From TV shows to movies to games to everything in between, there’s a glut of Star Wars content out there right now, and there’s plenty more that’ll be coming up in the months and years to come. Here, we’re focused exclusively on the gaming side of things. Over the last few months, a bunch of AAA Star Wars games have been officially confirmed to be in development, and the one thing they all have in common right now is that we don’t know much about any of them. Even so, some bits and pieces of information, leaks, and rumours are floating around for pretty much all of them (with a couple of exceptions, of course), and here, we’re going to try and sort through all of that. At this moment in time, there are seven major Star Wars games confirmed to be in development, and we’ll be looking at each of them one at a time.
STAR WARS JEDI: SURVIVOR
Kicking things off with the Star Wars game that was most recently unveiled, and is perhaps the closest to launch- that we will get a sequel to Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was never really in doubt. Within months of the original game’s launch, EA was calling it the first in a new franchise, and looking at the critical and commercial success it enjoyed, it wasn’t hard to understand why. Recently at Star Wars Celebration, Disney, Lucasfilm Games, EA, and Respawn Entertainment officially unveiled the sequel as Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, setting a 2023 launch window for it (which, according to leaks, will soon be narrowed down to Q1 of 2023), and confirming that it won’t be cross-gen, and will launch only for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
Beyond that, a few other brief details have also been unveiled. Protagonist Cal Kestis and his buddy droid BD-1 will, of course, be returning, and will still be in hiding as the Empire and the Inquisition continue their efforts to hunt down all Jedi. The game’s teaser trailer has suggested that the Grand Inquisitor – who was a shadowy, unseen presence throughout Fallen Order – will have a more prominent role to play, and sure enough, returning director Stig Asmussen has said that the sequel is going to have a darker tone than its predecessor. Meanwhile, Asmussen also says that thanks to the more powerful hardware of the new consoles, Jedi: Survivor will feature real-time lighting, ray tracing, faster load times, and more dynamic combat. More details on the game will supposedly be shared later in the year.
RESPAWN’S STAR WARS FPS
Earlier this year, EA confirmed that Respawn Entertainment has not one, but three Star Wars games in the works. One of these is Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, which we’ve already spoken about, and one of the other two is a first person shooter. Right now, very little is known about this game, other than the fact that it’s being directed by Peter Hirschmann.
Hirschmann, of course, has been directly involved in the development of a number of Star Wars games in the past, including the likes of the Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and original Star Wars: Battlefront in 2005. More recently, he was also the director of Respawn’s VR exclusive Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond. Hirschmann has said that the Star Wars FPS is “a story I have always wanted to tell”, so we can probably assume it’ll be a story-driven title (or at least a good chunk of it will be)- but again, beyond that, details on the game are scant. Given Respawn’s track record with both Star Wars and shooters, however, there’s every reason to keep an eye on this one.
RESPAWN AND BIT REACTOR’S STAR WARS STRATEGY GAME
The third Star Wars game that was confirmed to be in the works at Respawn Entertainment earlier this year is perhaps the most curious of the lot (or so many would argue, at any rate). Technically, Respawn Entertainment, in spite of being involved with the project, is not leading development on it. That responsibility lies with Bit Reactor, a newly founded studio led by co-founder and CEO Greg Foertsch along with other former Firaxis Games lead developers who worked on XCOM.
Bit Reactor says its mission is “to usher in the future of turn-based tactics games”, so it’s safe to assume that the Star Wars game the studio is working on is going to be a turn-based strategy game a la XCOM. Beyond that, there isn’t much else that we can say about the game right now- but the idea of a turn-based tactics title set in the Star Wars universe is certainly an intriguing one.
STAR WARS ECLIPSE
Star Wars Eclipse, developed by Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human developer Quantic Dream, was announced in December last year at The Game Awards, though at this point in time, it’s safe to assume that the game is years away from releasing. Official communication from Quantic Dream itself has been as good as non-existent since the game’s announcement, but multiple leaks from credible sources have claimed that the developer is having more than a few issues with the game’s development, ranging from technical troubles and issues with its engine to difficulties in recruiting people to work on the project. Reportedly, we might not see the game until as late as 2027 or 2028– which is so far ahead in the future, it almost isn’t even worth thinking about right now.
Given how far away the game seems to be from releasing, details on what it is and will end up being are far from nailed down, and again, officially, Quantic Dream hasn’t said much, other than the fact that it’ll be set in the Outer Rim during the High Republic era (roughly three hundred years before the events of the prequel trilogy), and that it’ll have multiple playable characters and a branching narrative, which is par for the course for this studio. But leaks have revealed some interesting potential details. Unlike Quantic Dream’s past games, Star Wars Eclipse will allegedly be a full-fledged action-adventure game set in an open world environment, and will also have some multiplayer elements. How long it will be before more details emerge remains to be seen, but that’ll obviously depend on how quickly and efficiently Quantic Dream can sort out its many internal issues.
STAR WARS: KNIGHTS OF THE OLD REPUBLIC – REMAKE
For many Star Wars fans, this is probably the single most exciting Star Wars game in development right now, and for good reason. BioWare’s original Knights of the Old Republic is not only one of the studio’s greatest games of all time, it’s also one of the best RPGs ever made, and it tells what is to this day one of the most captivating Star Wars stories ever told. That’s a massive legacy, and the idea of a remake that does justice to that is an extremely exciting one. Of course, doing so will be no easy task, but if developer Aspyr Media – who have supposedly brought on a number of people who worked on the original to work on the remake as well – can live up to expectations, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic – Remake will end up being a huge hit.
What do we know about the game right now though? Not much, unfortunately. It’s still in the early stages of development, and Saber Interactive is aiding with its development. Some voice actors from the original game will be reprising their roles in the remake, including Jennifer Hale as Bastila Shan. Meanwhile, according to some rumours, the remake will feature action-based combat similar to God of War and Nioh, as opposed to the turn-based system of the original. Finally, it’s been officially confirmed that whenever the game launches, it’ll launch exclusively for PC and PS5 as a timed console exclusive for PlayStation.
SKYDANCE NEW MEDIA’S STAR WARS GAME
Amy Hennig-led Skydance New Media has confirmed in the last few months that it’s working on two Disney-owned licenses for AAA games, with one being a Marvel title and the other being a Star Wars game. At this point, we know almost nothing about it, other than the fact that it will be, in Hennig’s words, a “richly cinematic” game. What era will it be set in? What genre will the game tackle? Will it be a purely single player experience? It’s hard to say at this point- but given Hennig’s pedigree, it’s safe to assume, at the very least, that it’ll be a single player-focused game.
Of course, Hennig has some experience with the Star Wars license. At one point, she was leading a team at Dead Space studio Visceral Games on the infamous Project Ragtag, a story-driven action-adventure title that got cancelled shortly before Visceral was shut down in its entirety. Prominent leaker AccountNgt has claimed that this new game will be set in the Rebel Alliance Era (a.k.a. the original trilogy era), and that it’ll make use of some elements of Project Ragtag. That said, the project is presumably in the very early stages of production right now, so it’s hard to be too sure about anything at this stage.
UBISOFT MASSIVE’S STAR WARS GAME
We’ve known about this game longer than any other game we’ve spoken about so far, and yet we don’t have too many details on it. Developed by The Division studio Massive Entertainment on the Snowdrop Engine, the unnamed Star Wars title is confirmed to be an open world story-driven title- though given the studio’s pedigree and track record, one would assume that it’ll have at least some multiplayer elements. Whether or not that assumption turns out to be correct remains to be seen. Director Julian Gerighty has described it as being completely different from The Division, so it could go either way based on what we know right now.
And when might we get more concrete details on the game? Honestly, it’ll probably be a while. Shortly after the game was confirmed to be in development, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot said that it was at an early stage of production, while recently, insider Tom Henderson claimed that the game would probably launch sometime in 2025. Of course, it’s worth keeping in mind that Massive Entertainment is currently busy with Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, which is due out sometime before April 2023. Presumably, once that is out, the developer will turn its full attention to Star Wars.
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