Star Wars: Dark Forces
From Free net encyclopedia
←Older revision | Newer revision→
| Star Wars: Dark Forces {{#if:{{{image|}}}|<tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align: center;">{{{image|}}} | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | LucasArts {{#if:{{{publisher|}}}|<tr><th style="background-color: #ccccff;">Publisher(s)<td>{{{publisher|}}} |
| Release date(s) | February 15, 1995 |
| Genre(s) | First-person shooter |
| Mode(s) | Single player {{#if:{{{ratings|}}}|<tr><th style="background-color: #ccccff;">Rating(s)<td>{{{ratings|}}} |
| Platform(s) | MS-DOS, Apple Macintosh, PlayStation {{#if:{{{media|}}}|<tr><th style="background-color: #ccccff;">Media<td>{{{media|}}} |
Star Wars: Dark Forces is a video game produced by the LucasArts Entertainment Company. It was released in 1995. The game is a first-person shooter for the PC, Macintosh, and PlayStation. It was the first officially produced Star Wars first-person shooter.
Contents |
Description
Often labeled a "Doom clone", it is believed that Dark Forces was created to counter the many unofficial Star Wars-themed WADs for Doom, and rumored that LucasArts reverse-engineered the Doom engine to find out how to build their own. The "Jedi Engine," as it was called, was in the end more advanced than the Doom engine, containing features such as rooms over rooms, polygonal objects, haze and fog and the ability to look up and down. The engine was by no means perfect however, with the view being badly distorted when looking up and down due to the lack of perspective correction.
The game was successful and was followed by novelisations and a sequel, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II. Jedi Knight spawned an entire series of games which includes the expansion, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith, Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, and most recently, Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy. This series, with the exception of Jedi Academy, focuses on the continuing exploits of Kyle Katarn, which take place after the events of Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi and the fall of Palpatine. After the first Jedi Knight title, the name Dark Forces was dropped from the series.
Gameplay
Image:Darkforces2.jpg Overall, the game is a standard First Person Shooter that controls similarly to the original Doom series. One major gameplay difference from Doom is that the majority of enemies are humans (mainly Imperial Stormtroopers) who can be dispatched with a few shots, in contrast to the powerful Demons that players fight in Doom. While the game does feature some "superhuman" opponents (such as the Dark Troopers and Boba Fett), they only appear infrequently as mini-bosses.
Notably, Dark Forces is one of the first FPS game to implement alt-fire modes for the game's weaponry. Oddly, many of the weapons have not shown up elsewhere in the Star Wars universe; game designer Justin Fisher admitted that weapons like the Bryar laser pistol and Packard mortar gun were named after his personal favorites, such as 1950's Packard automobiles. Although there is no lightsaber in Dark Forces (since Kyle Katarn was not a Jedi yet), much discussion over the lightsaber may have shifted the direction of the sequel to chronicle Katarn's rise as a Jedi.
Unlike many other Doom-based games, Dark Forces attempted a realistic approach: The missions followed a certain storyline, sometimes interrupted by videos to progress the tale. Each mission had its own briefing and objective, such as retrieve items or place explosives, instead of simply killing enemies and making it to the exit; some levels were intentionally designed not to be completed quickly and also included puzzles. The levels were designed to represent actual bases, mines, facilities and other known places from the Star Wars universe, like Star Destroyer interiors, Jabba the Hutt's space yacht, Coruscant, and several other planets. This exotic variety was a refreshing change from Doom's often criticized recycling of textures and tilesets.
The enemy sprites were Imperial Stormtroopers, Gamorreans, Kell dragons and other Star Wars creatures.
While Dark Forces got quite favorable reviews, the game was lacking in a few areas. The most notable flaw was the lack of any sort of multiplayer mode, in light of Doom's pioneering of deathmatch. Gamers had dreamed of competing with one another for years in a first-person Star Wars environment (Star Wars Doom), but it was not to happen until the Dark Forces sequel, Jedi Knight. An additional "flaw" was the game designers' choice to allow saving only at the completion of each (often long and tedious) mission, although there were mid-level checkpoints that the player could restart from as long as he had extra lives. This design decision in games has always been a controversial one, and this was no less so for Dark Forces.
Storyline
The game introduces the character of Kyle Katarn, a former Imperial agent, now a mercenary for hire in the service of the Rebel Alliance.
The story takes place both before and after the events of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. The first mission (which was also released independently for the game demo) was an infiltration to an Imperial base in order to steal the original plans of the Death Star, those that would be later given to Princess Leia and would lead later to its destruction in A New Hope. The first level was initially supposed to be based in an Imperial Star Destroyer but ending most of the level design was recycled for a later mission.
After the Battle of Yavin, Kyle is contacted again to investigate an Imperial assault on the Rebel base of Talay, with a never-seen-before kind of advanced stormtrooper. Kyle's investigation reveals the Imperial Dark Trooper project, led by General Rom Mohc. Each mission brings him closer to the Arc Hammer, the source of the project. Although not part of the original Star Wars universes, the Dark Trooper project nonetheless fits into the expanded universe, along with the stories from other Star Wars computer games.
Game Engine and Development
The developers of Dark Forces originally considered releasing the title on floppy disks since the game was developed during the game medium transition period of floppy disks to CD-ROM. In the end, however, the game was released on CD-ROM only. Retailers were not interested in selling a game consisting of 20+ floppy disks. On the CD the game itself was roughly 75MB in size and, in fact, the mere demo of Full Throttle was far larger than Dark Forces itself. Also, the use of CD-ROM allowed Dark Forces to include enhanced rendered cinematic cutscenes for the start and end of each mission. The improvements primarily consisted of a greater amount of audio and a longer length. The cutscenes were still very similar to efforts in previous LucasArts games, such as TIE Fighter. Dark Forces' sequel, Jedi Knight, took cutscenes to an entirely new level with FMV.
There were some leftovers from development left on the CD that were not actually used in the game. Intrepid game players discovered this and it was possible to enable some of it within the game (one example is a mission loading sequence).
Dark Forces utilized LucasArts' IMUSE music engine to produce a real-time soundtrack based off in-game events. The various pieces of the mostly-original soundtrack were composed by renowned game composer Clint Bajakian who worked with LucasArts for many years on various game projects. Dark Forces used the original MIDI-based IMUSE engine and was best heard with a General MIDI-supporting sound card.
Cameos of Star Wars characters
Places visited
- Danuta Secret Base
- Talay Tak Base
- Anoat City
- Fest Research Facility
- Gromas Mines
- Orinackra Detention Center
- Cal-Seti, Ramsees Hed Docking Port
- Anteevy Robotics Facility
- Nar Shaddaa
- Jabba the Hutt's Ship
- Coruscant Imperial City
- Ergo Fuel Station
- The Executor
- The Arc Hammer
Battles
Battle of Danuta
| Battle of Danuta | |||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conflict | Galactic Civil War | ||||||||||||||||
| Date | 0BBY | ||||||||||||||||
| Place | Danuta | ||||||||||||||||
| Result | Alliance victory | ||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||
Striking from a hidden base, the Rebel Alliance attacked the Imperial facility on Danuta, where a partial set of the Death Star plans were hidden.
During the battle, Kyle Katarn, a former Imperial turned Rebel agent was sent down by Mon Mothma into the facility to retrieve the Death Star plans. Cutting through the station's defenses, he reached the control room, where he found the plans. He escaped with the plans and ensured the first Rebel victory, though with massive losses.
With the Danuta schematics, plus the other set stolen from the Death Star during a Rebel prison break, the Rebels put them together and beamed them to Ralltiir to Princess Leia's ship, the Tantive IV.
Massacre on Talay
| Revenge on Talay | |||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conflict | Galactic Civil War | ||||||||||||||||
| Date | about .5 ABY | ||||||||||||||||
| Place | Talay | ||||||||||||||||
| Result | Imperial victory | ||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||
The Massacre on Talay was a fictional battle in Star Wars: Dark Forces, the videogame.
Admiral Mohc, a leading scientist in the Galactic Empire, studied battle droids used by the Confederacy in the Clone Wars. Desiring to improve upon what he saw as flawed designs, Mohc developed the next generation of stormtrooper. Using a battle droid skeleton, plus thick, hard armor, he created fearsome supersoldiers, which he called Darktroopers.
In retaliation for the destruction of the Death Star, plus to test his new creations' power, Mohc dispatched a squad of Darktroopers to the Rebel held city of Tak, on the planet Talay. There, a fierce battle took place that ended in a horrendous defeat for the Rebels. Countless soldiers and civilians were killed in the battle.
Kyle Katarn, the man who had stolen the original plans to the Death Star, went to Talay in search of clues to the Darktrooper identity. He found a huge blaster rifle that no ordinary human could carry and assumed that it belonged to the Darktroopers.
In the timeline of battles, the Revenge on Talay occurred before the Battle of Thyferra and after the Battle of Yavin.
Trivia
- George Lucas appeared on CNN's Future Watch show and demonstated/promoted the game. Lucas and Daron Stinnett also promoted it in Disneyland when they travelled there for the opening of the Indiana Jones train.
- Dark Forces was the 11th best selling computer game of the period 1993 to 1999, with 952,000 copies.
- Kyle Katarn returned as the protagonist in Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II and Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast. He appears as a supporting character in Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy and Star Wars: Empire at War.
- In a secret near the beginning of Anteevy, there is a room shaped like Max's head from Sam & Max, continuing the tradition of Sam & Max cameos in LucasArts games.
References
- Turner, Benjamin & Bowen, Kevin (December 11, 2003). Bringin' in the DOOM Clones (page 2). GameSpy.
- Dunnigan, James F (2000). The Complete Wargames Handbook (Year 2000 introduction)
- Loepelmann, Dr Karsten A. (July 5, 2001). The Dark Forces FAQ.
External links
- Official Lucasarts' Star Wars: Dark Forces web site
- DF-21: Taking Dark Forces into the 21st Century
- Dark Forces page at MobyGames
- Dark Forces information at the Internet Movie Database
- Dark Forces MOD for Jedi Academy
- A collection of Doom and Doom2 mods based on the Star Wars universe.
Template:Star Wars Template:Sw jediknight cvgcs:Dark Forces da:Jedi Knight de:Jedi Knight es:Dark Forces fr:Dark Forces it:Star Wars: Dark Forces sv:Star Wars: Dark Forces