Fall of the Empire

     Last week I read  the article called Fall of the Empire by Andrew Reiner in February's issue of Gameinformer. The article summed up how LucasArts slowly fell apart over the last decade due to inner turmoil.

     LucasArts was once very successful studio known for making stellar Star Wars video games over the past thirty years. However, while the studio was looking great from the outside, all hell was breaking loose on the inside causing the quality and the amount of games it was making to diminish. Back in 2004 Jim Ward was appointed as LucasArts' new president and he wasted no time cutting LucasArts' team from 450 people to about 190. Shortly after that is when studio started to fill with havoc. One of the main problems was Ward's leadership style because he wasn't easy to understand come from the film side of things and tried to changed how things worked inside of the studio. Once the team at the studio would reach a milestone Ward would have a "core meeting" to detail the progress the studio was making. These meetings where dreaded by the employees at LucasArts as one employee said they were "The infamous Jim Ward losing his s--- meetings", in which Ward would yell at everyone and say how they should be doing better. The studio's new leadership  wasn't the problem as George Lucas was known for changing core elements of some of the games being developed or not approving some of the concepts for future games. Some of the games that didn't get approved to be made where: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic III, Star Wars: Imperial Commando - the sequel to Star Wars: Republic Commando, and Star Wars: Jedi Knight III. The fact that these games didn't get the green light to be made was disappointing to me because I would of easily spent $60 a piece for each of these games on their launch day. Overtime things in the studio grew worse and quality of the games being made began to go down. On top of that, other studios given the right to make a Star Wars game kept getting set back due LucasArts interfering with the games development; Star War: Battlefront III being one of those games. However, Bioware was allowed to develop Star Wars: The old Republic with out any troubles from LucasArts. After a while, Disney bought the rights to Star Wars and shutdown LucasArts, ending their thirty years span of greatness. In the end, LucasArts will be know for the many games they made, however some employees at the studio wished that there was more games like Star Wars: the Old Republic, were they didn't interfere with the games development. It's sad to hear about how a once great studio could come to an end, but one day I hope the studio will be revived, along with some of my favorite games that got canceled with the studio.