Inside the Star Wars Pre-Vis

In regards to our ILM relationship, that's something we've always felt was a LucasArts advantage -- we can use their technology for some really cool gameplay implications. They do some really amazing and dramatic things with physics on their own, for example, and it's teaching us how to do things that no will expect and do things that no one else in the industry can.

IGN: Once the video hit the net, there was a lot of speculation as to whether or not that footage was real-time, a target render, etc. Can you set the record straight and let everyone know specifically what it is, what it's built on, and when you created it?

Blackman: One of the ideas the next-gen Star Wars team has been exploring is the concept of the "Force unleashed." To us, the "Force unleashed" is exactly what it sounds like: a Jedi or similar character releasing the full potential of the Force in ways that, while they feel like logical extensions of powers we've already seen, are also new, amped-up, or over the top. The video was created a little over a year ago, still very early in pre-production, so that the development team could wrap our collective heads around the concept and understand the gameplay and production implications.

The video is a pre-rendered pre-visualization of what we're targeting in terms of gameplay, the degree of interaction with the environment, and character reactions.

IGN: Is it realistic to expect that players will be able to do all that in-game once your engine is finished? Also, with all the crazy things you've already shown that a Jedi can do, how can you create over-the-top action sequences and still please Star Wars diehards that truly care how accurate you are as to what a Jedi can and can't do?

Blackman: Once everyone -- including George Lucas -- signed off on the concept of the Force unleashed, we had that "oh crap" moment I mentioned earlier when we realized that we had to actually go off and build a game based around it.

Fortunately, at LucasArts, we strongly believe that game design should drive technology and not the other way around. In order to realize our core concept of the Force unleashed, we've been working closely with Industrial Light & Magic. Now that we're right down the hall from the most important visual-effects house in movie history, we're not only working with some of their best engineers, but we're also using the same toolset to make our game that was used to produce the special effects for movies like Pirates of the Caribbean 2.

Beyond ILM, we've also been developing and integrating some truly bleeding-edge technologies that will ensure that no matter how many times you play the game, you'll never see the same thing twice.

We're working with Pixelux Entertainment to integrate Digital Molecular Matter into our engine. DMM simulates the ways in which materials behave in the real world based on real-world physics. We can make wood splinter and crack, glass shatter, and metal dent, all very authentically. And again, the experience is different every time based on how you interact with an object -- hitting a piece of plywood with a softball is very different than hitting it with an R2 unit, and we can simulate that in real time.

We're also working with NaturalMotion on the "euphoria" biomechanical AI system mentioned earlier. Euphoria gives our characters a central nervous system that results in very realistic reactions and interactions with the environment. We can even impart characters with a sense of self-preservation. Stormtroopers thrown from a building will try to protect themselves from the fall, or grab hold of something to keep from plummeting to their deaths. All of this is simulation-based, so it's different every time.