Lucasfilm Games And Ubisoft Making New Star Wars Game
Lucasfilm Games is back in a big way with new partners and new games, including a new immersive new game developed with new partner Ubisoft.
Sometimes, opening things up can make a person stronger. Exclusivity can tie you down, when all you really want is the freedom to get out there and meet cool and interesting new partners that really spark with you. What I’m saying is, Star Wars is polyamorous now, and the world is better for it.
So they *did* read my fanfiction
The signs were always there. The frequent robe-wearing, the hair, the fixation with getting in touch with your feelings, the operatic drama, and the jackets. Nobody with that kind of taste in jackets is monogamous.
Not even a little
Specifically, Star Wars is no longer exclusive with EA, and as such Lucasfilm Games is spreading their wings with a world of new possibilities opening up before them. Today we’re getting the first glimpse of a new game being developed in partnership with Ubisoft’s Sweden-based studio, Massive.
Lucasfilm Games and Ubisoft are collaborating on a new story-driven, open-world Star Wars game. It’s a genre long-requested by fans, and will come to life via Massive Entertainment, Ubisoft’s critically-acclaimed studio based in Malmö, Sweden.
Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment are renowned for their expertise in developing immersive worlds, and in pushing the boundaries of technology with their proprietary engine, Snowdrop.
You had me at open world Star Wars game. I will absolutely run all over the map looking for scattered holocrons, missing bounty fobs, unearthing carbonite frozen bounties and freeing them to find out what’s happening and solve an ancient Sith mystery, or sithstery (that one’s free Lucasfilm Games, I have more though, just drop an email), or collect mementos from the Old Republic, the High Republic, the New Republic or whatever. The biggest downfall of SWTOR wasn’t that you had to explore the map it was that you had to play a game that was clearly meant to be a single-player sprawling RPG in the same vein as Knights of the Old Republic crammed into an MMO framework, and even then Bioware was able to pull up from a weird “we tried to kill WoW” spiral.
To the point where if you go back now you can almost get the experience of playing Kotor 3. Star Wars lends itself to exploration, is what I’m saying, and in a way that the folks at Ubisoft might really be able to get a handle on. I mean Fallen Order was basically Jedi Souls, right? Imagine what Ubisoft could do, especially with the guiding hand of a newly reborn Lucasfilm Games helping to shape the overall experience.
That’s the other big part of this. Like a phoenix, rising from the ashes, Lucasfilm Games is once more ascendant. There’s been a conscious shift back to that name and all the meaning that comes with it. Lucasfilm, for a time, meant all sorts of innovation and depth. Titles like The Dig and Full Throttle made the SCUMM engine sing. And this new Lucasfilm looks ready to explore what that means. At least that’s the hope, right? I mean there’s every chance they could be just as bloated, overdeveloped, and underpaid as most AAA games companies are there with similarly disastrous results coming from management trying to rush out a game well before it’s ready. You could think that something as spectacularly bad as Cyberpunk 2077’s rushed, crunchified development that ended up with CD Projekt Red embroiled in a lawsuit as well as being devalued by a billion dollars might teach someone a lesson.
But who knows. The times, they are a changing. And for now, that Indiana Jones game makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up in all the right ways.
Happy Gaming
