Ubisoft has announced a brand new Star Wars game in collaboration with Lucasfilm Games. The title is being developed by Massive Games, a studio owned by Ubisoft, best known for their work on The Division.
“This is the beginning of a long-term collaboration with Disney and Lucasfilm Games,” said Yves Guillemot, co-founder and CEO of Ubisoft, in a Ubisoft news update.
In the same article, Julian Gerighty, who served as a director on The Division 2, and will be this game’s creative director, said, “Right now, we are at the beginning of our new journey, so we are still working out many of the details. But, what we can tell you is that this will be a story-driven open-world game.”
The title will be a “departure from the world of The Division” and will be “totally different from what we have done in the past” according to Gerighty. The game will be using Massive’s “in-house game engine, Snowdrop,” to “visually bring Star Wars to life in a way that no game has ever done before.”
The article also reminds us that Massive Games are also developing a game based on the hugely successful Avatar franchise.
A New Hope
This will also be the first Star Wars based game produced outside of EA since Disney acquired Lucasfilm back in 2012. This news comes shortly after the recently announced Indiana Jones game, a property that also falls under the Lucasfilm banner, which is being developed by Bethesda Softworks.
While this doesn’t mean that EA will no longer be developing Lucasfilm games, it does mean that Lucasfilm has opened its properties up to other developers. This comes as no surprise after the controversy surrounding Star Wars Battlefront 1 & 2, which were heavily criticised for their lack of content and use of loot boxes upon launch.
It’s worth noting that a sequel to the much-lauded Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order is said to be in the works by Respawn Entertainment, an EA subsidiary. So, while it would appear that Lucasfilm is willing to spread their wings and allow other developers access to their much sought after titles, EA is still very much in the game.