Electronic Arts is working on an open-world Star Wars game with online elements, according to one of the company's job listings. It's looking for a lead online engineer to deliver "online features for a Star Wars open world project" from its Vancouver studio.
The listing doesn't provide any more details about the game, but it could be a continuation of the Star Wars project that Visceral Games was working on before EA closed the studio down. That was a "story-based, linear adventure game" but EA wanted to completely rework it, and the company's vice president Patrick Soderlund talked about giving it "greater depth and breadth".
An open-world game would fit the bill. EA also said at the time that future work on Visceral's game would be led from its Vancouver studio, which matches up.
When Visceral was closed down, fans were worried that it meant the single-player project would morph into a multiplayer game heavy on monetisation—EA spoke of making something that "players wanted to come back and enjoy for a long time". It later clarified that, saying: "It wasn't about this [being] just a single-player game or it needed to be a live service, it was more about how do we get to a point where the overall gameplay experience was right for players."
We'll have to wait and see how the singleplayer/multiplayer portions balance in this open-world Star Wars game. You can bet that, given the controversy around Star Wars Battlefront 2 and its loot boxes, a lot of people are going to be sceptical.
As a reminder, Titanfall developer Respawn is also working on a third-person action-adventure game set in the Star Wars universe.
Thanks, Gamespot.
