Electronic Arts' exclusivity rights to making Star Wars games has come to an end as LucasArts has opened its portfolio to other studios--in fact, The Division 2 developer Massive Entertainment has already announced it's creating an open-world Star Wars game. This is exciting; I'm happy to see that other big studios are being given the opportunity to try their hand at Star Wars, and I can't wait to get more games like Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Star Wars: Squadrons. But I also can't help but think that any Star Wars game we get from a AAA studio may just cover genres and storylines we've already seen before. Massive Entertainment, for example, is doing what it does best and making an open-world game. But there are so many more exciting opportunities, and I hope LucasArts chooses to let a few indie studios take a stab at Star Wars to realize them.
I have no doubt that Massive can create a good Star Wars game, but I also assume it will cater to the strengths and gameplay systems that Ubisoft studios already know sell well. I'm willing to bet that this new game will be another open-world action game with RPG mechanics and a skill tree that stars a character who can be a man or woman and has enough side quests to keep audiences playing for over 30 hours--and then painted as Star Wars. That's not shade, I'm down for it, that sounds super fun, but it isn't all that weird for a Star Wars game. And Star Wars is at its best when you explore the stranger parts of its universe.
Indie studios traditionally don't have as big a bottom line to meet in comparison to AAA developers, allowing them to be a bit more experimental with what they make. We've seen this before with other major film, TV shows, or comic book properties. Bithell Games transformed John Wick into a top down strategy game with John Wick Hex, for instance, and Telltale Games made The Walking Dead into a choice-driven episodic adventure series. Neither are obvious genre choices for their respective franchises--personally, I'd expect John Wick to be a shooter and for The Walking Dead to be a survival horror game--but both worked surprisingly well.
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