It’s only been a few days since the Lucasfilm Games banner was revealed to the public, but we have been getting a steady flow of new information ever since. Yesterday we got the news that MachineGames, developer of the recent Wolfenstein games, is working on a brand new Indiana Jones adventure. Today Ubisoft and Lucasfilm Games have announced that Massive Entertainment, developer of Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 is in the early stages of developing an open-world Star Wars game.
While we don’t know a whole lot about the game just yet, a Q&A released on the Ubisoft site gives us some hints. For starters, the game will be a story-driven open-world game directed by Julian Gerighty, director of The Crew and The Division 2. According to the Q&A, Julian is a massive (no pun intended) fan of Star Wars, with A New Hope being the first film he ever saw in theaters, and the team is aiming to “invite players on a journey they never experienced before in this beloved lore.” Furthermore, the game will be running on Massive’s own Snowdrop engine. Massive is still bringing on new members to the team and engineering the Snowdrop engine to better utilize the power of the latest generation of consoles.
That’s all we know at the moment about this newly announced project but considering that, along with this game, Massive is also working on a video game set in the Avatar universe, it will be a while longer before we hear about a potential sequel to The Division 2. That being said, it seems that the previously promised 10-year exclusive deal that EA had for producing Star Wars games has come to an early end. The new plan of action for Lucasfilm Games and how they deal with Star Wars moving forward is detailed more in the recent starwars.com interview with Douglas Reilly, VP of Lucasfilm Games. Reilly says that while several more Star Wars games are still being developed under EA, their goal is “to uncover the stories they’ve (developers) always imagined telling and make them resonate with our fans, and across the wider Star Wars galaxy.” Needless to say, this collaboration with Ubisoft opens the door for even more possibilities for the Star Wars universe in the gaming medium. “This is the beginning of a long-term collaboration with Disney and Lucasfilm Games, and we are pleased to be working hand-in-hand to build upon the incredible legacy of Lucasfilm to create a game that we know Star Wars fans will love,” said Yves Guillemot, co-founder and CEO of Ubisoft, in the aforementioned Q&A.
And taking into account both the new Indiana Jones project and this new Star Wars game, Lucasfilm Games seems to be leaning away from the multiplayer-focused Star Wars games of recent years such as Battlefront II and aiming more for narrative-driven games like Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Speaking of, Respawn Entertainment still seems to be working on a sequel to 2019’s hit single-player game. And for fans who haven’t yet played the first game, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order just received a next-gen update that includes better framerates and dynamic resolution, so it’s as good a time as any to jump in.
