It's worth pointing out how different (and better) Jedi Knight's morality system is from the "Bethesda model", in which you play as good/bad but at the end of the game, it doesn't matter and you get to make the Big Moral Choice (purify the water or POISON EVERYONE?).
In JK you are never asked explicitly, "Do you want to do a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?". After a boss fight, you can choose to kill your opponent, or not. Those civilians running around sometimes drop health packs or ammo when they die, so maybe you kill them, or you don't. Dark side force powers are awesome, and don't require ammo to work, so maybe you put a few points into them. Then, at about 3/4 through the game, it doesn't ask if you want to be a light or dark Jedi, it tells you what kind of Jedi you were all along. You get to the point where you might expect the game to offer you a Big Choice, but instead, it points out that you already made your choice when you weren't paying attention.
The jedi thing in general is such a great metaphor for the human experience when it comes to the intersection of capacity, morality and power that I expect it'll outlive a lot of other stories.
Star wars is morality for children. There are recent additions to the canon that aren't this but mostly there are 'good guys' who do good things and get good outcomes and 'bad guys' who do bad things and ultimately get punished by a just universe.
Are we watching and playing the same things? Star Wars shows us again and again how the machinations of those with power (good and evil) ultimately crush those without.
Do you think the death of the Emperor is real justice for Alderaan, for the countless Jedi, for the thousands of planets devastated by an industrial war machine?
The good guys don't win. They just stop losing. That's war.
I'm not going to pretend Star Wars has real depth, but it's far more nuanced than you're making out.
Maybe you're right, that's really not what I got from it though. Admittedly I've only watched each film once or twice as a child. I can't honestly remember the specific consequences of the bad guys' actions, I was more affected by the closeness of the bad guys to the good guys. Maybe I'm remembering my own version.
My takeaway was that power has a magnitude but not a fixed direction, and that it can easily tip either way. And that you can educate and train but you can't control.
I think it was the first time that I considered the idea that people could, for their own reasons, use things that they have learned/acquired against those who taught/shared them. Relates to, for example, the innate risks that we take when we choose to enable other people in our lives eg. through granting powers, sharing of trade secrets, etc.
This article is mostly about Jedi Knight, yet Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game is mentioned. (uses d6's with +1,+2 pips, effect scales, and rerolling successes)
Having played, it's perhaps one of the best written role playing book series ever made. There are so many expanded universe supplements its ridiculous. Tramp freighters rarely even written about, with full stat blocks, and aftermarket parts. "How many turbolasers does a star destroyer have?" 'Was that an Imperial I, Imperial II, Valiant, Interdictor, Eclipse, Terminus, Executor, Resurgent, Venator, ...'
From the Wiki: "Lucasfilm considered the West End Games' Star Wars sourcebooks so authoritative that when Timothy Zahn was hired to write what became the Thrawn trilogy, he was sent a box of West End Games Star Wars books and directed to base his novel on the background material presented within."
If you happen to enjoy roleplaying, and never tried them, they're at least worth looking at. Lots of ideas. (also 35 yrs old, so mostly available, if rare) The art's mostly of a b/w storyboard type. Yet, that's kind of nice as, movies, and quickly gives a sense of scale about a bunch of different SW ideas. https://dk.pinterest.com/pin/396598310951842250/ (has a lot of illustration examples)
I've never play West End's game, but Fantasy Flight's "Genesys"-based Star Wars TTRPG is a phenomenal, novel, and approachable game with a massive, encyclopedic catalog of cohesive Star Wars universe components.
I highly recommend any of the three starter kits (Jedi/Rebel/Smuggler) for fans of the franchise who haven't yet played a tabletop RPG, or for anyone who thinks "Dungeons & Dragons" might be an interesting way to spend an afternoon.
If you enjoyed "Genesys" and should happen to stumble onto a copy of WEG Star Wars (perhaps even from some shady cantina dealer with a gray sense of legal acquisition), you will probably enjoy the WEG predecessor just as much. It is timeless in surprising ways that most D&D editions are not, including its reliance on simple, effective d6 dice pools. That's one of the more fun contrasts between WEG Star Wars and Fantasy Flight (now "Edge Studios: An Asmodee Brand") Star Wars: "Genesys" uses pools of custom dice with unique faces and WEG's system is often called "d6 Star Wars" because it just uses pools of one of the cheapest and most common form of dice.
As a child of the 80's who remembers scouring the local library for Star Wars books, a couple of years before the Zahn trilogy, this hits hard. I read them. Played the games. Not only was the Star Wars universe in the 90's really good (for the time), but the fact that everyone respected and built off each others stories is part of what made the whole greater than the constituent parts.
Today, my teenager loves building worlds and talking about universe designs. I know he's tired of hearing the cautionary tale of how you can take something amazing, built by a community, and run it into the ground by not respecting it. Hubris man... pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.
As a child from a very difficult and abusive home, the star wars EU novels in the late 90's was a literal godsend. There were some great (but flawed) MMO's and video games that came out of it too that expanded the universe even further - when disney bought it and completely invalidated 30 years of canon, it really hurt on a level that I didn't think was entirely appropriate at the time but looking back it makes sense.
Nothing was "stolen," you can still go read the books and enjoy that IP... but it just felt like that and the acquisition by Disney as the final betrayal and sellout by Lucas, who really can only attribute his incredible success to the people around him who had better sense. The prequels were terrible because they gave him unlimited artistic control, and no one told him no.
I think Lucas knows he’s screwed, he will be lambasted no matter what he does. Look at Game of Thrones, even the best written nerd series get torn apart by the nerd police. He understands that his business was always in nostalgia, it’s just his nostalgia for 50s serials, not actual Star Wars.
GoT was the best written nerd series until it ran out of best written novel to crib from, at which point it rapidly degenerated. The opinions both that most of it was good, and that the end was bad, are universal, including from people that never read the books - framing this as 'the nerd police' basing a decision on nostalgia is pretty dishonest. The show's scriptwriters just weren't good at plot and depended on it already having been written.
Frankly, the last two released books in the series also experienced a notable drop off in quality, after (supposedly, as I understand it) GRRM stopped enlisting the services of his editor.
The story is still great and I did still enjoy the books. But it’s surprising how much a change in editorial oversight had for both the Star Wars franchise and the ASOIAF series of books.
I was never a really big Star Wars fan (enjoyed them just wasn't super into them) but spent a lot of time on DFII: JK modding. The cog language could really do a lot if you leaned on it hard enough. The game engine's ability to do absolutely huge outdoor spaces without crumbling in performance was kind of unique at the time. There was a real sense of vertigo for me. I remember having a lot of fun with the cheesy grappling hook mods in multiplayer, flying around and slingshotting around ledges.
My brother and I made a mod in which you played as an Ugnaught (the little guys running around cloud city) wielding a wrench instead of a lightsaber. For some reason we thought it was hilarious to replace the main villain with Bob Saget.
The game wasn’t perfect, but it was extremely stable. I remember people spamming proximity mines, but even that became fun because it was so easy to get back in and play.
My connection was poor at the time and perhaps I never really got the big double swing timing down so I often used explosives against saberists. Can't deflect a thermal detonator, and if you pull it I'll just grab another out of the bag.
I remember finding it funny that the 4 star force speed and jump would injure you from running into walls or bonking your head.
The fun part was how broken the script cheat detection was. You could make massive changes, then randomly change a few characters and find a combination that wouldn’t get detected as a change. It ‘felt’ like they were using a 4 bit checksum to detect script changes.
IIRC the check was something even weaker than that. It just counted the number of verbs in the cog script and if it matched you were in. Cheating in online games was a pretty new concept though since online games in general were still a pretty new concept. Games would advertise themselves as being for hacks and people would come in and use all their weird scripts on each other.
It was a weird symbol counting scheme that was easily twarted. It was also completely client side validated so it was very possible to just intercept the checksum and force a match.
EU Star Wars was a big part of growing up for me. Obsessed with the books and games, especially KOTOR. Countless nights on Wookiepedia just reading articles.
Sad what Disney did, but remember the EU content didn’t disappear. You can still read the books and play the games and pretend Disney never happened. :)
Part of the fun was imagining a canon of episodes 7+ and how great the movies will be when they get around to filming Heir to the Empire.
So now that Disney has created a canon that invalidates it, the old material just reminds you of how great you used to wish the new material would be. Asking, "wouldn't it have been great?" isn't exactly as fun.
I don’t think there ever was an alternative to how they’ve handled it. There are times in the recent Disney SW material where I’ve thought “what the heck Dave Filoni!?” And realized that my understanding and version of Star Wars growing up was different than his.
This was the same schism that classic trilogy fans encountered when we all sat down in May of 1999 to watch The Phantom Menace. We were suddenly shocked with a different version of Star Wars than the one we’d constructed in our minds.
The trouble of course is that we all settle into “the way things are.” The EU was massively complex, and had its own bizarre establishments that I personally didn’t care for. But then, I wish they would’ve obviated a lot of the prequels too.
I’ve noticed that there’s an entire generation of now-adults who love the prequels, and don’t care much for the original. Which feels bonkers to me. We’ve reached saturation. There’s a Star Wars for everyone, and that means there’s a Star Wars for everyone to hate.
> They might also want to check out the game’s expansion pack, which caters more to the FPS hardcore by eliminating the community-theater cut scenes and making everything in general a little bit harder. I didn’t bother, having gotten everything I was looking for out of the base game.
I spent a lot more time playing Jedi Knight (honestly, it was probably the best time I ever had playing a video game), but Mysteries of the Sith was still fun, and I liked having a purple lightsaber. :-)
My mom gifted the Zahn books to me as they were published. I enjoyed them immensely. We lived in Portland, and IIRC Zahn lived in Eugene which seemed incredible to me someone was crafting the Star Wars universe from so nearby.
My interest in the games was primarily in X-Wing and its expansions B-Wing, etc. Poured many hours into those eventually some of Tie Fighter.
I think I did get a copy of Dark Forces but I think I got stuck and I moved on to something with more play action.
My brother and I played the hell out of Jedi Knight while we were in high school, and even went on to work on some mods - Jedi Knight Pong was one of the memorable ones for its ridiculousness.
The modding community was quite active, and I believe there was actually a LucasArts employee who was helping the modders figure out how some of the formats and tools worked. There was a fairly sophisticated scripting language that powered a lot of the gameplay; I don't remember any of the specifics but I had a good time messing around with it.
I spent countless hours playing the DF2 demo that came on one of the computer magazine CDs in India (PC Quest I think). My favourite FPS by a long shot :)
Here's a steam guide to upgrade to a fan made engine and really improve the graphics:
I still have very fond memories of endlessly dueling people online in Jedi Knight II Jedi Outcast. I still feel it was the best skill based melee engine I have ever played, not sure if I ever even played the single player.
Even guns vs lightsabers was balanced, but saber dueling with matrix wall walking and other force powers was sublime.
Loved the EU early on, but felt things went downhill starting with the series with the ‘Vong.
Still better than what they did with the movie sequels.
I’m loving all the original content being put out on Disney+. It’s almost unbelievable how great most of them are versus how utterly bad the sequel movies were.
I spent a large part of my childhood as a somewhat obsessive SW fan and read a lot of EU books.
Disney alienated entire fandom to appease people who were never really into it and didn’t win enough to cover the cost. Good luck with that, I will be patiently waiting for EU revival. AI might bring a lot of indie productions in the area :)
Respectfully, I think you overestimate the fandom's attachment to the EU. Certainly a non-trivial portion were very attached to the EU, but there were plenty of people who didn't care about the EU. And a very large group of people who like EU from this thing, but not from that thing.
And it can't be ignored that Lucasfilm threw the EU under the bus with the Prequels, and even before that with things like Splinter of the Mind's Eye.
The thing that's hard is when you've invested a lot of time and energy into something, and then the owner comes along and breaks your heart. Here's to finding love again.
Okay: The Disneyfied Latter Days Crap is a given in a world where Marvel exists as it does now, and I'm not even mad at that. People drink two liters of Coca Cola a day. Whatever, their choice. Jar Jar Binks is so far down the shit-gradient it's not even cynical, ironic or campy, that shit is just plain bad.
No, my beef is with the status the original trilogy has. Archetypal, shallow characters and tropes going beyond the banal. The narratives are too middle of the road: not naturalistic enough for full immersion, not stylized enough to be authentic space opera. The doritos of sci-fi.
Three movies were made, somehow, on the aesthetic of the light saber. That's all it has going for it, that the light sabers look cool.
When you describe something as archetypal, you basically admit it had very large impact. Similar to Tolkien being archetypal fantasy. Does not help your argument, really.
Your argument is baseless. I'm not saying your argument has no merit, I'm saying that your interpretation only makes sense in light of the media that came after the original trilogy. In a lot of cases, the tropes didn't become tropes until other people tried to ape them. I can think of plenty of movies that did not age well because they inspired so much of what came later. Arguably, the original Star Wars movies are amongst them. But its ridiculous to deride Star Wars as derivative of the films it inspired.
Arguably, the original trilogy was simply dungeons and dragons in space. Wizards, rogues, and knights in space.
But, it you look at the sci-fi/fantasy at the time, nothing really compares to what Star wars did. There's a reason it's pretty much the only widely known sci-fi films from the last 70s early 80s.
>Arguably, the original trilogy was simply dungeons and dragons in space. Wizards, rogues, and knights in space.
It was basically Flash Gordon plus WW2 movies plus samurai movies plus fairy tales and Arthurian fantasy in space.
I think one of the reasons why The Force Awakens is not good is that it tries to copy previous Star Wars movies, but Star Wars has always been best when it copies stuff from other genres and mixes them together into a new thing, not when it tries to copy from its own previous films.
>it's pretty much the only widely known sci-fi films from the last 70s early 80s
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, Blade Runner, and The Terminator are all widely known late 70s / early 80s sci-fi films.
Probably not as well known but still pretty widely known are Star Trek: The Motion Picture, The Thing, and 2010: The Year We Make Contact.
Every single film you mentioned came out after Star Wars. The closest, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, came out only 6 months later, so hard to argue that its derivative. Even so, its inarguable that Star Wars was the first of its kind to reach the kind of mass appeal that it did.
Likewise (to the parent), references to D&D or Kurosawa are red herrings, because those were sort of niche at that point. Flash Gordon is/was debatably niche, but even then, Flash Gordon wasn't made into a movie until 1980 (after Lucas gave up on pursuing the rights, and instead made Star Wars).
I'm not here to defend Star Wars as great art, but I am here to say that its place in the cultural canon is 100% earned, and trying to dismiss it as cliche, formulaic, or derivative is to wildly misunderstand the cultural impact of its forebears, and anachronistically criticize it for its similarities to the things it inspired.
Interesting take on a ~50 year cultural phenomenon with millions of fans. Maybe next time you could write "I don't like Star Wars" instead "Star Wars never good." That would be more accurate.
I mean I think they were ground breaking at the time for costuming and special effects. Many genre defining works look bad in retrospect because the genre has grown up since they came out.
In JK you are never asked explicitly, "Do you want to do a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?". After a boss fight, you can choose to kill your opponent, or not. Those civilians running around sometimes drop health packs or ammo when they die, so maybe you kill them, or you don't. Dark side force powers are awesome, and don't require ammo to work, so maybe you put a few points into them. Then, at about 3/4 through the game, it doesn't ask if you want to be a light or dark Jedi, it tells you what kind of Jedi you were all along. You get to the point where you might expect the game to offer you a Big Choice, but instead, it points out that you already made your choice when you weren't paying attention.