The Force Unleashed on stores September 16th

LucasArts’ most anticipated game, “Star Wars: The Force Unleashed”, will hit the stores next Tuesday, September 16th.

As you probably already know, “Star Wars: The Force Unleashed” is an RPG (Role Play Game) that narrate the story of a Darth Vader’s secret apprentice as he hunts down the remaining Jedi that survived the Emperor Palpatine famous “Order 66″. The story is set between Star Wars Episode III and Star Wars Episode IV time frame.

The game is based on the LucasArts’ proprietary “Ronin” game engine with the integration of Pixelux Entertainment’s “Digital Molecular Matter” (DMM), for dynamically destructible objects, and NaturalMotion’s Euphoria for realistic non-player character artificial intelligence. The objective of the overall engine is to give an extreme realism to the interaction with the various objects; for example if the player blow up an object the explosion will not have a generic animation, but it will change according to the direction of the player’s hit, the strenght, and the weapon used.

The game will be available on the majors consoles:

Unfortunately there is no plan to port the game to the PC platform. Beside the egoistic disappointment, as I do not own any console as I always preferred the PC, I find this decision strange as the “PC gamers” is a wide market. LucasArts reasoning was that “doing the game well would be too processor-intensive for typical PCs” … well … first, the legitimacy of this justification is puzzling at best considering that the game has been ported to platforms that have more limited processing power than a standard computer (for example the PlayStation Portable, Nintendo DS, and N-Gage). Secondly, the developers needed only to warn the PC gamers about the huge requirements necessary especially since it would not have been the first game that upon release is barely playable even on the current top machines (take for example Crysis).

Links

The Force Unleashed website: http://www.lucasarts.com/games/theforceunleashed/.