It feels like distant history now, but Disney’s takeover of George Lucas’ empire more than a decade ago kickstarted a chain reaction and major creative shakeup that saw LucasArts go the way of the dodo (only to return as the publisher Lucasfilm Games in 2021), and led to the cancellation of several promising projects. One of them was Star Wars: First Assault, and it seems it’s making a comeback… sort of.
Via TheSixthAxis, we’ve received word the game lives through a fan effort to finish what LucasArts started. This means Disney and Lucasfilm Games are no doubt going to Death Star the endeavour faster than you can say “twelve parsecs”, but at the time of writing, an extensive YouTube live recording with over an hour of uncut gameplay full of stormtroopers and Rebels gunning each other down is still up:
The original stream by Unseen Halo – Corbin (who seems to be big on old Halo games, as well) takes place entirely in the Tatooine map we’d seen before, but perfectly showcases how the matches play. By and large, Star Wars: First Assault was the franchise’s answer to Call of Duty, and despite EA’s two Battlefront games finding success years later, I’d say a smaller online FPS that felt more competitive would’ve made a decent amount of credits too.
Unsurprisingly, the framerate in this in-progress build (which is recreated and updated from the pre-release code which leaked years ago) isn’t the greatest, and visual bugs and janky animations abound, but the game works, and more importantly, it works online, which makes it quite valuable, at least as a piece of lost history, already. Back in 2024, former LucasArts developer Patrick Wren said First Assault was “months away” from being done and needed no extra development costs when it was binned.
Right now, the community behind the fan project is accepting new players via its Discord server, so it’s only a matter of time before Disney’s legal teams descend on the thing like Imperials on Hoth. This First Assault ‘remake’ joins the likes of the rebuild project of Free Radical’s cancelled Star Wars Battlefront 3, which continues to grow as new builds find their way online after all these years. Never tell Star Wars fans the odds.
