Shadowtrooper - Development and Releases

Development and Releases

On May 17, 2001 at E3 2001, LucasArts announced that Raven Software were developing a third game in the Jedi Knight series. Some plot details were given, such as the locations visited in the game; Cloud City, Yavin IV, Smuggler's Moon and planets original to the game. The following day at E3, LucasArts gave a demonstration of the game, showing the lightsaber and Force combat as well as the "buddy" system: in which certain NPCs would fight alongside the player. Technical details were also revealed: the game would use id Software's Quake III: Team Arena engine, and the GHOUL 2 animation system, seen in Raven's Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix, was to be used. The polygon capacity of the engine had also been doubled. The game was also on display at id's QuakeCon 2001, where enemy AI and combat were demonstrated. LucasArts announced that the game would feature multiplayer, although due to being early in development little information was revealed.

On July 17, 2001, multiplayer developer Pat Lipo made a post on his .plan file, revealing that Rich Whitehouse had been brought onto the development team to handle development of the game's multiplayer bots. Rich moved on to tackle the entirety of the game's multiplayer codebase, and was subsequently credited as the game's sole multiplayer programmer.

On January 16, 2002 LucasArts launched a new website for Jedi Outcast featuring an overview of the game and information regarding characters, weapons and Force powers. An FAQ, screenshots, concept art, images of player models and downloadable wallpapers were also available. A trailer was released on February 8, showing the game's combat, weapons, characters and environments. On March 13, 2002, LucasArts announced that the game was on track for release later in the month. Two days later, they announced Jedi Outcast was ready for release, set to go on sale by March 29 at a retail price of US$49.99. A new trailer was also released. Jedi Outcast shipped on March 29, 2002.

The game's SDK was released on April 22, 2002. This included a level editor, map compiler, model viewer, shader editor and viewer. Since its release, hundreds of mods have been submitted to sites such as FileFront.

A 66 MB demo was released on May 10, 2002, featuring the same level shown in an incomplete form at E3 2001, which did not feature in the final version of the game. Two patches were subsequently released: version 1.03 and 1.04.

At E3 2002, LucasArts announced that Jedi Outcast would be released on the GameCube and Xbox. On May 31, 2002, LucasArts and Aspyr announced that a Macintosh version of the game would be released. The Macintosh version was released on November 5, 2002 and the Xbox and GameCube versions on November 20 in North America and two days later in Europe.

On November 15, 2006 LucasArts announced that Jedi Outcast would feature with Star Wars: Battlefront, Star Wars: Empire at War, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Star Wars: Republic Commando and a 14-day trial of Star Wars Galaxies in a compilation release entitled Star Wars: The Best of PC. It was released during the 2006 holiday season, retailing at US$39.99.