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Comment by le-mark | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion, the decades of novels in between star wars movies where much better than the prequels and sequels we eventually got. At varying times, different novels were canon then not canon. But in the end, Lucasfilm jettisoned the lot. Maybe there were IP issues involved I don't know but the Timothy Zahn novels were epic.

Unfortunately, Lucasfilm didn't embrace them and mine them the way Feige is mining decades of Marvel comics for the MCU.

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> But in the end, Lucasfilm jettisoned the lot. Maybe there were IP issues involved I don't know but the Timothy Zahn novels were epic.

In fairness, Disney seems to have recognized that in re-canonizing characters like Thrawn.

The expanded universe had a lot of absolute junk in it. It's easier for them to throw it all out and then selectively re-introduce the few bits that are worth saving than it would have been to drum out the bad bits one at a time.

Plus the Jedi Outcast games! I have a hard time imagining a worthy successor to that in the Disney era, especially with EA having a 10-year contract on exclusive rights. I don't think they set out to make worse games on purpose, but they're definitely oriented more toward mass-market movie tie-ins with a focus on looking pretty. And I'd bet any single player story game we get will be built around a character that Disney writes into a movie, so there aren't nearly as many stories they could tell yet.

Visceral (best known for Dead Space) was working on something to come out this year, but EA canned it, shut down the studio, and merged them into EA Vancouver and EA Montreal.

Who knows if it wasn't shaping up well or if it wasn't suitably designed to stuff full of microtransactions or what. EA is supposedly still planning to adapt some parts of the concept into something else eventually, but I don't have high hopes. Maybe they'll surprise me.

This!! Kevin Anderson, Timothy Zahn... The stories were great and the fact that all the authors included and referenced each other’s events really made the universe cohesive and rich.

There was even a trilogy (!) of books already written about young Han Solo, which were equally amazing and rich..

The comics had plenty of material that breathed life in the form of details and different perspectives. Even Star Wars: Legacy, which ostensibly had the same retread of the original trilogy that the current sequel trilogy does- there is a new Empire, the Jedi are dispersed, young misfits must become heroes- redid the original plotline in a fresh and exciting way.

If you enjoyed Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trillogy, I hope that you know that he recently wrote a new book called "Thrawn", and it's just as good as his older writing. I would definitely recommend it if you enjoyed Thrawn as a character.

Disney had to decanonize them to carve out room for movies that people didn't know the plot to beforehand, and to get rid of massive blunders like the Yuuzhan Vong.

but then we end up with Solo where we pretty much know the plot beforehand.

That's like saying we knew the plot of Saving Private Ryan beforehand because we knew how the battles went.

um... I'm unaware of the 4 movies about Private Ryan's adventures after WWII...

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