Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (Page 2 of 3)

Alternatively, you could grab hold of an enemy with Force grip and raise him into the air, before smashing him back to the ground over and over again. And, in case you're not quite done with him, you could smack him into a wall, before throwing him-and the wall he's plastered on-into a larger foe. Such as, for instance, a TIE Fighter.

To help encourage players to stretch the combat system to its limits, LucasArts has designed Unleashed to reward your ingenuity with Force combos. The more you vary and chain your attacks, the more experienced you'll become with them, and, thus, the more power you'll be able to unleash. It's a recipe for gameplay that seems too good to be true, and it would be, were it not for the brand-new technologies powering the Unleashed engine.

Technology Unequaled

Just over a year ago, LucasArts partnered up with Pixelux Entertainment and secured the exclusive rights to a new physics technology called digital molecular matter, or DMM for short. DMM is a material engine that assigns real-world physical properties to virtual materials, so that they behave in-game in the same manner as they would in real life.

Basically, this means that everything in The Force Unleashed will react to impacts and environmental effects with more realism than anything ever seen before in a game. On the planet Felucia, for instance (the first confirmed environment in Unleashed, familiar to Star Wars fans as the planet where Aayla Secura was killed), mushroom stalks bend and sway with the wind. Wood cracks and splinters along its grain, while stone chips and crumbles and metal dents upon impact. Combined with the Havok physics engine, DMM will allow the worlds of Unleashed to become insanely interactive and immersive.

But DMM is just one half of the one-two tech punch Unleashed will be delivering when it's released. The other half is NaturalMotion's incredible 'euphoria' animation and AI technology. What euphoria does is dynamically overlay on-the-fly animations on top of pre-defined animations, based on what a given character might be thinking about or reacting to at any given time. Put simply, this allows a basic animation, like running in a straight line, to be enhanced with dynamic, simulated animation-such as deflecting an incoming projectile based on where the object if flying from.

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