Star Wars: Republic Commando may have saved us from Battlefront 2, however by no means obtained the prospect

For the unfamiliar, Star Wars: Republic Commando is a squad-based, first-person shooter that places you within the function of Delta Squad chief, RC-1138, aka “Boss.” Broken up throughout three core areas, the sport’s journey duties you with disrupting manufacturing on Geonosis, investigating a derelict spaceship, and releasing Wookies on Kashyyyk. The further three clone troopers act independently, however will be given direct orders to observe, equivalent to taking on sniping positions, regrouping, hacking terminals, and planting explosives. This creates a novel mix of fast-paced taking pictures and tactical gameplay that few Star Wars video games have been in a position to replicate.

These mechanics are wrapped up in darkish, mature themes that wipe away the floor veneer different Star Wars video games exhibit. There isn’t any opening crawl, the Jedi are merely an afterthought, and acquainted iconography we affiliate with the collection is pushed to the background.

“The game was always intended to be a grittier look at the Star Wars universe; we were inspired by the high-lethality of games like Rogue Spear and other Rainbow Six games, particularly in their multiplayer, which pitted teams of players against AI enemies (or against other players, I suppose),” Republic Commando’s lead developer Brett Douville explains. “We wanted to find a way to bring that sense of camaraderie and danger to Star Wars, and focusing on the day-to-day grind of a soldier seemed like a good way to do it.”

That ethos was mirrored in Republic Commando’s tough gestation. As improvement entered its closing section the workforce labored below the fixed risk of redundancy attributable to inside restructuring led to after the appointment of recent LucasArts president Jim Ward. The ailing division was to be rebooted, and so Douville’s workforce started to shrink as duties have been accomplished and roles eliminated.

“Many of the folks on that team I had worked with throughout my LucasArts career, including EP Daron Stinnett, creative director Tim Longo, and level designers Greg Land, Harley Baldwin, and Troy Mashburn, artist Patrick Sirk.”  Douville says. “But the entire workforce have been actually glorious at what they did.

“You work with individuals for years and particularly as a lead you’re feeling a whole lot of accountability and pleasure in the way in which individuals change and develop over the time you understand them. It felt like we have been firing on all cylinders and had a workforce cohesion the place the following sport would have been one thing much more particular. So trying again on that point is a bit bittersweet from that standpoint, nevertheless it was actually one thing to see the diploma to which the workforce pulled collectively below opposed situations to make a sport of which we’re all enormously proud.”

While these stresses have been among the many major components as to why Republic Commando by no means obtained a sequel, there was all the time the looming shadow of different Star Wars video games. During the identical launch 12 months, each Star Wars: Battlefront II and Lego Star Wars: The Video Game got here out. While the latter was a vastly completely different tackle this universe, Battlefront II posed some critical points for the workforce making Republic Commando. Both video games deal with the troopers throughout The Galactic War, nevertheless, Battlefront II took gamers to iconic areas from the movies. This was one among its prime promoting factors, as the concept of getting into the sneakers of a soldier in the course of the battle of Hoth was, for a lot of followers, irresistible. Additionally, the Battlefront collection had already constructed a reputation for itself that was shaping as much as be one of many defining video games set on this universe.

Douville and his workforce have been nicely conscious of the issues that Battlefront II posed for his or her sport: “We knew the most about it and particularly as the new management came in they seemed to believe the most in it. Battlefront II got the significant marketing push whereas Republic Commando got almost nothing in that vein – it was a surprise dark horse sort of hit, building from word of mouth and strong reviews. And I think the new management also had concerns that Republic Commando would cannibalize sales from Battlefront II, particularly when we had to support multiplayer competitive modes due to market forces.”

The multiplayer part of Republic Commando that Douville describes is just a group of conventional aggressive staples like Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag. It lacks the tactical gameplay that the single-player delivers and fails to convey something new to the desk. All of the distinctive qualities that make this sport standout are washed away as soon as the battle is taken on-line – Republic Commando is not about reflecting upon the horrors of warfare and the individuals concerned.

Be it no shock, then, that the multiplayer part was one of many primary issues many reviewers cited when Republic Commando launched. The tragedy is that the sport mustn’t have had multiplayer within the first place – the pressures of maintaining with the ever-changing panorama of the sport trade pressured it into the sport. It was a time when multiplayer was hotting up, and publishers have been pushing for it in all their titles – a situation that is still around today. “It being late in the original Xbox cycle, retailers were only buying product that had Xbox Live support,” Douville explains. “I wish we either had been able to cut it or to find a way to get co-op done, but that was just beyond what we could do with the time and resources we had.”

All of this created an ideal storm that helped push Republic Commando into the realms of obscurity. With little advertising, a pressured multiplayer part, and troublesome improvement, Republic Commando by no means managed to realize a correct foothold. It is a disgrace, since Douville is assured that a sequel would have been produced if all of those damning components didn’t completely align. “Had the team not been broken up by the restructuring I feel certain we would have rolled right into whatever the sequel would have turned out to be,” he says. “The team might have shrunk a bit at the beginning because we would have been going into pre-production on a game which would have been on a new generation of console hardware when it shipped, but we had built a lot of tools and technology and a really capable team. It’s a shame that investment was thrown away.”

There has by no means been a real sequel to Republic Commando and followers have solely heard small rumours of a follow-up coming down the road. Yet, there’s nonetheless a glimmer of hope that the sport’s excellent single-player may finally floor. Even although a lot of the Star Wars Expanded Universes’ tales are not thought-about canon, it seems Delta Squad nonetheless is. They briefly seem throughout an episode of Star Wars: The Clone Wars television show, titled “Witches of the Mist.” Despite every part Douville and his workforce have gone via, then, there’s nonetheless a small probability this squad will make a return in videogame type. All we will do is hope.