They didn't even make the best version of their stuff when they had it. DF was revolutionary and it and DFII were a hit, but the best one was outcast and that was farmed out. I played pretty much everything LA back in the day and they were excellent. But, they didn't wanna be in the create games biz. But the time of the buyout, LA still existed, but it was more license manager than publisher and was shuttered in the name of duplication.
Eh, gotta disagree here. LucasArts' true best work was the pre-buyout stuff. They had a run of amazing games in the 90s for PC.
The Monkey Island games, Indiana Jones adventure games (e.g., Last Crusade, Fate of Atlantis), Day of the Tentacle, etc.
The X-wing games (X-Wing, Tie Fighter, X-Wing Alliance). The only misstep there was XvT, which was only really a problem because it had no story, and was massively improved by the subsequent release of Balance of Power, which was revolutionary because it let you play through the story in co-op.
And yeah, Dark Forces an Dark Forces 2.
As for Jedi Outcast...I think there's a lot of glossing over of its flaws due to the fog of memory. The single-player game was a lot of fun. However, I personally never really liked the weapons in the game, which felt like a Quake clone. Beyond the Bryar Pistol and E-11, the rest of the guns were just kinda Star Warsy versions of typical FPS weapons for games of that era. Rocket launchers, flak cannons, machineguns, yadda yadda. That was a minor problem, though. The real problem came in the multiplayer aspect of the game. First, it used a different engine for sabre combat than the SP game. The SP game was way cooler and more cinematic, and MP felt more like swinging around glowing baseball bats. The way sabre combat overall was handled with the three stances also reinforced this "It's a glowbat" philosophy where taking big-wind-up-to-swing-hard hits did more damage than faster, lighter taps. Again, this makes sense for baseball bats, but not for omnidirectional laser blades that can cut through most objects with ease.
Raven Software's support of the MP scene was also pretty rocky. In the MP game, there were certain "i-frame" moves that were unblockable. This reduced combat to seeing who could get off which one-hit-kill move first. Early on, it was the red-stance "Death from above" jump attack, but they eventually patched that to do less damage than a one-hit kill. But they failed to patch the damage for backstab attacks, which still did one-hit kills, and which, in turn, led to people
literally running around in the game backwards just to do one-hit kills. I referred to this as the "Age of the Ass Masters." Eventually
that got fixed, but it took ages for them to get patches out for these issues. And even then, the combat just...never really amounted to much. MP was also pretty much just deathmatch or team deathmatch. No CTF modes, at least as I recall. They may have added those later, or in the next game.
Mostly the Jedi Outcast MP experience that people grew to love came from dedicated fans producing mods. But the baseline game? It was good, but it wasn't amazing.
Honestly, I think that most of the games that came out for PC after LucasArts switched to a publisher model rather than a developer were mostly mediocre, with a couple of stand-outs (e.g. KOTOR 1).
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