Earlier this year, Nightdive Studios announced Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster, and now we finally have a release date for the game - it's coming almost exactly 29 years after the original.
Dark Forces Remaster will launch on February 28, 2024, as Gamespot reports. The new version will be available across PC, Xbox Series X and S, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, and Switch, and will support resolutions up to 4K and frame rates up to 120 FPS depending on the hardware - both of which are quite notable improvements over the original PC version, released on March 10, 1995.
The original Dark Forces launched in an era when the best FPS games were still called "Doom clones," and Dark Forces does essentially take the form of a Star Wars-themed version of the id Software classic. You run through 3D environments shooting at sprite-based enemies with a wide array of Star Wars weaponry, ranging from blaster rifles to grenade-style thermal detonators.
Dark Forces enjoyed the benefits of several years worth of post-Doom genre development - you can look upward, for example - but its most notable feature was probably its extensive story segments, including animated cutscenes with proper voice acting. The game told the story of protagonist Kyle Katarn, who became a figure so beloved that fans are desperate to see him in Star Wars Outlaws, and plot elements like the stolen Death Star plans and the Dark Trooper program are still being revisited in modern Star Wars canon.
For my money, Dark Forces remains the definitive Star Wars FPS after all these years, and I couldn't be more excited to see Nightdive - the studio that collaborated on the excellent Quake 2 remaster and many other classic shooter revivals - putting its hands on this one. There's already an excellent fan-made Dark Forces remaster called The Force Engine out there, but Nightdive is the one studio I'd trust to do a modernization even more impressive.
Kyle Katarn would go on to star in several of the best Star Wars games, as Dark Forces spun off into the beloved Jedi Knight series.
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