We saw the new Star Wars video game Star Wars 1313 demonstrated behind closed doors at E3 2012, and it’s a thematic departure from previous games in the franchise. Star Wars 1313 is billed as the first “mature” Star Wars game to be released. Rather than focusing on Jedi, the Force, good and evil, or hilarious dancing games, it places the player in the shoes of a Coruscant bounty hunter tackling danger in one of the most twisted places in the fictional universe.
The gameplay itself is almost identical to that of the Uncharted series for PlayStation 3; the player runs, jumps, climbs, and shoots his or her way through spectacular, only partially interactive set pieces reminiscent of big-budget action movies.
The cinematic reference isn’t just ours, though. The team presenting the game focused almost completely on its impressive technology, and the fact that the team is made up of both game developers from LucasArts and special effects animators from ILM. One of the team members present worked on the Hulk for the recent summer blockbuster The Avengers.
The results are clear: The facial animations in this game are phenomenal. That seems to be a theme of this year’s E3, for many games. The other graphical elements are impressive too, and it’s clear that unless you’re a hardcore Star Wars fan, the graphics and technologically impressive set pieces are the selling points of Star Wars 1313.
There’s no word on which consoles this game will be released on, or when it will launch. We saw the demo we saw was shown on a cutting-edge, NVIDIA-powered gaming PC, but the tech as it appeared in the demo was clearly beyond the capabilities of modern consoles. Either it will be less impressive on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, or we just saw a title built for as-yet-unannounced, next-generation consoles.
We asked LucasArts producer Craig Derrick if the game would be distributed digitally. His response: “We’re not talking about any platforms yet. But digital is the future, right?”
