14 DAY TRIAL // Ever since the Nintendo Wii and its motion tracking technology were announced, players who are also fans of Star Wars have thought about how suited to a lightsaber duel videogame the new mechanisms were.
The promise has not been realized until now, mainly because of limitations linked to the hardware, as seen in both Red Steel videogames but with motion tracking now coming to the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, it might be time to actually reconsider the idea.
When MCV asked openly about a full lightsaber simulation, Darrell Rodriguez, the Chief Executive Officer of LucasArts, answered, “I’m very excited by the new interfaces, either Natal, Move or iPad. It’s something we’re definitely watching and we will consider in the future. The regular suggestion of a lightsaber game is one of the reasons why we are excited about it – but we’ll keep looking at it and see what we can do.” Of course, he qualified his remarks by saying that there's no commitment on the part of the company at the moment.
The big Star Wars project in development now is The Old Republic, a MMO that is being worked on by BioWare. The company has talked at length about its desire to work on the Old Republic setting in order to have the freedom to create complex stories for all character classes, with the combat important but in no way coming close to realism.
LucasArts could be considering a lightsaber videogame but the problem is that both the PlayStation Move from Sony and Project Natal from Microsoft are untested technologies for the time being. It will take a bit of time after their launch in the fall to see if players adopt them in significant enough numbers in order to justify the resources needed to create a full lightsaber duel simulation based on the main Star Wars setting.