So, this was a bit of a surprise. Imagine waking up this morning with little to no hints that something was going to happen to the fate of Star Wars video games, and here we are. Today, The Walt Disney Corporation and Electronic Arts have announced a multi-year partnership in which EA will be making and producing Star Wars games. Well, more than the one they currently already make.
As far as specifics – EA will be making games for what they define as a “core audience”, or the console/PC crowd, effectively. Disney, however, retains the rights to make Star Wars games for mobile/tablet/web and online audiences. And already EA have announced that two of their studios are working on Star Wars projects; as Visceral Games and DICE will be joining Bioware in this regard.
“Every developer dreams of creating games for the Star Wars universe,” says current EA head Frank Gibeau. “Three of our top studios will fulfill that dream, crafting epic adventures for Star Wars fans. The new experiences we create may borrow from films, but the games will be entirely original with all new stories and gameplay”. Disney is equally chuffed – “Collaborating with one of the world’s premier game developers will allow us to bring an amazing portfolio of new Star Wars titles to our fans around the world”, says John Pleasants, Co-President of Disney Interactive.
Personally? I’m kinda intrigued to see just what Visceral, DICE and, if they’re making something non-TOR related, Bioware are upto. Whether they continue (and finish) what products Lucasarts were planning to ship before getting shuttered, or be completely new projects, I’ve no idea. But it’ll be interesting to see where they go from here.
Five years ago, I couldn’t seriously picture myself engaging in as many digitally distributed games as I do now. They were all stupidly expensive, had no real benefit over the physical version and took way too long to download. Nowadays? They’re still expensive, but it’s become a more accepted method of acquiring video games, thanks to advances in internet speeds and cheaper, higher capacity hard-drives. But the more important point to factor in is that we’ve had that adjustment period, and now it’s not only just an accepted method of acquiring video games, but in some cases, it’s the norm.
We are frequently debating about whether fighting games should have stories. After all, these are games that are primarily designed for competition or to be played with other people, single player is mostly treated as one of three things: Training for the online/multiplayer game, an afterthought, or the unnecessary focus of the game that takes away from the multiplayer.
There’s been some hype as of late for MMO shooter Defiance. For the longest time, all I’d heard about the game was it involved publisher/developer Trion Worlds, creators of the semi-successful MMO Rift, and that people were excited for it. And you know what? All this got me somewhat interested in the game…and then I heard it’s a tied into a TV show on SyFy (which, by the way, remains the blurst name for a thing, ever –ed). And that’s where the scepticism comes in droves.