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Star Wars The Force Unleashed 3 - The Story of the Cancelled Star Wars Game

STAR WARS™: The Force Unleashed™ Ultimate Sith Edition

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The Force Unleashed 3 is probably the most anticipated Star Wars game ever. Game Show viewers have been asking for ages about the fate of The Force Unleased 3, and so I've repsonded with as much information as I can fine. You guys are amazing and you deserve it.

Following on from my video about The Force Unleashed series, The Force Unleashed 3 was planned and cancelled and today I want to find out as much about this cancelled Force Unleashed 3 game as I can.

Let’s start with The Force Unleashed 2. The game was short and critics accused the game of being rushed. Negative reviews cited the game as a desperate cash grab, fan fiction and "one of the most underachieving games of 2010". Its commercial response was equally underwhelming. Despite a promising opening week, less than four million copies sold in total, on all formats (including Wii and DS versions). This was not the response Lucas were looking for in the sequel to the fastest-selling Star Wars game of all time. But how could this have happened?

During the year Force Unleashed II went into production, LucasArts had no less than three CEOs, each with a different approach to executive involvement. The year Force Unleashed 2 shipped, LucasArts had had three more. Haden Blackman, the director of the first game was helming the second, but announced his resignation before the game shipped. By the time The Force Unleashed 2 had shipped, a third of all LucasArts employees had been fired.

We know for a fact that The Force Unleashed 3 was on the cards, but it's likely that the internal pressure at LucasArts and crushing development schedules contributed to Haden Blackman leaving LucasArts - and in turn - Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 3 getting cancelled.

But what could we have expected from The Force Unleashed 3? 
The Force Unleashed 2 ended with a cliffhanger so The Force Unleashed 3 would immediately resolve that end sequence. Sam Witwer, the voice of Starkiller commented on his Facebook that he and Blackman had discussed the story and that he was keen to do it. Blackman revealed that he would have like The Force Unleashed III to have been a more open-world, sandbox experience. No level-based gameplay, more of a massive physics playground. His vision of the story would have seen Starkiller and Darth Vader reluctantly team-up to fight a new threat from Emperor Palpatine. Introducing co-op play to the open-world concept, The Force Unleashed III would have been about two incredible Force users, adventuring through the Galaxy together, working together to stop the Emperor’s evil scheme to replace Vader.

For those who think Starkiller’s story should have ended in The Force Unleashed 1; Blackman’s original ideas for The Force Unleashed 2 didn’t involve Starkiller at all; one of them centred around Yoda. A kind of “Yoda Unleashed”, the game would have explored Yoda’s past and probably featured him backflipping and slicing fools heads off. Another idea was a Western-inspired story about a Grey Jedi keeping low after Order 66. None of these ideas made it into The Force Unleashed 2, because Blackman was given three weeks to write the story.

After jotting down a few story notes and assembling some concept art for The Force Unleashed 3, Blackman left LucasArts forever. We don’t know what could have been and we likely never will. Due to the financial failure of The Force Unleashed 2, LucasArts canned all efforts at creating The Force Unleashed 3. Allegedly even saying the name “Starkiller” was banned on Lucas property. In 2012, LucasArts was acquired by The Walt Disney Company and a little over six months later the studio closed, with all games development being cancelled and 150 staff members losing their jobs.

The chance of The Force Unleashed 3 is slim. Disney most likely want to tell their own stories, and their resources seem to be focused on movies. The Force Unleashed could have been a hotbed of creative new ideas. Had LucasArts had the conviction to see past the quick wins, who knows what could have happened?

Sources:
http://www.vgchartz.com/game/41802/star-wars-the-force-unleashed-ii/
http://uk.ign.com/articles/2010/07/29/force-unleashed-producer-resigns
http://kotaku.com/5627835/lucasarts-confirms-layoffs-former-staffers-speak-out
http://www.gamespot.com/articles/layoffs-hit-lucasarts/1100-6284135/
http://www.cinelinx.com/game-news/item/8536-haden-blackman-reveals-what-the-future-of-the-force-unleashed-could-have-been.html
http://dorksideoftheforce.com/2015/11/08/star-wars-the-force-unleashed-3-what-could-have-been/
http://theforceunleashed.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Wars:_The_Force_Unleashed_III
http://www.videogamesblogger.com/2010/10/29/star-wars-the-force-unleashed-3-possible-lucasarts-still-figuring-it-out.htm

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