Star Wars 1313 allows players to assume the role of a bounty hunter and descend to level 1313 – the hub of the underworld – on planet Coruscant.
Interestingly, LucasArts has confirmed that Star Wars 1313 is running on the Unreal Engine 3, rather than the next-gen Unreal Engine 4.
Although the studio has yet to provide an explanation, one could speculate that the game was originally developed on the older engine – perhaps making any move to Unreal 4 somewhat more difficult than originally anticipated.
Nevertheless, judging by what we’ve seen thus far in terms of game play video and trailers, 1313 is certainly not being held back by Unreal Engine 3. Frankly, this new clip is so advanced – in terms of graphics – that it reminds me of the reboot trailer for the upcoming Judge Dredd.
Although the clip does show some recycled E3 footage, it also depicts fresh game play elements. Looking at how high-quality the graphics in this game are, it’s certainly not hard to imagine that in another decade graphics in video games may very well be indistinguishable from reality as Industrial Light and Magic’s Kim Libreri predicted earlier this month.
“It’s an interesting time because with modern computer graphics hardware. The way it’s going, it’s gonna be pretty hard to tell the difference between something that is interactive and rendered in real-time, and something that was done for an animated TV show, or even a live action thing,” he explained.
“Ten years from now, I’m pretty sure, if you extrapolate where we’ve gone with the console generations and the changes in video and ATI hardware… We’re getting to the point right now [with real-time rendered graphics] where we’re matching the quality of an animated movie seven or eight years ago, and another ten years from now, it’s just going to be indistinguishable from reality.”
