With all the hype still red-hot around Star Wars Jedi Fallen Orer, EA Motive, a division of the company created back in 2015, is hard at work on an as of yet untitled game for the Star Wars franchise.
Clearly, EA wants to continue riding the wave of positive press it has been receiving since the release of Fallen Order, so all eyes are falling on EA Motive to show that the quality of this game was not an anomaly, but a new trend.
EA Motive has had their hands in the Star Wars gaming world before, having helped DICE out with Star Wars Battlefront 2.
Patrick Klaus, a former Ubisoft Quebec managing director who now leads EA Motive, spoke a bit about the undisclosed game in a recent interview, describing it as “a very unique Star Wars experience.”
He also stated that Motive is planning on using a lot of material originally produced by the now defunct Visceral Games for its own Star Wars title. He stressed that they would be building on that and adding more “player agency.”
Visceral Games was developing a Star Wars game under the direction of Amy Hennig from the Uncharted series. That all fell by the wayside when EA shut the studio down in October of 2017, parting ways with Hennig completely shortly thereafter.
“The studio’s identity is being built right now,” Klaus said. “We’re doing a lot of work internally in order to identify our DNA, who we are, and what we do. We’re in the process of communicating that internally and making sure the teams buy into it, that they’re fully committed to where we’re going, and they understand why. And then I think the identity externally gets proven when we release games, and when we release successful games.”
EA signed a 10-year deal with Disney back in 2013 to produce Star Wars games. Bioware, which is now owned by EA, had success with Star Wars in the past, creating Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic and Knights of the Old Republic 2 on the original Xbox. However, this was before EA had control, and the company’s track record since taking on the daunting task of translating one of the biggest franchises of all time to gaming has been less than stellar.
Star Wars fans decried battlefront 2 in particular for its lootbox-based system and seemingly endless micro-transactions.
Fallen Order, however, was hugely successful for the studio and it will be interesting to see if EA Motive can keep that going.
