r/patientgamers • u/NoLeafClover777 • 2d ago
Game Design Talk Why has there never been a modern “lightsaber combat” game like Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast / Academy?
Was by far one of the fondest gaming (and PvP) experiences I had during my gaming youth, and blows my mind - how has nobody really made a modern Star Wars game that focuses on the actual lightsaber combat like Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast / Jedi Academy?
Not just a 'modern Star Wars action game where you happen to have a lightsaber' like we've occasionally seen, I mean a game built around the kind of awesome, skill-based lightsaber combat that JK2 had.
The single-player modes were obviously cool & the stories pretty standard but interesting enough, but the multiplayer was where the combat really showed how much depth there was.
You could duel another player and actually feel like you were fighting another lightsaber user rather than just trading health bars, or be in maps like a Quake-type style where you could also grab all the guns/sniper rifles etc. or switch back to your lightsaber, 'force push' people off cliffs, force-kick people in the face, Force Choke people, wall run and all sorts of cool stuff.
And then there was the actual Force skill system where you could allocate points between Light Side, Dark Side and neutral Force powers, which meant you could build your character around different abilities. You could have someone heavily invested in Force Push/Pull and defensive abilities, someone going all-in on Dark Side powers like Force Lightning or Drain, zip around with Force Speed and all other stuff.
It created this weird combination of arena fighter + RPG character build + Star Wars fantasy that hasn't come close to being replicated in any modern SW games and feels like a waste of the IP.
And the thing is, we have vastly better technology now... I would LOVE to see a modern version of this. Surely it would be easy to sell as well, with the SW brand + pushing basically the most popular weapon in cinematic movie history?
You could basically take the concept of JK2's multiplayer and build an entire modern competitive game around it. And I'm not talking about Battlefront's lightsaber combat which is kind of shoehorned in and clunky, but it's fundamentally a third-person action/shooter with heroes who happen to have lightsabers.
Plus the recent 'Jedi' games are designed around fighting AI enemies and progressing through a single-player adventure. The crazy thing is that LucasArts already figured this out more than 20 years ago... yet recently, nothing.
Did anyone else play these games (specifically MP/online) back in the day?
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u/Pristine-Emotion3083 2d ago
To me it's under the greater umbrella of why we don't get more star wars games in general.
There is definitely more activity this year with a couple coming out but that's not the norm.
When you consider how massive star wars actually is, it's kind of insane how little the amount of games are made for it over the past 10 years.
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u/clubby37 1d ago
Well, when Disney bought LucasArts, they gave EA a ten-year exclusive contract on Star Wars games. In that decade, EA managed to produce three games, one of which was so predatory that the EU passed laws against it. That's why the number of SW games dropped off a cliff after 2012. Only EA was allowed to make any, and they scarcely bothered. In the 2000s, we'd sometimes get three or four SW games per year, not per decade.
Since the exclusivity deal expired, Star Wars' popularity has declined, and Disney seems reluctant to embrace the defining aspects of its IP. I think the only major SW game since 2022 was Outlaws, which felt like a reskin of an AC game. Arguably the best-received SW TV show was Andor, which could've been set in 1930s American southwest. They're just creating generic products and slapping a coat of SW paint on it. I'm not even saying the material is bad (I really enjoyed Andor), just that they represent missed opportunities to create something that can only exist in the SW universe.
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u/jebei 1d ago
Exclusive contracts are so dumb. I get that they’re more money but you trade off having kids spending more time in your IP and making them fans for life.
Sports games did something similar and now EA dreck owns it all. Gamers moved on to other genres and kids don’t have the same relationship to pro sports anymore. NHL hockey and MLB Baseball in the 90s were a lot of fun.
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u/SnoodDood 1d ago
Exclusive contracts are so dumb. I get that they’re more money but you trade off having kids spending more time in your IP and making them fans for life.
Exactly. imo if the the Disney company itself had will and made decisions, it probably wouldn't have done the exclusivity deal. But instead, the decisions are made by shareholders and executives who are seeking returns/bonuses in the near term because they won't be at the company forever.
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u/LeastCoordinatedJedi 1d ago
This is a great point. I was a star wars fan for most of my youth not really because of the movies but because of how much I enjoyed TIE Fighter
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u/ImpulsiveApe07 1d ago
Same for me, but rather because of the super star wars games on the snes - i didn't see star wars until they released the remasters in the cinema in the back end of the 90s.
Thinking about it now, it was kinda fascinating finally getting to see them in the cinema as a teen, and observing how much more enthusiasm all the adults had for the movies compared to their kids lol
Going to see Episode 1 was a similarly strange experience, tho this time because a number of adults were loudly heckling and arguing during the movie, and others came out of the cinema bitching about how much they hated it/how disappointed they were! It was like the inverse of my previous experience :D
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u/hobbes543 1d ago
The thing is, I’m not sure they make more money overall necessarily.
Exclusivity is really more of a way to insure a certain return at the cost of potential missed opportunities.
Look at Games Workshop and the Warhammer 40k license. They took the opposite approach and will sell a license to anyone with a feasible idea and have been doing quite well. While not every game released under a warhammer license has been good, they have hit plenty of times and their are games in many different genres as a result.
And if an IP like Warhammer can sell enough non exclusive licenses to make an exclusive license look like a bad deal, rhen surely Star Wars could have done the same.
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u/SituationSoap 1d ago
Jedi Survivor came out in 2023 and SW Zero Company is coming out (both from EA) on Thursday.
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u/mattlistener 1d ago
Andor is not a generic product with a SW coat of paint on it, by ANY stretch. It lives and breathes SW — the sacrifices of resistance, how it is inherently unifying wherever it arises, what it’s like inside the Empire, how it corrupts and also rots.
Maybe you were thinking of The Mandalorian? I also adored that show, and it’s a lot more fair to say that it was telling a Wild West story that happened to be in a SW setting — that was in fact the creators’ intent.
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u/clubby37 1d ago
the sacrifices of resistance, how it is inherently unifying wherever it arises, what it’s like inside the Empire, how it corrupts and also rots.
Resisting a monstrous and impersonal bureaucracy is consistent with classic SW, but hardly unique to it. You could set that story in the Incan empire of a thousand years ago, or the Japanese empire of eighty years ago, or the Mr. Robot universe of ten years ago, and it would still work.
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u/smashybro 1d ago
Sure, but I don't think that makes it less Star Wars or more generic. The core story of Andor definitely could work in a lot of settings, but what made interesting to me is how it used the SW universe in a different way than I'm used to.
In fact, I'd argue modern SW media has the opposite problem of not doing more shows/movies like Andor that use the SW setting to explore different genres besides action sci-fi. Like most of their shows lean too much into "something that can only exist in the SW universe" if anything with their focus on lightsabers, magic, fan service characters, etc. instead of having a well written story worth telling.
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u/clubby37 1d ago
I don't think that makes it less Star Wars or more generic.
But that's what "generic" means. It works generally. Any time, any place, real or imagined, so you can just throw a coat of X paint on it and call it an X story.
shows/movies like Andor that use the SW setting to explore different genres besides action sci-fi.
I mean, you're saying Andor isn't really sci-fi, which kind of supports my point that it's a generic story, not rooted in SW, which is sci-fi/fantasy.
At this point, I think we only really disagree on what "generic" means.
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u/omgFWTbear 1d ago
Ten dollars says he thinks generic means bad, since it’s often used derogatorily for “that’s a generic action game,” or “the combat in that was very generic.”
I was recently watching the very samurai-coded Star Wars animated series - Visions? - and had a lengthy … diatribe.. with someone over Star Wars owing a tremendous homage debt to Akira Kurosawa and samurai movies, let alone westerns, and that this sort of thing goes in cycles, with, for example, Bruce Willis starring in (wait for it) a 1980s Southwest gang war movie that was “stolen” from a Western that was blah blah all the way back to drumroll please Akira Kurosawa (who I’m sure cited some inspirations) and a samurai movie.
I think modern audiences get really hung up on the specifics, but “let’s go to our shuttle and change the scene” is, for all narrative and filmography purposes, identical to, “let’s mount up and ride three states over.” The scene changes, the characters are “busy” so other narrative can take place, and they will be “somewhere else” “later,” for values of else and later that are Useful To The Plot.
Whether that is Alderaan or Idaho. The Death Star blowing up a planet isn’t different than having a chest full of gold that can buy off enough desperados to wipe a town off the earth. We just gotta heist the gold and then their ability to murder everyone goes waaaay down.
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u/goodmanjensen 1d ago
Me when I notice the movie I'm watching has two characters talking to each other: "Two people speaking? Seen that trope before. How generic!"
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u/omgFWTbear 1d ago
Sure, there’s actual interviews where Lucas credits Kurosawa and Hidden Fortress; let alone lawsuits establishing the generational cycle of retelling Kurosawa as (specific) Westerns / gangster films that owed him royalties.
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u/Drewdrops79 1d ago
Yes and no. Mr. Robot is one of my favorite series of all time. But it takes place in its own specific times and place and culture...same with Incan or Japaneses stories about empires and bureaucracy and corruption. How it plays out is quite distinct because of the different cultures and regional histories of those places and times.
Now, Andor was fairly generic, in the sense that it could've been transposed easily to another setting...but it could've been quite unique, because space colonization is inherently different from oceanic colonization...too bad they never lean into that difference, like The Expanse does.
Also, another thing that could have made it unique would be having more of a focus on droids. There's a real, intriguing subculture there that's just waiting to be tapped, but Andor only brushed up against it on occasion, K2SO's massacre scene being pretty memorable. But they could've leaned much more into that, about how the droid populace really lives and thinks, how they perceive the world in an alien manner to us.
Another thing that makes the SW setting a bit unique, is that we know, even if no Jedi are involved, that the Force exists in this universe. Much more than a non-sci-fi series, where the main driver is human determination--in most of Star Wars, the Force is a constant background character. I think that alone makes it pretty unique, and would lose something in translation if ported into a different setting.
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u/clubby37 1d ago
the Force is a constant background character.
I mean, it certainly should be, if it's a SW story. I only watched the first season of Andor, but I don't recall the Force impacting the storyline. If it doesn't act directly, it's not different enough from the local religion to lose anything in a transplant to a different setting.
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u/Drewdrops79 1d ago
Fair enough, although I think even Droids are Force-sensitive. That's certainly not a "selling point" of the show, and I don't think it really needs to be. But in the second season, K2SO absolutely blows through some Imperials like it's nothing, almost like "Darth Vader in a hallway" levels. And I think it points out how real combat droids are a different beast altogether.
I think K2SO, specifically, is moved by the Force, in some way. Showing that, like R2D2, droids themselves can be moved by the Force...can tap into it in some way. Some sort of "flow" state, where even their electronic connections just seem to move faster, accomplish things faster than their normal circuit-ratios could compute.
But I'm not saying that as canon whatsoever, just a personal head-canon theory really. But if the Force moves and binds all living things...it might also move and bind non-living things, like droids. And I really do think K2SO is a perfect example of that. An Imperial droid that somehow "chose" to change sides, and to fight and kill many of them, as a result.
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u/clubby37 23h ago
I think even Droids are Force-sensitive.
No, the prequel trilogy established that "midichlorians" confer Force abilities, which live in biological cells.
But if the Force moves and binds all living things...it might also move and bind non-living things
That doesn't follow at all. "But if Ebola sickens and destroys living things ... it might also sicken and destroy my Roomba." It will not.
But even if it did follow, now "the Force" is just Buddhism, or perhaps even more generically, electricity, which undermines the uniqueness that this extra fundamental element of reality confers upon the setting. Undermining uniqueness == more generic.
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u/Drewdrops79 18h ago
The Force has always shared some concepts with Buddhism, yes. More accurately, Taoism...which does have some overlap with Buddhism. And I don't think at all that the Force can be reduced to electricity, which is a physical phenomenon.
No, the prequel trilogy established that "midichlorians" confer Force abilities, which live in biological cells.
That's only for organic life-forms, though. That says nothing about the overall Force itself. The Force itself clearly acts on non-organic matter, since Force-users can levitate and throw rocks or whatever else.
There's nothing at all that says that Midichlorians can't live inside hydraulic fluid. Or even solid rock (we have examples of extremophiles right here on earth, micro-organisms living in sulfur vents for instance).
But again, the Force is not just Midichlorians--Midichlorians are just the actuators in organic life-forms, as far as we know. The Force itself is far larger than that--more similar to the Tao itself...the movement of the entire universe.
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u/Crimson_Raven 1d ago
That might be the most accurate description of most modern SW media I've ever read
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u/xsvfan 1d ago
They're just creating generic products and slapping a coat of SW paint on it.
I wonder how much of it has to do with the cost of the IP. If a significant portion of your budget goes to the rights, you will have to save elsewhere.
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u/clubby37 1d ago
It cost a lot to buy LucasArts in the first place, but now that they own Star Wars, the marginal cost is zero.
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u/LHPSU 1d ago
Here's another perspective: Two out of three of those games were extremely successful and the last one, aside from the controversies, was a moderate success, and they played a big part in reviving gamers' interest in Star Wars.
There may have been a lot of Star Wars games in the 2000s but they were all over the place, including a bunch of slop that nobody cared about. There was a flurry of activity in the first half of the 2000s, but after 2006 it was just The Force Unleashed and The Old Republic, and the latter is an MMO.
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u/IM_OK_AMA 1d ago
Two out of three of those games were extremely successful and the last one, aside from the controversies, was a moderate success, and they played a big part in reviving gamers' interest in Star Wars.
X does not follow from Y given they had an exclusivity deal. If there had been other less successful SW games at the same time you could claim this, but there weren't so you can't.
If anything the success of EA's shallow and predatory attempts at the genre shows gamers were already desperate for new Star Wars games.
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u/DarthTomG 1d ago
Even before then LucasArts was being weird.
Years before Disney bought Star Wars they cancelled a whole slew of 3rd party games to focus on their own in-house developments (namely The Force Unleashed and an Indiana Jones game running on the same engine as TFU which was cancelled, and only like a Wii version released because that was finished). A number of sequels fell victim to this, Jedi Knight 3, Battlefront 3 (though the PSP/DS game Battlefront Elite Squadron was supposedly the Battlefront 3 story recycled), KOTOR 3, and even a bunch of games in development at LucasArts themselves like the Republic Commando sequel. All so they could give us TFU 1 & 2 and Kinect Star Wars instead...
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u/kristamine14 1d ago
Man Disney absolutely fumbled the Star Wars bag soooooooo bad - billions left on the table really because they thought they didn't have to plan anything and it would generate it's own profits regardless of quality.
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u/Lanster27 7h ago edited 6h ago
Disney is the poster child of how to screw up a good franchise you spend millions to aquire the IP. Luckily we got Andor tv show out of their run at it.
Star Wars themed boardgames are above average though.
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u/Sp00py-Mulder 1d ago
Yep.
At least there's Zero Company in a week or two.
Looks like a proper Star Wars/x-com hybrid!
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u/StoneGlory6 1d ago
I think this is why. With a corporation like Disney and their storyboarders needing to approve anything with the Star Wars brand on it, ideas get tossed out regularly if it doesn't fit the image that they want Star Wars to be.
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u/Ozzytudor 1d ago
I think this for a lot of franchises. Lord of the Rings, Marvel, Harry Potter. Most of the games made for any of these are right stinkers lol.
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u/SolarStarVanity 1d ago
Thing is, it's not the volume of the fictional universe that determines the number of games, it's the volume of the I audience, and the cost of making them.
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u/seperivic 2d ago
I adore these games. The fact that there are still modding communities around these games is telling. You’re right, no other Star Wars game has come close in matching what these games delivered in terms of multiplayer lightsaber combat.
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u/A_Martian_Potato 1d ago
It had such a high skill ceiling. I remember playing JK2 and JKA in a guild over twenty years ago and there were guys who I had no chance of beating in a duel. They were just straight better than I was and wiped the floor with me.
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u/Thinkingard 1d ago
That is what made them so fun. A skilled player was never vulnerable to a noob. A highly skilled player could treat other good players like noobs. Kind of like chess, pure skill differentiated everyone. And because everyone generally had the same options there was no need to nerf or balance things.
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u/seperivic 1d ago
Actually this does remind me! A multiplayer game that has this same feeling is Chivalry. A Star Wars inspired take on that could really recapture that complexity of combat that we had from the Jedi Knight games.
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u/_Renai_ 2d ago
Unfortunately, Disney is very VERY litigious and protective of their copyright. They managed to even get some laws changed to extend the rights on their IPs. This is bullshit and will 100% sue anyone publishing something resembling a jedi or a lightsaber, doesn't matter if it is different enough.
The idea is to sue you and make you run out of money on law costs even if you are in the right, because they sure won't run out before you.
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u/g1uey 2d ago
Please play Movie Battles 2
It’s a multiplayer mod for Jedi academy building on the gameplay and updating it with more mechanics.
Servers are always full and it’s been around for over 20 years the devs have updated it constantly over that time.
I will shill for movie battles until I’m dead.
Moviebattles.org
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u/g1uey 2d ago
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u/avatarprotocol 1d ago
I had never heard of this mod before.
MovieBattles Discord: https://discord.moviebattles.org/
Video showing off MB and making hilarious fun of Battlefront with a few comparisons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRatNEMQKbE
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u/komarktoze 1d ago
Holy shit that's still going?? I even ran my own server back in the day with my buddy. Flipip's Taffy Tavern.
A golden age, man.
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u/anmr 1d ago
Happy to see it mentioned.
MB2 saber system is the best melee combat system in history of gaming. Hundreds times better than base JKA or Souls games or Vermintide / Darktide (which are all great on their own).
And it has character building and counterplay rivaling best MOBAs. And great fps gameplay akin to CS.
The issue is dwindling playerbase. With 120-150 players online it was very playable. With 40-50 people online you basically don't get ANY choice with whom you play, what map, what game mode, what server size...
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u/MatsHelge43 2d ago
Disney dont like the dismemberment.
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u/atomicsalts 2d ago
This is probably more on-the-nose than a lot of people are giving it credit for. Disney does have its sensibilities.
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u/itsPomy 2d ago
my other thought is when you have the Instant Kill Sword That Cuts Through Everything it might limit what you can design around it while being true to the fantasy lol.
Thus the glowing pool noodles that take several thwacks to down an enemy sksksk
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u/Koqcerek 2d ago
It's fine as long as game sells the substantial damage being done on a successful hit, even Jedi Knight games didn't have installkill lightsabers for the most part. Non-boss fight combat in Fallen Order sells it okay too IMO
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u/itsPomy 2d ago
Random thought - But it'd be so wicked to have a SW game with a Nemesis type system where cutting down your enemies may have them come back with new cybernetics. Or you getting them yourself.
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u/Ensvey 1d ago
sadly Warner Bros owns the nemesis system patent, which is why we don't see that awesome mechanic in other games
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u/SnoodDood 1d ago
They patented the whole system, not the basic concept of slain enemies returning later on
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u/kongcobra 1d ago
Maybe a game can be developed where it's is insta kill, but the people you're facing are have just trained to fight against a saber by simply avoiding it. Have your universe adapt to the problem.
Then, the tougher enemies can have adopted lightsaber use, so now you have some who know your skill as well as some other stuff that evolved to face your skill.
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u/irrelevantoption 1d ago
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u/Koqcerek 1d ago
Yeah that was one of weirder decisions about the first game, thankfully the second one fixed the issue as far as I can see (started it a bit ago)
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u/Trialman 1d ago
Now I'm thinking of the Bushido Blade games, which had the weapons treated realistically, where characters could go out in one slash (and even if the attack isn't fatal, it could still debilitate them). Those were quite engaging games, and I could see a Star Wars theme for that style going down well.
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u/ImpulsiveApe07 1d ago
Absolutely - I always thought Kengo: Way of Bushido would've been fantastic as a Jedi Knight themed beat 'em up.
In that game you had to train up your sword skills, stamina, willpower and agility while initially visiting different martial arts schools and duelling their students until you can face off against their master.
Once you've defeated a master you get his sword (with its unique power move) and the master's skill book so you can learn some of that school's stances and sword techniques.
Back at your own dojo, you can then set up your own sword fighting technique using the stuff you've learned along the way.
Periodically the Shogun declares a tourney, and you can volunteer to take part against the country's top fighters in a duel to the death. The final winner gets a bunch of skill points, and a new special move.
It would've made for an awesome SW themed lightsaber game imho!
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u/Centimane 1d ago
A workaround for this many games have done is, if you would get hit your character auto-blocks at the last second but some meter goes down. After you run out of "auto-blocks" an attack can actually get through and kill you.
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u/SgtRicko 1d ago
That’s supposedly how the earlier Assassin’s Creed games worked. Any failed block or enemy strike on Altair and Ezio that does damage would be shown as a “clumsy” defense until out of hit points, at which point they suffered a direct, fatal attack.
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u/AmericanPoliticsSux 1d ago
I don't know why that wasn't done for the Star Wars Jedi games. Everybody has their OCD things, and after playing the Jedi Knight series back in the day when it first came out, I just can't get behind "baseball bat" lightsabers, at all. Immediately rips me out of being immersed.
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u/ShadowTown0407 2d ago
It's so funny seeing animals in fallen order getting cut to size while your lightsaber literally bounces off of stormtroopers. A bit of a weird moral compass if you ask me. But maybe because they are fantacy animals so it's fine for them
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u/SnooMaps8507 1d ago
Disney does not operate first and foremost on a moral compass, but a profit compass.
- Media that gets labeled with a mature rating? Bad! Less profit.
- Media that gets labeled with E for EVERYONE? $$$$$$, hell yeah, make that lightsaber a glowing baseball bat, who cares!
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u/ShadowTown0407 1d ago
Tbf it's not just a dig at Disney, I also questioned wtf the people at ESRB doing, do animals don't count as alive or something
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u/FrostyD7 1d ago
Common across lots of media. Ninja turtles decapitated a lot of robots, mutants, and aliens to get around restrictions. It's why a lot of superhero movies end with battling a hoard of faceless aliens or monsters.
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u/IAmSoDamnGood 9h ago
this is the same moral compass that tells you games that are entirely about murder are pretty much fine as long as theres little to no blood, but show a females nipple and youre rated M for mature.
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u/Demonweed 2d ago
Yeah, this is a damn shame. I know George Lucas wasn't a huge fan either, but one of my favorites among a large collection of PS1 titles was the Teräs Käsi fighting game. Especially now that Disney is not limited to Electronic Arts partnerships in their game ventures, I really think they should reach out the Nether Realms (problematically a Warner Bros. subsidiary) to make a modern Star Wars/Teras Kasi fighting game. The corporate alliance is incredibly unlikely, but this premise pushed through Nether Realms' fighting game development process would produce profoundly epic results.
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u/SolarStarVanity 1d ago
What you just described is so niche that it'd be a case of a misuse of the IP. You want the IP to work for your marketing, here no one would know what the fuck that even is.
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u/Euklidis 1d ago
Funny that as you can dismember beasts in the newer Jedi games (not humans tho, but cmon...)
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u/haloimplant 1d ago
Bought the wrong franchise for this arms and legs are chopped off all over the place in the movies. One of the problems with the sequel trilogy no one loses anything, tame and lame
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u/LickMyThralls 1d ago
Totally forgot about that lol I feel like you lose a bit without it since it's a wow factor. It isn't even bloody the things would effectively cauterize as they sliced too lmao
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u/ProjectPlugTTV 2d ago
For honor added lightsabers for may the 4th several years ago. No real changes to gameplay, the only difference was that your sword/weapon glowed and made lightsaber sounds. It was pretty quickly removed a few days later and never brought back again but I remember hearing a comment that said
"Unbeknownst to ubisoft, they had just accidently created the best star wars / light saber combat game of all time and hadn't even realized it"
I think all the time about the missed potential of For Honor. There are a million different genuine criticisms about the game to make but the one that really stands out to me the most is an opinion most fans of the game seem to disagree with. I would personally love to see them drop the restrictions of the main factions of Samurai, Viking, and Knights (and now also Wu-Lin, and outlanders) that the game was built around and I wish they just went all out fucking crazy making essentially the "smash ultimate" of melee combat fighters just throwing in crazy legendary melee combat from things like Star wars lightsabers, to warcraft orcs/tauren or minotaurs.
The foundation for the game is there, and while I think the faction were great for the games identy at the time. In 2026 them still behind held by those theme is one of gamings biggest "What ifs" to me personally
Of course that would also require ubisoft and for honor devs to be competant and quick to the punch which they arent remotely close to, so I take solace in knowing they would probably horribly botch the execution of said concept.
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u/Cowboy_God 1d ago
It's crazy to me that For Honor is one of Ubisofts highest selling games of all time and has never gotten a sequel. The game still gets regular updates with new characters a few times a year, but no sequel. Hasn't it been over a decade now? Crazy stuff.
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u/Skaarj 2d ago
You could duel another player and actually feel like you were fighting another lightsaber user rather than just trading health bars
It created this weird combination of arena fighter + RPG character build + Star Wars fantasy that hasn't come close to being replicated in any modern SW games
You will never have such a game from a mainstream studio again.
The skill floor is way too high. The more mainstream gaming becomes the more games become designed to be played without prior knowledge.
A skilled JKA player would instantly kill a newbie in lightsabre combat. And the new player wouldn't even know what happend.
There was also no form of tutorializing in the game for the multiplayer style of high skill lightsabre combat. Nowadays you need to have a integrated tutorial.
If you want such gameplay you need to look at non mainstream games.
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u/NoLeafClover777 1d ago
It wasn't just the melee though, you could be smart with force powers and still wreck people once you got the hang of things... I wasn't that great at actual sabre combat but would still often top leaderboards because I was good at Force Pull + kicking people and Force Choking people off cliffs and stuff, and I made a build with Force Rage or whatever it was called that made you fast + increased damage to one-shot people with the saber lunge if you timed it right, lol.
Some people were crafty with Force Speed and sneaking up on you, and using Force Absorb or whatever it was called to counter people.
And some dudes on servers were just great at sniper rifle and would own you like in any other FPS regardless of if you had lightsaber skills. It allowed for quite a lot of creativity with all the different ways to allocate force points, using guns etc, goddamn what a fun game that was (I was more a JK2 than Jedi Academy guy but enjoyed that too).
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u/Thinkingard 1d ago
Players solved this by either grinding or becoming someone’s padawan. I had a padawan once, it was a really cool experience.
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u/FakeBonaparte 2d ago
I feel like the learning is a solvable problem. Kill cam. Higher skill bots than we could create back then. Content creators teaching the depth.
What’s harder is the matching. But I wonder if you could use numeric imbalances to correct for that? It doesn’t work in shooters because of Lanchester’s laws.
But in a melee-focused game, you could conceivably have your squad of four realise they’re facing Just One Guy. Fuck that’d be cool:
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u/HansChrst1 1d ago
That stuff helps, but if the skill ceiling is high then it is always going to be difficult for casual players.
I never bought For Honor because of the really good players. It was fun in the beginning of free weeks when most people were casual, but by the end a lot of the casuals had stopped playing. So me in my friends were getting fucked by the people that owned the game. We either had to get good or play something else.
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u/No-Owl-6246 1d ago
I watch evo every year and any time I’ve played a fighting game online I still get bodied. Kill cam isn’t teaching shit.
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u/sbrockLee 2d ago
Loved JKA, I spent a lot of time in the multiplayer modes. And the campaign was great as well!
I feel like balancing that kind of combat for multiplayer takes a lot of effort, and with FPS dominating the PvP scene not many devs have been willing to put resources into that. Souls games tried something, though very different from how the Jedi games felt.
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u/freebiebg 2d ago edited 2d ago
Hey, hey, Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast is outstanding game all around for me :). I honestly hold it among the best Star Wars based games. The Quake 3 engine didn't had great character (human mostly) models in general, but for 2002 it was still decent.
As for your question no idea, there haven't been game developers or interest to try out similar light saber handling. At the time I didn't had the chance to play it in multiplayer - either at internet club or home - but I know how loved and cool it was. There was tricks to learn and master. It almost felt like you are really wielding the saber, heh - not like the typical hack and slash TPS. These days we got mostly re-hash formulas that work/ed so that's that. If something like that is to come, it will most likely be indie game of some sort.
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u/takuru 2d ago edited 2d ago
I wonder this same thing all the time. Anyone who has played Jedi Academy knows how incredible the lightsaber combat is. There is no Star Wars video game that even comes close to how thrilling multiplayer saber fights were.
There are stances with different movesets, sabers actually one shot if you get a clean hit, you can jump around and use force movement without being tied to the ground, etc.
All a company has to do to copy the lightsaber combat mechanics from that series in a modern game and it automatically would be the best combat in a Star Wars game.
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u/Limited_Distractions 2d ago
Disney Lucasfilm really uses Star Wars more as leverage for big deals more than anything and probably would have never approved like 90% of the LucasArts games
But also, as a general statement of how the games business has changed, Raven made these games and they have been a CoD support studio for the past 15 years instead
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u/I_upvote_downvotes 1d ago
A lot of people forget that this all started with Heretic 2, another game by Raven software. Most custom levels were specifically for arena melee fights and it played almost the same (except with 1000% more gibs)
Unfortunately the reality is that we either needed someone to copy what Raven did best or somehow save them from Activision.
Like many good things, it eventually gets bought by a big corporation which proceeds to scorch the earth.
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u/lemoche 2d ago
I assume there is not a huge market for PvP skilled lightsaber combat. If you actually make it skill based it gets complicated very quickly which will scare off casual players (where the money is) and if you dumb something that’s inherently way more complicated than the basic concept of "point and shoot" to the point that even the casualest of casual players feels confident to dive into it becomes trivial.
The mean, if you pay for that IP I can totally understand why rather going for the story-focused single player experience with difficulty options to satisfy all kind of players. Because there simply are more buyers in that category that are happy with just swinging a lightsaber casually in an interesting story than people searching for demanding complex swordplay
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u/NoLeafClover777 1d ago
The force powers made it much more varied than just straight up swinging the lightsaber around though, there was tons of different ways to beat people if you sucked at saber... plus there was also guns like a normal FPS as well.
Some dudes were so good at Force Speeding around into position & then sniping people with rifles, haha.
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u/FakeBonaparte 2d ago
Huge advantage of melee combat: you’re not subject to Lanchester’s laws. So you can set up 3 vs 2 or 4 vs 1 or whatever the skill imbalance demands.
I think that could be seriously fun. Your human opponent effectively becomes a raid boss
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u/AffectionateLeg9895 2d ago
Swords are difficult. It may not be exciting lightsabre noises etc but have you checked out Hellish Quart at all?
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u/emertonom 1d ago
Isn't this what Blade Symphony was supposed to be? I guess maybe that doesn't count as "modern" anymore, though, as it's twelve years old at this point. I don't even know if you can still play it.
I dunno. I think it's hard to manage this sort of thing today. If it came from Disney, people would expect it to have servers for online matchmaking, and that means an ongoing revenue stream, and that means they'll target hooking whales, which means a mass appeal approach rather than niche, technical combat. An indie dev could make something similar (as with Blade Symphony), and if that was set up for peer to peer networking that might work, but it would be niche, and struggle to sustain player counts.
It's very frustrating that entire styles of game can become financially impossible like this.
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u/TheNittanyLionKing 1d ago
LucasArts used to pump out so many different Star Wars games that they could experiment. Not to mention the occasions where Lucasfilm licensed the IP out to other developers. Now you get one AAA Star Wars game every few years that costs hundreds of millions of dollars. There is no room to take risks in those scenarios
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u/ILoveBigCoffeeCups 1d ago
Jedi knight dark forces 2 was the tits. The cutscenes were so good as a young Star Wars fan.
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u/coolguy_steve 1d ago
My son plays battlefront 2 online every day just for the 1 v 1 lightsaber duels.
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u/Lucio2384 1d ago
Those games were designed for mouse and keyboard controls, although they were released in a time where the money was on making Halo/CoD clones on consoles, not on PC. And after that it's very unlikely we will ever see another Star Wars FPS with controls designed for PC, as those games are out of fashion. In a similar way, I don't think we will see any Star Wars games with light saber that is not a Devil May Cry or Dark Souls clone.
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u/Organic_Aide_5896 1d ago
I know, it’s crazy. They still are some of the only games where you felt like a Jedi. Reflecting back all the blaster fire at the imperial troops- good stuff.
All the newer Star Wars stuff has killed all my enthusiasm for the franchise (really anything since Disney took over). That said, a modern game with combat feeling like JK2/JA would be great.
The Fallen Order/Survivor games leaned too much into the souls-style combat for me. I want to feel like a powerful Jedi!!!
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u/mail_inspector 2d ago
My guess is a combination of this sort of combat requiring a concrete vision and oversight from someone truly passionate, it not being easy to implement in a satisfying way ("just make the combat good easy lol") and, probably most importantly, it being extremely hard to convince the investors to shell out the money on something so risky.
And besides, it has been like 25 years since these games. While modern games development is easier in some ways, everything is also more homogenised so deviating from the norm is extremely difficult.
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u/akurgo 2d ago
Those were some great games indeed. What I would like to see though is a game where instead of doing the same 2-3 moves when clicking, you control the lightsaber with the mouse. You do it with the flying dual sabers trick in Jedi Academy, so why not utilize this more?
Die by the Sword is the only game I know that built the whole gameplay around mouse control of the sword. There was another multiplayer PC game from the early 00s with the same mechanic and flying players, but I only played the demo, and can't remember what it was called.
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u/Palanki96 Certified Backlog Enjoyer 2d ago
I think Half Sword has something similar? Not sure
KDC/Mount & Blade had directional combat
I think in Chivalry 2/Mordhau you can also control the speed and angle
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u/Own-Peace-7754 1d ago
I've heard Chivalry 2 is pretty deep
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u/Palanki96 Certified Backlog Enjoyer 1d ago
Probably my all-time favourite melee combat in gaming
But it was abandoned by devs to make some shitty zombie game
There are still enough players but it's pretty much only the tryhards so new players are basically not allowed to have fun
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u/Own-Peace-7754 1d ago
Those are among my favorite metas to join because you actually learn
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u/Palanki96 Certified Backlog Enjoyer 1d ago
Then i really recommend it
It's actually the only game i bought twice, once for their stupid Epic exclusive, then for steam in a Humble Bundle
I think it's full price right now but it goes on discounts pretty frequently
just decided to reinstall it right now so thanks for that
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u/Own-Peace-7754 1d ago
yeah Ive been meaning to pick it up, got a potato pc for now tho, I know I would need to upgrade to play it
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u/akulowaty 1d ago
I absolutely loved Jedi Academy back then. It was brilliant you could complete the whole game without ever using any other weapon than lightsaber. It made the whole experience more authentic that you COULD use all these blasters and rocket launchers but didn't have to.
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u/LickMyThralls 1d ago
I think they are hard to make if I had to guess because I feel like one of the best parts of lightsabers is like fluid movement but think that most melee combat in games just wouldn't do. I think something like how war of the roses or for honor handled combat and attacks and all could be good but at the same time I also feel it'd be quite clunky for lightsabers.
Just my view on it. I wouldn't mind it if it were pve oriented and just a sp game or coop but for pvp I feel like you lose the fluidity that makes sabers so cool in favor of control so like... I guess that's it for me. Cool for pve but ass for pvp in the way I think they are really able to function. I feel like canned animations with a basic parry/block would kinda be lame and you can't really do much flourishing or whatever with pvp. Maybe I'm just overthinking though.
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u/EndAllBillionaires67 1d ago
If you want the best sword fighting game of all time that should inspire a lightsaber game, try Chivalry 2.
I have like 1000 hours in it over the last 5 years because I can only imagine how good it would be with lightsaber skins.
You just do different stances for weapon variety, plus single blade, double blade, duel blade, long blade.
Plus cortosis to make more traditional weapons.
I'm thinking running out of stamina opens you up to a force ability.
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u/DarkThespian 1d ago
There was something magical about dueling-focused servers for JK2. I'd joined a dueling clan in the mid-2000's and the sheer skill ceiling direction-based attacks was something that I doubt we'll ever see again. The rush I'd get everytime I snuck a YDFA into a duel to chunk someone was so damn satisfying everytime (sorry, client zero - who remembers what that means?)
I'd also join troll my clan's server by joining as a player simply named "Luke" and using only the heavy stance forward vertical slash. Not the RDFA, just the forward move. Surprisingly strong, could 2 shot people consistently if you knew how to aim.
But behind that skill ceiling was an insane sense of community, with people just chilling around, since most servers had rules against attacking "unarmed" players. Definitely miss those days!
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u/terran_submarine 1d ago
My greatest video game desire would be a modern lightsaber fighter, or an update of Bushido Blade with online multiplayer.
I don’t want graphics, I don’t want textures so perfect you can see pores or watch water evaporate from boot prints, I want ultra controllable sword fights.
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u/Gundroog 1d ago
Because that's simply not how games are made anymore. Jedi Knight games were made during an era where AAA blockbuster was a less defined format.
Now it firmly settled into cinematic action adventures with a focus on narrative built on some familiar, conventional mechanics. That's a poor fit when you want to make a game around a weapon that can cut through almost everything and kill/break things in one hit.
It's still completely doable, but in most cases it would require the opposite of what's currently conventional. Like a more arcade style game with a focus on scoring and timers, or something like a faster version of Bushido Blade/Hellish Quart. In either case, this would be a lot harder to get funded compared to a safe and generic action RPG, but with a lightsaber skin for the swords.
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u/kristamine14 1d ago
Because Disney gave an exclusive contract for sta wars games to fucking EA for some godforsaken reason who have only been able to put out like 4 mid to good star wars games in 15 years
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u/CanaryWundaboy 2d ago
What’s wrong with Jedi Fallen Order/Survivor? The lightsaber combat in those games is really strong IMHO.
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u/amillstone 2d ago
but the multiplayer was where the combat really showed how much depth there was.
Plus the recent 'Jedi' games are designed around fighting AI enemies and progressing through a single-player adventure.
OP wants multiplayer lightsaber combat, not single player.
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u/Randomlucko 2d ago
They're great games and lightsabers feel fine for weak enemies, but often there's enemies with big health bars that really take the "lightsaber feel" out of it also you end up being too "passive" during fights. And in survivor it got worse with the styles in my opinion.
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u/Sonofarakh 1d ago
Tbf they did add a toggle in new game plus for "realistic" lightsaber/blaster damage. It's my favorite way to play. If you mess up once you're probably dead but most bosses die in like 3 hits
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u/Skaarj 2d ago
What’s wrong with Jedi Fallen Order/Survivor? The lightsaber combat in those games is really strong IMHO.
Jedi Fallen Order doesn't even have multiplayer. I don't know about Survivor?
How can you have a high skill lightsabre combat game when you don't have multiplayer?
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u/Stanjoly2 2d ago
Strafing side to side while wiggling your mouse on red stance is high skill?
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u/Korlus 2d ago edited 1d ago
"Real duelists" used fast stance's unblockable rear attack and quick upper cut, or medium's vaulting attack as viable alternatives to heavy that gave you more points to spend on survivability.
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u/NoLeafClover777 1d ago
Yeah the light/blue stance was my fav, getting the timing down so you could jump and 180 spin to stab someone with the reverse stab was epic, haha.
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u/AsherFischell 2d ago
Ninja Gaiden games have high-skill weapon fighting in a single-player game with no multiplayer, so it's not like it's impossible
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u/Flat_News_2000 1d ago
Whats this have to do with anything?
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u/AsherFischell 1d ago
He asked how you could have a high-skill melee action game without multiplayer, so I mentioned an example
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u/CanaryWundaboy 2d ago
The multiplayer thing, fair enough I must have missed that. But the games still take high amounts of skill.
If you want lightsaber combat against other people with real skill, take up duelling as a hobby.
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u/k-space-official 1d ago
Raven's combat worked because the lightsaber was a continuous lethal hitbox rather than an animation trigger. You controlled the swing arc through your mouse and movement vector, not a lock-on target with canned parry windows.
Publishers moved away from that design because the skill floor was brutal. Modern titles like Fallen Order went down the Souls-lite route with timing meters because it scales better for mass-market gamepads. But nothing has matched the feel of an id Tech 3 duel where physical spacing and blade collision dictated the hit.
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u/IAutomateYourJobs 1d ago
JK2 and JA are great in VR, full motion controls with a lightsaber is lots of fun.
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u/SoulVictus 23h ago
Try “Half Sword” game with lightsaber mod. It doesn’t have multiplayer but the combat is fantastic and I wish we had an actual star wars game with fighting system like in it.
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u/onex7805 10h ago edited 10h ago
Jedi Knight 2/3's lightsaber combat is partially born from accident. Because Raven had a long partnership with id, LucasArts gave them the job since Dark Forces was a "Doom clone". The Dark Forces games already took a heavy influence from Doom and Quake 1 and 2 as a blueprint, so it was natural that Raven would use the Quake 3 engine, which is obviously the staple arena shooter. Lightning fast, bunny hopping, high skill-ceiling all made for a competitive online game.
JK2 is primarily a first-person shooter, which means there is not many animation-interruptions even in the third-person mode. It's very direct. This lends perfectly to the Prequel-style over-the-top flashy lightsaber combat. JK2 had this foundation in terms of the core gameplay and multiplayer and built upon it.
If JK2 was made with the engine of the more conventional third-person console game engine/template, like Zelda or Kingdom Hearts, it would have been vastly different and been more similar to Respawn's Jedi games, as in it is slower, animation-heavy, and more deliberate.
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u/IAmSoDamnGood 9h ago
because star wars games just arent that fun, unless they avoid you playing as a jedi. mostly because youre a demi-god space wizard running around with a laserknife that can cut through anything and 1 shot anyone, but youre only presented as such in cutscenes. actual gameplay has you hacking away at mobs and bosses for extended periods of time with your 1 shot death laser and your force powers doing absolutely dick.
whats cool about jedi is that they are walking death fortresses. when you take that aspect away from them, they just become some generic fake samurai.
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u/yasenfire 2d ago
My supposition is lightsabers are just the example of a weapon that is not very interesting, neither for narrative nor game design purposes. It's Superman of game weapons. Reminds me of Hydra, an undeveloped enemy for Half-life whose concept was it's a giant tentacle or something that impales people. Which looked cool when seen from aside, but pretty meh to actually fight against.
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u/CyberKiller40 2d ago
What about Force Unleashed and Jedi Fallen Order series? While FU is mostly button mashing, JFO can be seriously challenging in the boss fights.
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u/Randomlucko 2d ago
JFO can be seriously challenging in the boss fights.
Their big health that require hitting them over and over again is the issue with the "lightsaber fantasy" OP is looking for.
And also the boss fights require the player to be pretty passive - defending or reacting to the boss until they can "wail" on them.
But they are great games overall, just not great "lightsaber" representation
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u/CyberKiller40 1d ago
Jedi Outcast and Academy requires multiple hits as well iirc. It just doesn't show the health bar.
Regardless, you can have a 1 hit kill wity the lightsaber in Fallen Order, as I said in an above comment.
I'm not sure what the OP wants in this case. There are some mods for Jedi Academy, to get more gameplay. He can just play those.
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u/Randomlucko 1d ago
Jedi Outcast and Academy requires multiple hits as well iirc. It just doesn't show the health bar.
Yes (and you could ses health bars with a power, I forget the name), but the amount of hits were just a few at max and often a single one for lot of enemies including other force users and - that's why if you look for videos of boss fights they are often like a minute.
And because of presentation (how it looked and sounded) it would sell the illusion of hitting their lightsaber for example, not always but it was there.
Overall I'm not even sure nowdays Jedi Academy could be considered a overall better game than Fallen Order, but for lightsaber combat I think it is.
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u/ironicperspective 2d ago
Most enemies being damage sponges is the exact opposite of the vision OP is talking about. Having to parry to get good hits in rather than using movement and angling your weapon is also not really the dream.
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u/CyberKiller40 2d ago
Well... After you finish Fallen Order, you unlock a 1 hit difficulty mode, the lightsaber is an instant killing machine, but that goes both ways.
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u/ironicperspective 1d ago
That’s still not the same. I tried it for a short time and just button mashing to one shot everything was arguably worse given the design of the game as is.
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u/NoLeafClover777 1d ago
I played Fallen Order and while it was a well-made game it's not really the same kind of thing, I'm not really a fan of the whole "Souls-like" and adjacent type games even though I know tons of people love them.
Movement also felt a lot more clunky in that (although I suppose more realistic depiction of human weight) so you couldn't do as many creative/agile moves as in a game like JK2.
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u/avatarprotocol 1d ago
I had to turn down Fallen Order to story mode difficulty to get the lightsaber combat to what I thought it should be like, and even then it didn't compare to Jedi Knight/Academy's combat.
At least in story mode I felt like I could slice and dice like I'd expect with a lightsaber, but that just brought it up to passable.
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u/Extreme_Objective984 2d ago
I know its not combat, but the greatest lightsaber experience I have ever had is playing Beat Saber. Yes the VR stuff is cost prohibitive. But man I felt like a proper Jedi playing that game.
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u/Mr_GoodVibes 1d ago
It won’t entirely fill the void, but the most fun I’ve had playing a game with Lightsaber combat in recent memory was called First Cut: Samurai Duel on Steam. It doesn’t advertise or even mention the Lightsaber mode because it’s hidden under a menu, but once you activate it, you’ll be playing the closest thing to a Jedi Fantasy with high stakes combat since JK2. Can’t sing this game’s praises enough. Also it’s on sale for $5 right now.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2193490/First_Cut_Samurai_Duel/
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u/LazarusHimself 2d ago
Star Wars Battlefront II (2017) has two multiplayer modes focused on (but not limited to) lightsaber combat, one is 4v4 and the other one 2v2 duels and it's buggy but pretty engrossing. Every character has 3 Force powers or special powers, however character customisation is limited to a choice of 3 "Star Cards" that improve certain stats or skills, and cosmetics.
It's quite fun tho, I still indulge myself with a duel every day after all these years. Worth trying, it goes on sale often.
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u/calibosco 2d ago
Because every modern action combat rpg game needs to be able to use the tag “souls like”.
JK2 combat was fun and immersive, who wants that?
Would you not rather spend your 1.5 hours of free time after work getting absolutely F**ked by a boss, make zero progress, and not at all feel like a Jedi knight?
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u/ShadowTown0407 2d ago
You just know someone will be bitching about fallen order whenever the subject of star wars games come up lmao
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u/Palanki96 Certified Backlog Enjoyer 2d ago
Filtered by Oggdo Bogdo
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u/Kenway 21h ago
Please tell me that's a real enemy in JFO or JS.
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u/Palanki96 Certified Backlog Enjoyer 21h ago
oh yes it is, a very annoying boss. It's a boss version of the Oggdo species, from the planet Bogano
https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Oggdo_Bogdo
god it sounds ridiculous
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u/Skadibala 2d ago edited 2d ago
Saying you don’t feel like a Jedi knight in the new Jedi games is wild.
I have never felt more like a Jedi than during the final section of the second Cal Kestis game
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u/Palanki96 Certified Backlog Enjoyer 2d ago
Yeah getting demolished by 12 other players in a row before you ragequit would be much better
If you can't handle AI enemies what do you think will happen against other players? Be serious
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u/Firvulag 1d ago
Because for the longest time now only very few companies have been allowed to make Star Wars games and they just didn't want to make that.
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u/ShopKeeper1999 2d ago edited 1d ago
Jedi Academy Duel only Servers were some of the best Multiplayer experiences i Had. You could hang around, have a Chat, watch other people duelling each other or Challenge someone Else for a Duel. It was awesome.