LucasArts Embraces Game Mod Community

An anonymous reader writes "LucasArts has taken a great step in promoting the modification of their titles and supporting the communities that love them! According to this press release, LucasArts has teamed up with LFNetwork to open LucasFiles.com. The site is dedicated to all files that fall in the LucasArts realm." Given competing games like Neverwinter Nights, which have a phenomenal amount of user-created add-ons, this is a very smart move for LucasArts.

Preemptive PR?

[bobz]

Conspiracy theory of the day: Lucasarts puts up a "fan community" site to garner lots of good karma in order to offset the hit it will take when it serves more legal papers to ScummVM [scummvm.org] (a Lucasarts adventure game interpreter), who just days ago produced another release...

Re:NWN is not the answer.

[eddy]

They're not going to "fix it", but there's a Mod that does release the camera, so if you really want it, you can have it.

I won't spend time countering your "no customizability"-statement, but I can agree that NWN was nowhere as good as I should have been.

Re:CS

[koko775]

they make boat-loads of money off of CS as well. About four in every five people at my school don't know what the hell half-life is, yet 100% of them know what CS is, and roughly 50% of them play it.

CS-Retail is utterly stupid but, knowing the nature of people who play cs (there are a great many lamers), it's utterly successful as a standalone game.

Re:CS

[dirvish]

True enough. I think the CS CDs that are in stores are about the same price as the Half-Life only CDs. So, either way they are selling just one CD (at roughly standard price) per gamer...lamer or not.

Doom Total Conversions?

[Anonymous Coward]

what ever happened to the -great- starwars themed Doom Total Conversion mods for Doom and Doom II?

one of 'em had you going around inside the friggin death star! it was great.

so was the Aliens Total Conversion mod for that matter. scary as fuck with the sound clips.

Re:Does it hold any potential?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about an FPS? Jedi Knight 2 has quite a few mods and third-party levels [jediknightii.net] (single and multiplayer). Most of them aren't on LucasArts' new site though.

Re:MMORPG

[bfree]

Why would Lucas Arts pass this out? Can anyone out there tell me how difficult it would really be to make a 1942 esque mmorpg out of Jedi Knight, X-wing series (and follow-ups) and all the other Star Wars games they have released? I can see they don't have the expertise with dealing with a huge number of simultaneous users and running the servers for it, would that really be an issue for them? Finally why can't "universe" games run on a distributed network of servers where anyone can design their own region of space and have it inserted (perhaps based on network geography so if you stay close to home you have more of an advantage)?

The best mods will still get killed

[stratjakt]

But not by lucasarts, by whatever copyright they might step on.

New maps, more wookies, flying yodas, etc will probably be tolerated. How would they feel about Jedi Starfighter being turned into a Star Trek game?

But if someone did something like a total conversion mod, say about Dragonball Z or the such, and they gave it some name like Bid for Power, and it was really really cool - much better than any official DBZ game ever created - FUNimation would send out cease and decist orders.

This is a good step, but the modding communities options are still extremely limited.

Re:CS

[mobets]

I use retail because it was cheaper that way. Wy brother and I both wanted it. We got the Half Life collecters pack or whatever. He downloaded the mod, I installed retail.

enuff FPS already!

[delong]

You know what the gaming community really needs? Some real-time strategy and strategy dedicated server binaries. EVERYTHING is FPS. A game company releases a RTS, they put up their own "company" servers only and/or peer to peer. Lame. I'm the game server admin for a US national ISP. I have a dedicated subnet with a dedicated OC3 with a bunch of dedicated boxes used only for games. And they're all FPS, because that's all that's out there. Boring. How about a dedicated binary for Galactic Battlegrounds or something George?

LucasArts embraces mod community...

[Anonymous Coward]

..in much the same way MS embraces Java, I imagine. Once the mod community stops representing a potential source of profit for LA (2 years after the game's released? 3?), the mod community will be getting a little thing I like to call "the shaft".

Re:So what does this imply for ScummVM?

[ja2ke]

The catch to that is, much like AtomFilms hosting your Star Wars fanfilm, you must agree to the agreement/disclaimer thing, and it will probably go through a quality screening process by us, a pack of judgemental fans :)