Even if he lost the exclusivity of the Star Wars license, the publisher Electronic Arts is not ready to let go. It just announced three new games, including a new installment to the Jedi Fallen Order franchise.
Although Electronic Arts may have lost the exclusivity of the Star Wars license in video games, the publisher had made it clear that it did not want to release such a lucrative windfall. “We have a long partnership with Disney. Expect us to continue to invest in our Star Wars partnership. It’s been very profitable, we’ve made over $3 billion, and we’re excited about what we can do in the future around the license. So it shouldn’t be understood as the idea of making fewer games.” said Andrew Wilson, the current CEO of Electronic Arts, in February 2021.
Word kept. EA has just announced three new games to come around the license, the development of which will be supervised by Respawn Entertainment, which delivered a Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order pretty solid.
That’s good, there will officially be a sequel, the development of which will still be supervised by Game Director Stieg Asmussen, to whom we owe the extraordinary memory God of War III. This announcement is not really a surprise, insofar as EA had announced in May 2020, in front of the great success of the game, that it was the first part of a franchise in the making.
This new title would already be in development for a while, and could aim for a release as early as this year, or in 2023.
For the record, Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order, that was it…
The other announced title will be an FPS (first person shooter), the development of which is supervised by Peter Hirschmann. The interested party is no stranger to the genre. He had notably worked on the license Medal of Honor in its infancy, and on the games Star Wars Battlefront. We also owe him the development of the VR game Medal of Honor: Above & Beyond. He is also an alumnus of the late LucasArts, slashed unceremoniously by Mickey in 2013.
The third title announced will be a strategy game, developed by studio Bit Reactor, and produced by Respawn Entertainment. Bit Reactor is a new studio announced last week, including veterans from Firaxis; a studio famous for creating the excellent series of strategy games X-Com and Civilization.
We will end by recalling that, still about the distant galaxy of Star Wars, Ubisoft is preparing an Open World for its part. The French studio Quantic Dream meanwhile unveiled its new project last December, Star Wars: Eclipse, supposed to set during the so-called High Republic period, nearly two hundred years before the events of the film Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, and which corresponds to a golden age of the Jedi.
Check out the trailer…