Star Wars Force Unleashed gets downloadable content “soon” – for a price

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 02 October 2008 16:17

Opinion and Analysis

Are you willing to sell your soul to the Dark Side of the Force? If so, you’ve probably purchased LucasArts’ hit new game, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. But now there’s news of upcoming downloadable content, some are annoyed it will cost more money, leading some to exclaim that today’s game purchases simply don’t end when you initially buy the game.

Kotaku has published the news that Star Wars: The Force Unleashed will be getting new downloadable content, if you own the PS3 or Xbox 360 versions of the game.

Although the sweeteners are that you’ll be able to play as Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Ki-Adi-Mundi or Kit Fisto, there is concern that there’s no specific release date, nor any pricing.

Comments at the Kotaku story bemoan the fact that today’s games aren’t fully paid for when you buy the original game, and that games developers are potentially purposefully cutting short development time simply so they can sell more content in the future.

Reviews of the game have noted that it’s one of the best Star Wars games yet, although the control system and some elements of repetitive game play could have been better, with heightened expectations that any future Star Wars games will take the best elements of the Force Unleashed and make it even better.

The Force Unleashed certainly has been a retail hit, despite the mid-range reviews, having sold over 1.5 million copies in less than a week since the game’s launch last month.

Paid downloadable content also raises the issue of why games need to be sold at retail at all, although the fact that games on Blu-ray disc are tens of gigabytes in size is certainly a limiting factor for 2008, while moves to limit the “unlimited” nature of broadband connections in the US also weighs heavily on massive downloading.

Still, given that downloading of everything is undeniably the future, the next few years will surely see multi-gigabyte downloads being the norm as carriers and ISPs upgrade their infrastructure to handle ever larger data tsunamis.

The Force Unleashed’s executive producer Haden Blackman told Kotaku that the new content ideas came partially from fans, and partially from their own brainstorming.

Blackman also told Kotaku that the downloadable content would be an “added level” and a “separate campaign”, and that the map size would be larger than Cloud City, but smaller than the “giant level” on Raxis Prime, and that he hoped “it hits the sweet spot for size”.

Blackman also added: "I wouldn't rule out any future content on The Force Unleashed. We hope gamers hold onto the game anyway. There is already a lot of replayability built into it. There is quite a lot of exploration you can do. If you enjoy the story, the gameplay, the first time through, though, you should enjoy this."