Star Wars: The New Era was holding a booth at the Kultima Festival in Paris the 2rd, 3rd and 4th of November 2007. This event aimed to concentrate all the western imaginary cultures from comics to video games and from Sci-Fi to fantasy worlds. But this event was not alone, in the same hall was the Chibi Japan Expo, who was dedicated to Asian cultures (Cos-players everywhere :o ). The show took place on 20,000m² with over 20,000 people on 3 days.

Two PCs were running the demo build (made for Kultima) in the back of the booth while the trailer (and me :p) was looping on a table in front of it.

Let's speak of the game itself. The build present for the festival was a softened version of our dev build. Actually, we cleaned it to keep only the finished maps and weapons. Because of the hardware configuration, we were unable to play modes other than deathmatch, we even had to change the players spawn in order to get people close enough to fight. Otherwise they would have played hide and seek.

Despite these details, the feedback was really good - in fact, most of them thought that this was a commercial production (remember: this is a fan-based project!). The major criticism was about the speed of the blaster bolts and the little lag when you fire weapons but it seemed to be a minor problem.
There were a lot of different people that tried the game, from hardcore-gamers to little girls, and they all enjoyed it at their level. A lot of curious people, sometimes just a curious father but also game designers.

I've been interviewed by some video game magazines (Joystick) but also by a french mod community called pmods. (Articles and video interview coming soon).

The Empire, in their search for an always better infantry wanted to test our real-combat simulation, they were really surprised by the level of simulation. This is the first Empire Approved Simulation :p.

Seriously, the 501st and the Rebel Legion were at the festival and they tested the mod. As Star Wars specialists they where really pleased by our attention to the detail.

This festival assessment was really positive, seeing people enjoying the mod is really rewarding and fueling our motivation.
We'll be back soon for more events, so stay tuned!

Jean Dellac

PS: A big thanks to the Kultima Staff for their help!