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It didn't take a Jedi Master to conclude that Star Wars: The Force Unleashed would be getting a sequel -- after all, it met with tremendous success, ranking as the fastest-selling Star Wars video game of all time and moving more than six million copies to date. Still, LucasArts laid off a majority of the team that developed it before the game even hit shelves, so many that our source at the time told Joystiq that the remaining group would be insufficient to produce a sequel should one be ordered.

So, now that The Force Unleashed 2 is officially happening, we naturally began to wonder: who's making the game? When asked for comment on the topic, LucasArts president Darrell Rodriguez told Joystiq, "Our internal team here in San Francisco will be focused on the game in addition to other development partners. The San Francisco team is made up of TFU veterans who are all bringing their hard earned muscle memory to the development process." Rodriguez didn't elaborate on who these "development partners" are, but it's clear that a core team at the company's Northern California HQ is only part of the development effort.

Rodriguez did not remark on whether any new staff is being hired to work on the title internally, but did reveal to us that LucasArts is "also currently hiring for some other unannounced products that we are internally developing as well." We're just going to assume that none of the staff who received pink slips last summer will be sending in resumes.

Click to give in to the Dark Size

If you're a Star Wars fan, you've no doubt read about the recently revealed, final two classes in BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic: the Jedi Consular and Sith Inquisitor. The latter is a powerful Sith warrior who harnesses the dark side of The Force to perform a range of powered-up attacks, such as Force Lightning. We recently paid a visit to LucasArts HQ at San Francisco's Presidio, where we got a chance to zap a few dozen enemies while playing as the new class.

The Inquisitor should be thought of as the uber-Sith, beyond the likes of Darth Vader and Darth Maul, and more in line with Darth Sidious / Emperor Palpatine from the films. This isn't a character whose strength lies primarily in mastery of lightsaber dueling; the Inquisitor likes to let others get their hands dirty while they turn the tide of battles in more grandiose ways through Force manipulation. Still, like all the classes in SW:TOR, they have to start out somewhere. In their case -- as with the Sith Warrior -- it happens to be the Sith's homeworld of Korriban. Instead of fighting Jedi during our (all-too-brief) demo, we went ... tomb raiding.