Skydance New Media / Lucasfilm Video games
Lucasfilm Video games’ newest announcement may sound boilerplate: One other Star Wars journey recreation is coming, and it would not have a launch date, display screen pictures, or goal platforms.
And but, this Tuesday announcement is popping heads for a significant cause: It brings Amy Hennig again to the Star Wars online game fold, almost 5 years after her final main Star Wars venture crashed and burned.
The information, announced by Hennig’s current employer, Skydance New Media, and mirrored by Lucasfilm, confirms that Hennig will lead the manufacturing of “a richly cinematic action-adventure recreation that includes an unique story within the legendary Star Wars galaxy.”
Coincidentally, the identical description applies to “Ragtag,” the code title for a Hennig-helmed Star Wars recreation that spent four years in development hell at EA earlier than being summarily canceled in 2017. On the time, critics puzzled whether or not any of the sport’s manufacturing points have been because of EA shifting sources to games-as-a-service releases—an obvious focus that torpedoed Star Wars Battlefront II‘s late 2017 launch.
Within the years since EA lost its exclusive deal to make Star Wars video games, extra tales have come out about GaaS priorities cursing different EA-affiliated studios. Probably the most notable instance was Dragon Age 4 receiving a full mid-development overhaul to remove multiplayer modes after the sport writer seen how profitable Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order turned out as a single-player, wholly offline journey recreation. (In different phrases, what Star Wars Ragtag would’ve been.)
Legal households, scoundrels, and action-packed heists to come back?
Hennig, who led growth of the cult-classic Legacy of Kain sequence earlier than directing Uncharted 2 and Uncharted 3, is now main a game-development workforce at Skydance New Media. In late 2021, her workforce introduced work on an “all-new recreation” set within the Marvel Leisure universe—which arguably means the Home of Mouse that controls Marvel, Star Wars, and extra has been impressed sufficient by Hennig’s early Marvel efforts to double-dip.
As a part of the Tuesday announcement flurry, Hennig supplied a sly nod to the fact of returning to Star Wars recreation growth, posting on Twitter, “Never tell me the odds.”
How a lot of the Ragtag venture may be sourced and resurfaced as a template for Hennig’s subsequent Star Wars recreation? The ashes of Ragtag have been, in response to a Hennig interview, transferred to an “open-world” EA Star Wars recreation that we have but to see indicators of. It is unclear whether or not that included content material like characters, voices, and tales or technical belongings, leaving the unique Ragtag script and idea out there for Lucasfilm Video games to reuse because it sees match. (Both method, EA still has a few more not-yet-revealed Star Wars games in its release schedule.)
Ought to Skydance get the rights to reuse any Ragtag content material, its new Star Wars recreation might revolve round life instantly after the destruction of Alderaan and observe the exploits of at the least one Han Solo-like bounty hunter in “a narrative about legal households, scoundrels, and action-packed heists,” as Jason Schreier previously reported for Kotaku. (That is not the identical as a canceled 2013 third-person journey recreation, Star Wars 1313. That one revolved round Boba Fett and, according to a January leak, appeared remarkably much like Uncharted.)
This week’s information follows the megaton “April Fools” announcement that Lucasfilm Video games and legendary Lucasarts developer Ron Gilbert had shaken palms on growth of a brand new Monkey Island point-and-click sequel.
