Disney, the new owners of the Star Wars franchise, has already farmed out the license for video game development to a new company and guess who it is? Everyone's favourite always-on publisher, Electronic Arts! Hurray… right?
This license is pretty all encompassing too, giving EA the right to develop games across multiple platforms and with different styles and settings within the Star Wars universe; so expect console and mobile titles, perhaps even some social network related “games” too. The question from here though, is which of its internal or external studios will EA farm out the work too?
I get the feeling that this scene makes a lot more sense to Star Wars fans today
Eurogamer has it that DICE, Bioware and Visceral will all be given a chance to develop something Star Wars in the next couple of years, which should cheer up Star Wars fans. Bioware were behind the Knight of the Old Republic games and DICE has a solid reputation with games like Mirror's Edge and the Battlefield series. Visceral also has quite a pedigree with its Dead Space games, so at least the people EA is putting on this know what they're doing.
Speaking in an interview, EA labels president Frank Gibeau said: “Every developer dreams of creating games for the Star Wars universe. The new experiences we create may borrow from films, but the games will be entirely original with all new stories and gameplay.””Powering it all will be the Frostbite 3 development engine – guaranteeing incredible graphic fidelity, environments and characters,” he concluded.
KitGuru Says: So I know you guys aren't big EA fans, but are you happy enough with the developers that will be working on future Star Wars games? If so, what kind of game would you like to see? I wouldn't mind a new Pod Racer myself.
KOTOR 3! Or Battlefront 3!
And everyone says valve cannot count to 3…
I’m not going to lie, i don’t really have much respect for EA as a company but some of the studios EA has are pretty dam amazing. Im not a Battlefield 3 fan but DICE at least know how to make a game and so does many other EA owned developers.
Let’s just hope EA doesn’t use the Star Wars franchise as a guinea pig for its new DRM and online only ideas.