House. When Krome acquired Melbourne House, which was around 18 months ago, they were already working on The Force Unleashed both at the Brisbane and Adelaide studios. When we joined, they said ‘Hey, this is a great opportunity to expand what we are doing’. So in addition to helping out with general development on the game, we took responsibility for the Wii platform.

The initial brief was that LucasArts wanted to make a game about Force powers, exploring Force powers in a way that hadn’t been done before and to a level that hadn’t been done before. When we started developing on the Wii, we thought there would be an expectation here. The fans are going to want with the Wii controller to use that as a lightsaber. So we spent a lot of time focusing on that. We didn’t want it to feel like it was sort of tacked on. We spent a lot of time working on just the recognition, on making it feel responsive. Personally, I think it’s the best gesture recognition we’ve seen on the Wii yet.

The Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of The Force Unleashed will not get the same multiplayer treatment as the Wii version as it has been revealed there is no multiplayer mode in either of those two versions. LucasArts’ official statement:

“To be specific, there’s no multiplayer in the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions, because there is on the Wii, PSP, and DS. As far as specific reasons are concerned, we don’t really like to get into the reasons why we don’t do things because I don’t think there’s really a satisfactory answer that people would really be happy with. So, there isn’t multiplayer and that’s kind of how it is…”

I suppose they did this so each version of the game remains even as far as equal amount of gameplay and features but it still will upset a lot of people.

via G4 - Thanks Prime.

According to an article at NZGamer.com, through a press meet with LucasArts it has been revealed what the secret apprentice’s name will actually be. Haden Blackman once gave us the hint that the name began with the letter ‘S’, well this report follows this lead-on and says the apprentice’s name is Starkiller. This name is familiar because it was originally to be the name of Luke before Lucas changed it to Skywalker. You can read the article for yourself here. Thanks to Ztalker for the heads up.

Finally we have a confirmed reason for why The Force Unleashed will not be released for PC. The producer of Force Unleashed, Cameron Suey, in an interview with Videogamer.com, stated that it would be too hard to develop a game which could satisfy both killer gaming rigs and outdated ones.

“The PC being the gaming platform that it is, someone with a $4,000 high-end system would definitely be able to play the Euphoria, the DMM and really technical elements of the game. But someone with a low-end PC would have a watered down experience, they would have to turn all the settings down and it wouldn’t be the same game,” Suey said.

One might ask why not give the PC version a more scaled down version of the game so that it would reach a wider install base, well Suey says that would not be taking advantage of what the $4,000 rigs can do, so “it’s going to be not as good or only for a select few people.”

However don’t get too down as Suey did have some good things to say about the PC in LucasArt’s future. “That said we’re definitely not out of the PC market. It’s just with our choice for this game, with the known quantity for the consoles, and every console is the same with the same processing power, it made sense for us to develop for those consoles.”

Videogamer.com

Check out this video from G4 demoing the power of the Force with the Wii’s exclusive duel mode. The Wii version is shaping up to be the real deal.

Here’s a new video on the N-GAGE version of the Force Unleashed, for a mobile game its looking pretty good. Thanks to mojo for the link.

Last night The Force Unleashed was featured on Gametrailers TV where Geoff Keighley got an insider look at the game at the LucasArts studio in San Francisco. Check out the four-part video below or you can watch the video in HD on Gametrailers here.

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