LucasArts Reduces Staff After Cancellations 55
cordsie writes "In a move that should come as a surprise to absolutely no one at this point, the once venerable LucasArts has laid off thirty of its staff. The brief article implies that the layoffs were due to the recent cancellation of the sequel to Sam and Max and the Full Throttle follow-up." S!: Ferrago has a story noting this reduces the LucasArts staff count "to about 389", still a significant number, and an earlier International House of Mojo story regarding the layoffs has a commenter alleging: "Among the people let go were... [the] Director of The Dig, Escape from Monkey Island and most recently Full Throttle 2... as well as both the Lead Engineer and Producer of the late Sam and Max 2 game."
To those who got laid off... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:To those who got laid off... (Score:1)
Typical (Score:2)
"If it doesn't say 'Star Wars' in the title it won't make cash. Sack everyone who's not working on a Star Wars console game."
Re:Typical (Score:3, Funny)
Stepping out of starwars (Score:1, Interesting)
Which brings back to the original statistics. What percentage of gamers nowadays are devoted starwars fan that'll buy anything starwars related. It's a much smaller percentage, now that the market is saturated with starwars garbage.
Re:Stepping out of starwars (Score:5, Interesting)
Labyrinth: Outstanding game for its time
Monkey Island series (1 through 4): Great games, all of them
Sam and Max Hit the Road: Awesome game
Force Commander: Utter pants
Rogue Squadron: Godawful kindergarten shooter
Obi Wan: Terrible! Stop!
Starfighter: Fricken useless childish replacement for the older X-Wing/Tie Fighter games
Re:Stepping out of starwars (Score:4, Interesting)
Grim Fandango: Great
Maniac Mansion: Great
Loom: Great
The Dig: Great
So many great LucasArts adventure games. It came to a point that I'd almost buy any LucasArts adventure game without reading a single review (the same definitely cannot be said about Star Wars games).
From this point on, I think I must refuse to buy any more LucasArts games if they keep sacking all the good developers. It's going to kill me not playing KOTOR2, but I'm just so disgusted at LucasArts right now.
Re:Stepping out of starwars (Score:2)
I'd say about 40% of all the star wars games out there are really good? I say this as both a gamer and a star wars fanboy, so that's a pretty fair statement for someone who might otherwise be biased.
Re:Stepping out of starwars (Score:2)
Fear leads to anger
Anger leads to hate
Hate leads to suffering
Suffering leads to hitting the KOTOR 2 crackrock!
Re:Stepping out of starwars (Score:2)
All the elements are there, storyline, RPG system, stats, artwork, soundtrack, all the right elements, but they tied it together in a rather limited way. Hopefully Kotor 2 will exceed Kotor by not dumbing down the system as much as they did
Re:Stepping out of starwars (Score:2)
Re:Stepping out of starwars (Score:1)
D20 fails on the same levels GURPS does.
A really "good" system is Rolemaster, but calling it incredibly complicated would be an understatement. It's almost like it was designed to run on a computer.
Loom! (Score:1)
The sadness. Loom was probably my first introduction to adventure games (along with LSL1.)
Re:Stepping out of starwars (Score:2)
Re:Stepping out of starwars (Score:3, Interesting)
Of the others I've played:
Jedi Starfighter on X-Box - I thought it was OK, but it seemed like they added way too many "features" that it was hard to keep track of, much less actually use.
Rogue Squadron on PC - I really loved this one. The game control with a joystick is excellent, and it had som
Also also... (Score:1)
Rescue on Fractalis: Also outstanding for the time
Eidolon: A little slow, but fun
Ballblazer: Absolutely fantastic! Too bad the souped-up Playstation version was not so hot...
Night Shift: Total pain in the ass, but a cute puzzle game.
Re:Stepping out of starwars (Score:4, Interesting)
Lucasarts and Sierra were the two main developers advancing the adventure game genre for many years, and the list of best classic adventure games reads like a list of their titles. I'm not sure what non-Star Wars Lucasarts games you dislike so much, but I'm doubtful that you're thinking of their adventure games -- which FT2 and S&M2 would have been.
I can believe that Lucasarts published poor games at some point in time, but they have an extremely strong reputation in the adventure game arena. I do not know of any poor adventure games that they produced. Honestly, I cannot think of another game company that is as known for such long-term good leadership in their field. Perhaps id Software for FPS-style games.
Now, this doesn't mean that S&M2 and FT2 would have been good. It does, however, mean that any bias toward their new games based on their history should really be positive, not negative.
Re:Typoo (Score:3, Funny)
I realize when trolling it's always best to throw in at least one typo to hook all the spelling nazi's but there's such a thing as pride in your work. By making such an obvious mistake, your trollish intent becomes clear. Far better to misspell using a homonym or some such whenever possible.
I mean, come on.. everybody knows it's "into" not "out of"
Re:Stepping out of starwars (Score:1)
I fully agree - many of their best games were from licenses outside the SW world. I was full of awe when I played "The Dig" - the soundtrack was truly incredible, and the story was thought provoking, and inspired a sense of wonder. And Sam and Max and Full Throttle were masterpieces (I ripped so many choice sound bytes out of the resource file of Sam & Max I kept people in hysterics forever when I played them ba
Kind of a shame, really (Score:4, Interesting)
With Sam and Max and FT2 cancelled, coupled with the resignation of president Simon Jeffrey and the firing of the director of some of the great adventure titles, I have a sinking feeling I know what has happened. Lucasarts has decided to put all of its weight behind Star Wars Licensing. The suits have taken over: why make novel titles when you can put out a star wars game that will make way more money?
Re:Kind of a shame, really (Score:2)
The justification for cancelling Sam and Max 2 was that the game wasn't turning out well, that it wasn't fun. *That* might be reasonable. I'm more than a little surprised that FT2 could also be bad, though.
It's not a huge deal. Like Bioware transforming like
Re:Kind of a shame, really (Score:2)
Re:Kind of a shame, really (Score:2)
Re:Kind of a shame, really (Score:1)
No - the justification for cancelling Full Throttle 2 was that the game wasn't turning out well, and (though I have seen nothing more than screenshots and a text summary) they may well have been right. It didn't give me the impression that it had the style or character of the original game.
However, the
Re:is the star wars curse (Score:2)
Re:is the star wars curse (Score:2)
KOTOR was great, and KOTOR2 will also likely be great (Obsidian has great talented people who are used to working with Bioware tech on new, spin-off, and sequel titles). KOTOR was almost enough to make me forget about how horrific the last few years have been for Star Wars in the movie theatres, but not enough to excuse how god
Re:is the star wars curse (Score:2)
Instead of continuing with this great and under-used engine, they decided to make Starfighter. Now Starfighter really sucked.
Re:is the star wars curse (Score:1)
The SSD had previously appeared in Balance of Power, the X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter expansion disk.
X-Wing: Alliance was good, but it suffered from some tedious missions (most of the "family" stuff), as well as the usual X-Wing series "oops, you just played a half-hour mission and made a tiny mistake at the end, now you have to do it all over again" syndrome.
At least it wasn't as poorly balanced
Re:is the star wars curse (Score:1)
What I can't understand is why they don't develope the X-Wing/TIE Fighter series more. They made Lucasarts lots bac
Re:is the star wars curse (Score:2)
Re:is the star wars curse (Score:3, Insightful)
Why then do the performances suck in the first two episodes? Because the script is bad and the direction is worse. The actors are fighting with blue screen (not MS) sets and Lucas really getting his hands in and asking for wooden dialog. He's choosing cuts with some of the worst performances. Why he does this is a complete myste
Re:is the star wars curse (Score:2)
The New Trilogy falls f
Re:is the star wars curse (Score:2)
Director of the Dig (Score:1)
Is this (or rather, _was_ this) the sequel to the 1995 DOS game "The Dig"? A quick search of this (the 1995) game on Google shows remarkably little
Re:Director of the Dig (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?gameid=22
Re:Director of the Dig (Score:1)
A New Opportunity (Score:3, Insightful)
Does anyone know? (Score:2, Interesting)
Sad... (Score:2)
This is sooooo sad... this means LucasArts is dead. I mean, who cares about Yet Another Star Wars Franchise Game (tm), except for Star Wars fans ? It seems to me they've laid off all of the remaining creative people at LucasArts, the last hopes for good adventures are really dead. When Sam and Max 2 was cancelled there at least a very slim hope that they would finish it someday (the game was almost ready for RTM, AFAIK), but this move shows that LucasArts has no interest whatsoever to do something creative
Announcing Generic Star Wars Title #42483.4b (Score:5, Insightful)
And it looks like their innovation and originality dying even more, they recently announced Mercenaries [lucasarts.com] which is a generic 3rd person military unit behind enemy lines preventing North Korea from releasing nukes. Gee, I wonder where they got that *brilliant* plot, who would have ever thought about one involving North Korea and nuclear weapons in this day and age?
Even with their recently released original titles things haven't been going well. I wonder if those who canned Sam & Max 2 were also responsible for giving RTX Red Rock [gametab.com] and Wrath Unleashed [gametab.com] the ok. Plus games like Gladius and Armed and Dangerous probably could have done better if they were given more time. Now it looks like Lucasarts is going to take the safe and easy route by releasing cliches and Star Wars titles.
I can understand the canceling of Full Throttle 2, it was not living up to the original(I recall some game magazines who got to play some of it were disappointed ) and they didn't want to disappoint the fans. But I can't really deal with their canceling of Sam & Max 2 when things seemed to be top quality. Even Steve Purcell thought it was good, and I trust him more then Lucasarts with how Lucasarts has been doing for the last few years.
I think it was about two years ago the company head was going on about how they were going to restore things back to Lucasarts past history of releasing high quality and original titles, and look at how *well* they have accomplished that. While the games were original, they did not have the old Lucasarts quality and game play wise were quite poor. They have pretty much failed at producing high quality original titles, their releasing anymore adventure games seems unlikely, and are pretty much producing just Star Wars games. Thus for now I have given up with Lucasarts, unless they under go through some drastic changes I don't see anything worth my while being released by them.
Adventure Genre (Score:1)
Re:Adventure Genre (Score:3, Insightful)
I was pretty surprised to see a shelf dedicated to Adventure games at Best Buy - it used to be half a row. I suspect that means they're selling again. Personally, I'd like to see the "Myst" style game die, which was about 3/4 of those games - I'm definitely not a fan. I like the Lucas Ar
Re:Adventure Genre (Score:1)
Re:Adventure Genre (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, Grim Fandango was great, and we have several incarnations of Monkey Island, but there's been nothing like Maniac Mansion 3, or Sam & Max 2 - not even after Day of the Tentacle and S&M sold so well. They rested on their laurels and now the characters have faded into obscurity. No one knows who Bernard Bernoulli, Conroy Bumpus, or Docto
Not listening to public outcry. (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not surprised to see Lucasarts pulling their support from the adventure titles. They see it as a dead genre and want to focus more money and development on guaranteed sellers like Galaxies and Jedi Knight. I only wish they would realize how wrong they are.
Re:Not listening to public outcry. (Score:1)
They will, but sadly not in time.
To those recently laid off by lucasart (Score:5, Insightful)
Please try to consider this an opportunity. We are loyal fans who love your games. It is sad to see the ones who made such amazing games as "the dig," "sam and max," and "full throttle," let go like this.
Your art, directing, and style are magnificent. Dont ever forget this.
The reason you were let go was because of shitty, poor management. You should be HAPPY to get away from these people.
Now, A request. Dont stop making games. We love your sense of humor, your writing abilities, and your direction. If you guys release another comedy adventure game WE WILL BUY IT.
In fact, Ive stopped buying lucasarts games recently due to the stagnation your old fuckhead management seems to love so much. So, what I'll do is spend that money on YOUR games instead.
Were waiting!
I have the solution! (Score:2)