[ VIDEO REMOVED BY LUCASFILM ]
LucasArts enjoys killing fun ideas and backing up tried and tired ones. As the video above showcases, Star Wars: First Assault was a digital-only spinoff of Star Wars: Battlefront with all the basic improvements gamers would have come to expect from this current generation of gaming. It's just too bad that no one will be able to play it.
We reported on Star Wars: First Assault recently explaining how Kotaku had received some leaked screenshots from the nearly completed game that was scheduled to launch around this time (or potentially sometime in April). However, LucasArts never announced the game, never mentioned anything about it and all we had to go on was the leaked box art that surfaced last year.
Star Wars: First Assault was supposed to be a testbed of sorts to gauge interest in the Battlefront brand to see if it was still lucrative. The digital-only release on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 would have let LucasArts and the rest of the marketing monkeys at Disney know if the brand was still worth investing in as a full $60 retail release. However, bureaucratic brain-dead underachievers felt it unnecessary to explore the possibility of a $20 or so release of Star Wars: First Assault and the septic-tank for a brain-encasing executives at LucasArts instead shelved the project.
As it stands, the footage above (and any subsequently leaked media assets) will be as close as gamers get to playing the game...which is not playing it all. Good job, LucasArts...at failing.
