Honestly, you wait at least a couple of years for a new Star Wars game and then all of a sudden 50,000 come along at once. Well, sort of.
Thanks to the success of EA's Battlefront - released back in November 2015 and boasting sales of 13 million as of last month - the publisher has just announced that it's working on a sequel for next year. Oh, and three other games for the next two or three years after that, too. Yes, it turns out there's quite a crossover between Star Wars fans and gamers. Who knew?
All this news got us thinking, however, just what can we expect from these new releases? Knowing EA, it could be everything from Star Wars does FIFA to Star Wars does The Sims, where you have to make sure Jabba the Hutt is fed, watered and generally looked after rather than sitting alone in his palace masturbating.
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Star Wars: Battlefront 2
So, yes, news that EA was going to serve up a sequel to one of the best selling games of recent years is hardly shocking. In fact, you can file that under 'completely unsurprising', along with Tyson Fury making some kind of racist or homophobic outburst or Azealia Banks making some kind of racist or homophobic outburst. Wait a minute - has anyone introduced those two?
Anyway, logic suggests that, given the first Battlefront came out before The Force Awakens hit the big screen, its sequel may well be focused more on Disney's fresh take on a galaxy far, far away than the universe George Lucas created and then battered to death in front of us over and over in the late 1990s and early 2000s. That means more Kylo, more Rey and more Finn. Oh, and more of the swirly new planets and sharp looking space ships that featured in the new movie. We'd look up their silly names, but Wookieepedia is down right now.
Either way, Battlefront 2 will be more of the same, albeit with new characters and new settings, for that is the EA way. Oh, and expect Lionel Messi to feature on the cover art.
Jade Raymond's New Star Wars Game
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This is where we have to start guessing a little. Having spent a decade at Ubisoft working on the likes of Assassin's Creed and Watch Dogs, producer Jade Raymond left the French giant to return to EA and take charge of Visceral Games.
That's the same Visceral Games that worked on Dead Space and the far less acclaimed Battlefield Hardlines. Now it's working on a Star Wars title that's described as an 'action game'. That's not much to go on, but with the developer's background in first-person shooters, some form of FPS seems likely, albeit one that's radically different from the multiplayer friendly Battlefront.
So, to summarise, Visceral is making a Star Wars game, and it'll probably have shooty gun things in it, and be set in space. All clear? Cool.
Credit: EA
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Respawn Entertainment's Third-Person Star Wars Game
We know a little bit more about this one, if only because EA had the sense to publish a journalist-desperately-scavenging-for-details friendly press release casting light on the bits and bobs we can expect.
If you didn't already know, Respawn is the studio behind EA's big Xbox One release Titanfall. It's now working on a third-person action adventure release that takes the developer's talent and fuses it with "the power of Star Wars." That said, we have no idea of the exact setting or time period it'll be set in, and given the scope of the Star Wars franchise, we're not going to guess, either. (Although it'll probably have big droids and clones and shit in it. This is the Titanfall developer, remember.)
More Unannounced Star Wars Games
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Okay, we really are guessing here. As well as the three aforementioned releases (made by DICE, Visceral Games and Respawn Entertainment respectively), EA has claimed there are three other studios under its wings also working on Star Wars games.
They include Capital Games, BioWare and Motive. BioWare is, of course, the outfit behind the Knights of the Old Republic series, which continues to be updated and added to right up to the present day. As such, it's safe to say we're going to be seeing more RPGs tapping into the Star Wars universe from BioWare in the years ahead.
Capital Games, meanwhile, is developing a mobile Star Wars game called Galaxy of Heroes due out later this year, so it's unlikely it's involved in any major console or PC releases. Motive Studios, finally, is a Montreal based studio working with Visceral on Jade Raymond's game, so that counts the folks over there out.
However, if EA is to hit its target of one new major Star Wars game every year from now until 2020 at least, there's one piece missing from the puzzle that perhaps EA hasn't even pinned down yet. We wait with much anticipation.
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Words by Keith Andrew
Featured image credit: EA
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