It's worth pointing out how different (and better) Jedi Knight's morality system is from the "Bethesda model", in which you play as good/bad but at the end of the game, it doesn't matter and you get to make the Big Moral Choice (purify the water or POISON EVERYONE?).
In JK you are never asked explicitly, "Do you want to do a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?". After a boss fight, you can choose to kill your opponent, or not. Those civilians running around sometimes drop health packs or ammo when they die, so maybe you kill them, or you don't. Dark side force powers are awesome, and don't require ammo to work, so maybe you put a few points into them. Then, at about 3/4 through the game, it doesn't ask if you want to be a light or dark Jedi, it tells you what kind of Jedi you were all along. You get to the point where you might expect the game to offer you a Big Choice, but instead, it points out that you already made your choice when you weren't paying attention.
The jedi thing in general is such a great metaphor for the human experience when it comes to the intersection of capacity, morality and power that I expect it'll outlive a lot of other stories.
This article is mostly about Jedi Knight, yet Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game is mentioned. (uses d6's with +1,+2 pips, effect scales, and rerolling successes)
Having played, it's perhaps one of the best written role playing book series ever made. There are so many expanded universe supplements its ridiculous. Tramp freighters rarely even written about, with full stat blocks, and aftermarket parts. "How many turbolasers does a star destroyer have?" 'Was that an Imperial I, Imperial II, Valiant, Interdictor, Eclipse, Terminus, Executor, Resurgent, Venator, ...'
From the Wiki: "Lucasfilm considered the West End Games' Star Wars sourcebooks so authoritative that when Timothy Zahn was hired to write what became the Thrawn trilogy, he was sent a box of West End Games Star Wars books and directed to base his novel on the background material presented within."
If you happen to enjoy roleplaying, and never tried them, they're at least worth looking at. Lots of ideas. (also 35 yrs old, so mostly available, if rare) The art's mostly of a b/w storyboard type. Yet, that's kind of nice as, movies, and quickly gives a sense of scale about a bunch of different SW ideas. https://dk.pinterest.com/pin/396598310951842250/ (has a lot of illustration examples)
I've never play West End's game, but Fantasy Flight's "Genesys"-based Star Wars TTRPG is a phenomenal, novel, and approachable game with a massive, encyclopedic catalog of cohesive Star Wars universe components.
I highly recommend any of the three starter kits (Jedi/Rebel/Smuggler) for fans of the franchise who haven't yet played a tabletop RPG, or for anyone who thinks "Dungeons & Dragons" might be an interesting way to spend an afternoon.
As a child of the 80's who remembers scouring the local library for Star Wars books, a couple of years before the Zahn trilogy, this hits hard. I read them. Played the games. Not only was the Star Wars universe in the 90's really good (for the time), but the fact that everyone respected and built off each others stories is part of what made the whole greater than the constituent parts.
Today, my teenager loves building worlds and talking about universe designs. I know he's tired of hearing the cautionary tale of how you can take something amazing, built by a community, and run it into the ground by not respecting it. Hubris man... pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.
As a child from a very difficult and abusive home, the star wars EU novels in the late 90's was a literal godsend. There were some great (but flawed) MMO's and video games that came out of it too that expanded the universe even further - when disney bought it and completely invalidated 30 years of canon, it really hurt on a level that I didn't think was entirely appropriate at the time but looking back it makes sense.
Nothing was "stolen," you can still go read the books and enjoy that IP... but it just felt like that and the acquisition by Disney as the final betrayal and sellout by Lucas, who really can only attribute his incredible success to the people around him who had better sense. The prequels were terrible because they gave him unlimited artistic control, and no one told him no.
I think Lucas knows he’s screwed, he will be lambasted no matter what he does. Look at Game of Thrones, even the best written nerd series get torn apart by the nerd police. He understands that his business was always in nostalgia, it’s just his nostalgia for 50s serials, not actual Star Wars.
I was never a really big Star Wars fan (enjoyed them just wasn't super into them) but spent a lot of time on DFII: JK modding. The cog language could really do a lot if you leaned on it hard enough. The game engine's ability to do absolutely huge outdoor spaces without crumbling in performance was kind of unique at the time. There was a real sense of vertigo for me. I remember having a lot of fun with the cheesy grappling hook mods in multiplayer, flying around and slingshotting around ledges.
My brother and I made a mod in which you played as an Ugnaught (the little guys running around cloud city) wielding a wrench instead of a lightsaber. For some reason we thought it was hilarious to replace the main villain with Bob Saget.
The game wasn’t perfect, but it was extremely stable. I remember people spamming proximity mines, but even that became fun because it was so easy to get back in and play.
The fun part was how broken the script cheat detection was. You could make massive changes, then randomly change a few characters and find a combination that wouldn’t get detected as a change. It ‘felt’ like they were using a 4 bit checksum to detect script changes.
EU Star Wars was a big part of growing up for me. Obsessed with the books and games, especially KOTOR. Countless nights on Wookiepedia just reading articles.
Sad what Disney did, but remember the EU content didn’t disappear. You can still read the books and play the games and pretend Disney never happened. :)
Part of the fun was imagining a canon of episodes 7+ and how great the movies will be when they get around to filming Heir to the Empire.
So now that Disney has created a canon that invalidates it, the old material just reminds you of how great you used to wish the new material would be. Asking, "wouldn't it have been great?" isn't exactly as fun.
> They might also want to check out the game’s expansion pack, which caters more to the FPS hardcore by eliminating the community-theater cut scenes and making everything in general a little bit harder. I didn’t bother, having gotten everything I was looking for out of the base game.
I spent a lot more time playing Jedi Knight (honestly, it was probably the best time I ever had playing a video game), but Mysteries of the Sith was still fun, and I liked having a purple lightsaber. :-)
My mom gifted the Zahn books to me as they were published. I enjoyed them immensely. We lived in Portland, and IIRC Zahn lived in Eugene which seemed incredible to me someone was crafting the Star Wars universe from so nearby.
My interest in the games was primarily in X-Wing and its expansions B-Wing, etc. Poured many hours into those eventually some of Tie Fighter.
I think I did get a copy of Dark Forces but I think I got stuck and I moved on to something with more play action.
My brother and I played the hell out of Jedi Knight while we were in high school, and even went on to work on some mods - Jedi Knight Pong was one of the memorable ones for its ridiculousness.
The modding community was quite active, and I believe there was actually a LucasArts employee who was helping the modders figure out how some of the formats and tools worked. There was a fairly sophisticated scripting language that powered a lot of the gameplay; I don't remember any of the specifics but I had a good time messing around with it.
I spent countless hours playing the DF2 demo that came on one of the computer magazine CDs in India (PC Quest I think). My favourite FPS by a long shot :)
Here's a steam guide to upgrade to a fan made engine and really improve the graphics:
I still have very fond memories of endlessly dueling people online in Jedi Knight II Jedi Outcast. I still feel it was the best skill based melee engine I have ever played, not sure if I ever even played the single player.
Even guns vs lightsabers was balanced, but saber dueling with matrix wall walking and other force powers was sublime.
Loved the EU early on, but felt things went downhill starting with the series with the ‘Vong.
Still better than what they did with the movie sequels.
I’m loving all the original content being put out on Disney+. It’s almost unbelievable how great most of them are versus how utterly bad the sequel movies were.
I spent a large part of my childhood as a somewhat obsessive SW fan and read a lot of EU books.
Disney alienated entire fandom to appease people who were never really into it and didn’t win enough to cover the cost. Good luck with that, I will be patiently waiting for EU revival. AI might bring a lot of indie productions in the area :)
Respectfully, I think you overestimate the fandom's attachment to the EU. Certainly a non-trivial portion were very attached to the EU, but there were plenty of people who didn't care about the EU. And a very large group of people who like EU from this thing, but not from that thing.
And it can't be ignored that Lucasfilm threw the EU under the bus with the Prequels, and even before that with things like Splinter of the Mind's Eye.
The thing that's hard is when you've invested a lot of time and energy into something, and then the owner comes along and breaks your heart. Here's to finding love again.
Okay: The Disneyfied Latter Days Crap is a given in a world where Marvel exists as it does now, and I'm not even mad at that. People drink two liters of Coca Cola a day. Whatever, their choice. Jar Jar Binks is so far down the shit-gradient it's not even cynical, ironic or campy, that shit is just plain bad.
No, my beef is with the status the original trilogy has. Archetypal, shallow characters and tropes going beyond the banal. The narratives are too middle of the road: not naturalistic enough for full immersion, not stylized enough to be authentic space opera. The doritos of sci-fi.
Three movies were made, somehow, on the aesthetic of the light saber. That's all it has going for it, that the light sabers look cool.
When you describe something as archetypal, you basically admit it had very large impact. Similar to Tolkien being archetypal fantasy. Does not help your argument, really.
Your argument is baseless. I'm not saying your argument has no merit, I'm saying that your interpretation only makes sense in light of the media that came after the original trilogy. In a lot of cases, the tropes didn't become tropes until other people tried to ape them. I can think of plenty of movies that did not age well because they inspired so much of what came later. Arguably, the original Star Wars movies are amongst them. But its ridiculous to deride Star Wars as derivative of the films it inspired.
Interesting take on a ~50 year cultural phenomenon with millions of fans. Maybe next time you could write "I don't like Star Wars" instead "Star Wars never good." That would be more accurate.
I mean I think they were ground breaking at the time for costuming and special effects. Many genre defining works look bad in retrospect because the genre has grown up since they came out.
[+] [-] professoretc|1 year ago|reply
In JK you are never asked explicitly, "Do you want to do a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?". After a boss fight, you can choose to kill your opponent, or not. Those civilians running around sometimes drop health packs or ammo when they die, so maybe you kill them, or you don't. Dark side force powers are awesome, and don't require ammo to work, so maybe you put a few points into them. Then, at about 3/4 through the game, it doesn't ask if you want to be a light or dark Jedi, it tells you what kind of Jedi you were all along. You get to the point where you might expect the game to offer you a Big Choice, but instead, it points out that you already made your choice when you weren't paying attention.
[+] [-] jddj|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ttymck|1 year ago|reply
Witcher 3 excelled at this. It is the only game which I felt an overwhelming sense of dread and guilt after finishing.
[+] [-] Stevvo|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] araes|1 year ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_The_Roleplaying_Gam...
Having played, it's perhaps one of the best written role playing book series ever made. There are so many expanded universe supplements its ridiculous. Tramp freighters rarely even written about, with full stat blocks, and aftermarket parts. "How many turbolasers does a star destroyer have?" 'Was that an Imperial I, Imperial II, Valiant, Interdictor, Eclipse, Terminus, Executor, Resurgent, Venator, ...'
From the Wiki: "Lucasfilm considered the West End Games' Star Wars sourcebooks so authoritative that when Timothy Zahn was hired to write what became the Thrawn trilogy, he was sent a box of West End Games Star Wars books and directed to base his novel on the background material presented within."
If you happen to enjoy roleplaying, and never tried them, they're at least worth looking at. Lots of ideas. (also 35 yrs old, so mostly available, if rare) The art's mostly of a b/w storyboard type. Yet, that's kind of nice as, movies, and quickly gives a sense of scale about a bunch of different SW ideas. https://dk.pinterest.com/pin/396598310951842250/ (has a lot of illustration examples)
[+] [-] gavmor|1 year ago|reply
I highly recommend any of the three starter kits (Jedi/Rebel/Smuggler) for fans of the franchise who haven't yet played a tabletop RPG, or for anyone who thinks "Dungeons & Dragons" might be an interesting way to spend an afternoon.
[+] [-] thadt|1 year ago|reply
Today, my teenager loves building worlds and talking about universe designs. I know he's tired of hearing the cautionary tale of how you can take something amazing, built by a community, and run it into the ground by not respecting it. Hubris man... pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.
[+] [-] JohnMakin|1 year ago|reply
Nothing was "stolen," you can still go read the books and enjoy that IP... but it just felt like that and the acquisition by Disney as the final betrayal and sellout by Lucas, who really can only attribute his incredible success to the people around him who had better sense. The prequels were terrible because they gave him unlimited artistic control, and no one told him no.
[+] [-] screenoridesaga|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bonton89|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] professoretc|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] screenoridesaga|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] persolb|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] latentcall|1 year ago|reply
Sad what Disney did, but remember the EU content didn’t disappear. You can still read the books and play the games and pretend Disney never happened. :)
[+] [-] havblue|1 year ago|reply
So now that Disney has created a canon that invalidates it, the old material just reminds you of how great you used to wish the new material would be. Asking, "wouldn't it have been great?" isn't exactly as fun.
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|1 year ago|reply
So many hours of my youth spent doing lightsaber duels on Cloud City Gantry:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfTGOlyKqKk
[+] [-] sandyarmstrong|1 year ago|reply
> They might also want to check out the game’s expansion pack, which caters more to the FPS hardcore by eliminating the community-theater cut scenes and making everything in general a little bit harder. I didn’t bother, having gotten everything I was looking for out of the base game.
I spent a lot more time playing Jedi Knight (honestly, it was probably the best time I ever had playing a video game), but Mysteries of the Sith was still fun, and I liked having a purple lightsaber. :-)
[+] [-] cogman10|1 year ago|reply
DF2, on the other hand, always had about 20+ active games
[+] [-] Der_Einzige|1 year ago|reply
I find great fun in playing as lando and spamming the insane "Woohoo" audio line that they use for his taunt.
[+] [-] a_t48|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] none_to_remain|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Arrath|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bredren|1 year ago|reply
My interest in the games was primarily in X-Wing and its expansions B-Wing, etc. Poured many hours into those eventually some of Tie Fighter.
I think I did get a copy of Dark Forces but I think I got stuck and I moved on to something with more play action.
[+] [-] QuercusMax|1 year ago|reply
The modding community was quite active, and I believe there was actually a LucasArts employee who was helping the modders figure out how some of the formats and tools worked. There was a fairly sophisticated scripting language that powered a lot of the gameplay; I don't remember any of the specifics but I had a good time messing around with it.
[+] [-] vijayr02|1 year ago|reply
Here's a steam guide to upgrade to a fan made engine and really improve the graphics:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=17787...
Think it should work on the GOG version too.
[+] [-] SigmundA|1 year ago|reply
Even guns vs lightsabers was balanced, but saber dueling with matrix wall walking and other force powers was sublime.
[+] [-] decafninja|1 year ago|reply
Still better than what they did with the movie sequels.
I’m loving all the original content being put out on Disney+. It’s almost unbelievable how great most of them are versus how utterly bad the sequel movies were.
[+] [-] d3ckard|1 year ago|reply
Disney alienated entire fandom to appease people who were never really into it and didn’t win enough to cover the cost. Good luck with that, I will be patiently waiting for EU revival. AI might bring a lot of indie productions in the area :)
[+] [-] sircastor|1 year ago|reply
And it can't be ignored that Lucasfilm threw the EU under the bus with the Prequels, and even before that with things like Splinter of the Mind's Eye.
The thing that's hard is when you've invested a lot of time and energy into something, and then the owner comes along and breaks your heart. Here's to finding love again.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] isoprophlex|1 year ago|reply
Okay: The Disneyfied Latter Days Crap is a given in a world where Marvel exists as it does now, and I'm not even mad at that. People drink two liters of Coca Cola a day. Whatever, their choice. Jar Jar Binks is so far down the shit-gradient it's not even cynical, ironic or campy, that shit is just plain bad.
No, my beef is with the status the original trilogy has. Archetypal, shallow characters and tropes going beyond the banal. The narratives are too middle of the road: not naturalistic enough for full immersion, not stylized enough to be authentic space opera. The doritos of sci-fi.
Three movies were made, somehow, on the aesthetic of the light saber. That's all it has going for it, that the light sabers look cool.
Rant over.
[+] [-] d3ckard|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] petsfed|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rikthevik|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dgfitz|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gryfft|1 year ago|reply
Hey, that's not fair at all. The lightsabers also sound cool.
(And all due credit to Ben Burtt for that.)
[+] [-] hiddencost|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] add-sub-mul-div|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] stonecolddevin|1 year ago|reply