Open-world Star Wars game in development

WHEN video game group Electronic Arts’ (EA) Visceral Games studio was closed in October 2017, it seemed as if EA was envisioning a very different future for the team’s Star Wars project.

Instead of the lavish single- player narrative adventure that had been anticipated – a Star Wars reworking of PlayStation’s Uncharted formula, from that franchise’s creative director Amy Hennig – EA was looking for something quite different.

Or, different enough to merit closing the studio behind the groundbreaking Dead Space franchise, at least.

The publisher’s executive vice president, Patrick Soderlund, had said that EA “needed to pivot the design” in order to “deliver an experience that players will want to come back to and enjoy for a long time to come”.

“We are shifting the game to be a broader experience that allows for more variety and player agency,” he had said, imagining “a Star Wars adventure of greater depth and breadth to explore”.

With EA already having the Battlefront franchise as its roundbased Star Wars shooter (an equivalent to Call of Duty, Overwatch, or its own Battlefield ventures), an open-world action adventure similar to Two’s Grand Theft Auto V, Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s The Division, and Activision’s Destiny 2, with their long-term appeal, appeared to be under consideration.

That appears to be even more likely after EA’s March 20 advertisement for a lead online engineer position on its ‘ Star Wars Open World project’.

The vacancy’s wording has since been altered to remove references to the Open World genre.

The posting is for EA’s Burnaby office near Vancouver in Canada, a site Soderlund had said would take over development of Visceral’s game.

The game was originally due between April 2018 and March 2019, but has been withdrawn from EA’s public release calendar pending further announcements. – AFP-Relaxnews