I was a bit wary of Star Wars 1313. The Star Wars universe, or at least the mainline segments of it that I have experienced, have never fully embraced a mature brand, and that’s all I was hearing about the game’s mission. “The first mature title in the Star Wars universe,” was the assumed mantra, and hearing it echoed at the beginning of our demo didn’t exactly set the stage well. I understand that bounty hunters are a rather malicious bunch and their trials and tribulations aren’t family friendly material, but I was hoping that, at the very least, it wouldn’t be overly exploitive or gratuitous.
And then our demo began and I dropped every single expectation. We were treated to a behind the scenes presentation of the mocap process at Lucas Animation and Industrial Light and Magic. The usual mocap suites were in place, but the actors were interacting in real time together. Furthermore, a significant amount of attention was also being placed on the actor’s faces, which were covered with hundreds of motion tracking dots. At this point the gentleman from LucasArts in our demo room piped in and spoke to the fidelity of their rendering process. He described humans as experts at facial recognition, and alluded to the discrepancies found in stumbling upon the uncanny valley. He went into great detail over how hard the team was working to create believable facial animation, and how executing that would fascinate videogame narrative and character interaction like never before.
The animation, all of which was being rendered in real time, was astounding. Star Wars 1313 was running on a high level PC, and the strength and fidelity of the animation must have (greatly) exceeded the limitations of current generation consoles. Even in an early form, I had to keep reminding myself that what I was seeing wasn’t a CG cut scene, and that the onscreen interaction was being presented in real time. I won’t go as far as the say Star Wars 1313 was the most technically impressive game I’ve ever seen, but it blew away most everything else I witnessed on the E3 show floor.
The narrative premise was light, but intriguing. You’re a bounty hunter, and you’ve been dispatched to level 1313 beneath Coruscant. It’s where the scum of the universe is hiding out, making it a ripe playground for bounty hunters. What we saw, which mostly consisted of a small transport ship being attacked and then crashing down a vertical transport zone, wasn’t much to convey the sinister underground, but what was there looked appropriately seedy and nefarious.
LucasArts’ mantra regarding the gameplay is noble; they don’t want the player to watch a cut scene and wonder why in the world they weren’t being allowed to engage the onscreen action. That’s a great design philosophy, but it didn’t exactly translate well to the canned demo. What we saw, or at least what I could tell was interactive, was standard bits of third person, cover-based shooting along with bits of overly basic “grab the object that stands out” platforming. All of this was carried out on a ship that was in the midst of crashing, so the stakes couldn’t have been higher, but from a purely interactive standpoint Star Wars 1313 wasn’t doing much of anything new.
To be fair, what was on hand is far from the final game, and the footage we saw was likely little more than a proof of concept for basic elements of game design. It also clocked in at around five minutes. We have a long way to go until Star Wars 1313 is a real thing, so LucasArts’ mission is primed to err on the side of being properly executed. After the poor reception of The Force Unleashed II and the lack of modern day spectacular Star Wars games, Star Wars 1313 could the new hope for the venerable franchise. Color me intrigued.
