Lucasarts Expo Revealed

It is sort of sad that a company such as Lucasarts has a President who is somewhat clueless to gaming, though to be honest, I’m sure it’s more of a business decision and to interview him about the ways in which certain games went wrong might be a bit of a stretch (though ideally he should be one of the most knowledgeable about them). What do I mean? At Gamecenter a new multi-page interview with the Lucasarts head reveals much about what’s happening at the company. It’s simple, they need quality over quantity. Even the president mentions this numerous times. Regarding Force Commander, why do you think it wasn’t successful? Here is a chip from the interview to chew on, the president’s reason:

Q: For many gamers, one of the bigger disappointments was Force Commander. How do you look at a game like Force Commander, hindsight being 20/20?

A: Force Commander had quite a checkered and interesting history. I think that ourselves, along with a couple of other publishers, found out that the real-time strategy market wasn’t quite ready for the jump to 3D. We made a bet, a gamble, that the real-time strategy market was looking to evolve beyond the Command & Conquer or StarCraft-style of gameplay and go into the 3D world. I think that we came up against a bit of a technology hurdle, and we realized that it was hard to implement something that is real-time and strategy in a 3D environment, because there isn’t the same kind of direction. [Two-dimensional] real-time strategy games almost always are linear in their gameplay, and that may sound trite, but in some ways I think that was what part of the problem was. And we’ve seen other 3D real-time strategy games that have suffered from the same problem; when people are in a 3D world, they don’t know what to do–they aren’t so directed–and their strategic thinking is more muddled and more confused.

People weren’t ready for the jump to 3D, nor were people ready for the evolution of Starcraft or Command & Conquer. The game was fine, it was the people that were just not ready. =) No, he does address the problem of implementation to 3D in a round about way, but seriously, it was a horrid interface and clumsy gameplay that people didn’t care for. In other words, it was lacking in quality.