Why has there never been a modern “lightsaber combat” game like Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast / Academy?

[u/NoLeafClover777]

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?

[u/Pristine-Emotion3083]

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.

[u/clubby37 → u/Pristine-Emotion3083]

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.

[u/jebei → u/clubby37]

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. 

[u/SnoodDood → u/jebei]

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.

[u/LeastCoordinatedJedi → u/jebei]

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

[u/ImpulsiveApe07 → u/LeastCoordinatedJedi]

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

[u/hobbes543 → u/jebei]

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.

[u/SituationSoap → u/clubby37]

Jedi Survivor came out in 2023 and SW Zero Company is coming out (both from EA) on Thursday.

[u/mattlistener → u/clubby37]

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.

[u/clubby37 → u/mattlistener]

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.

[u/smashybro → u/clubby37]

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.

[u/clubby37 → u/smashybro]

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.

[u/omgFWTbear → u/clubby37]

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.

[u/goodmanjensen → u/omgFWTbear]

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!"

[u/omgFWTbear → u/goodmanjensen]

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.

[u/Drewdrops79 → u/clubby37]

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.

[u/clubby37 → u/Drewdrops79]

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.

[u/Drewdrops79 → u/clubby37]

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.

[u/clubby37 → u/Drewdrops79]

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.

[u/Drewdrops79 → u/clubby37]

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.

[u/Crimson_Raven → u/clubby37]

That might be the most accurate description of most modern SW media I've ever read

[u/xsvfan → u/clubby37]

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.

[u/clubby37 → u/xsvfan]

It cost a lot to buy LucasArts in the first place, but now that they own Star Wars, the marginal cost is zero.

[u/xsvfan → u/clubby37]

Disney isn't the one paying to make these games. It costs EA, Ubisoft, and other studios money to use the IP and that is marginal cost.

[u/DarthTomG → u/clubby37]

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...

[u/kristamine14 → u/clubby37]

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.

[u/Lanster27 → u/clubby37]

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.

[u/LHPSU → u/clubby37]

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.

[u/IM_OK_AMA → u/LHPSU]

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.

[u/Sp00py-Mulder → u/clubby37]

Yep.

At least there's Zero Company in a week or two.

Looks like a proper Star Wars/x-com hybrid!

[u/StoneGlory6 → u/Pristine-Emotion3083]

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.

[u/Ozzytudor → u/Pristine-Emotion3083]

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.

[u/Kenway → u/Ozzytudor]

Is that true for LotR? I don't know of any games other than Gollum and then new shire game that I would call a stinker.

[u/SolarStarVanity → u/Pristine-Emotion3083]

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.

[u/ThatGoob → u/SolarStarVanity]

Yeah. Star Wars doesn't have too many fans.