EA Has One More Chance With Star Wars

This is a guest post from Contributor Derek Grant

On Tuesday news dropped, from Kotaku’s Jason Schreier, that EA cancelled yet another Star Wars game. This time it was the open world Star Wars game announced after Visceral Games was shut down in 2017. Keep in mind that this is a different project than the one Visceral was working on. The previous project was a linear story driven game that likely was going to be very similar to that of the Uncharted series since Amy Hennig, who lead the first three Uncharted games, was working on the project.

After the announcement of the cancelled Star Wars game, the internet made sure to let EA know about their disappointment with users on Twitter pointing out how few games have been released compared to when Lucas Arts had the license.

Since EA acquired the license to produce Star Wars games in a deal with Disney, they have released two games. Two. Star Wars Battlefront and Star Wars Battlefront II. Both games were met with criticism from reviewers and fans, but Battlefront II received the harshest criticism as the pay to win microtransactions and EA’s terrible Reddit response, which became the most downvoted Reddit comment of all time, didn’t help.

Despite the cancellations and the poor way in which EA handled Battlefront II, they can still redeem themselves if Jedi Fallen Order is a smash hit. We know very little about the game beyond its announcement at E3 2018, but the games’ success will depend on whether-or-not Disney should revoke the license from EA.

Here’s what we do know about Jedi Fallen Order. It’s an action-adventure game. It’s made by the developers behind Titanfall. It’s slated for a 2019 release. That’s pretty much it. Despite so little information, the expectations for this game will be through the roof. If EA somehow bungles the release of this game, then that should be curtains on their deal with Disney.

Star Wars is one of the most beloved franchises of all time, if not the most beloved. I would think it would be rather easy to make a competent game that will be a smash success and popular with the fans. In other words, making a Star Wars game should be akin to printing money. Unfortunately for fans, EA has different opinions as to what type of games they should make.

In the past two years games like God of War, Spiderman and Breath of the Wild have shown that single player games are far from dead and gamers absolutely want them. However EA continues to show resistance to making a story driven single player adventure that Star Wars fans have been craving. The single player experience in Battlefront II was good in my opinion and it shows that there are talented people at EA’s disposal that will be able to create a wonderfully crafted single player experience.

I want Jedi Fallen Order to be a success, but not for EA’s sake. Instead I want it to be a success because I’ve been craving an amazing Star Wars experience that I haven’t had since the mid-2000s. Will the Star Wars license be better off in the hands of a different publisher? It’s easy to say from the sidelines that it would be, but it’s difficult to say for sure. Let’s just hope that by the end of 2019 we’ll be playing an amazing Star Wars game.