There Might Well Be An Open-World Star Wars Game In Development

There are whispers in the gaming community that a brand new, open-world Star Wars game might be in the offing.

Of course, this is totally unconfirmed, no screenshots, no features, no nothing, but there is one key element: Electronic Arts, the company behind all the previous Star Wars game, are advertising for a developer and it looks suspiciously like they want someone with experience in open-world.

The advert read: "We are looking for a talented and experienced Lead Online Engineer to join an established, experienced team of developers working on a AAA Star Wars title in development at EA Vancouver.

"This is an opportunity to join a veteran team to design, architect, and implement the Online infrastructure for the project, while working with industry-leading central technologies."

While that doesn't mean that much to mere mortals such as ourselves, in gamer speak - and more importantly, programmer speak - it means a lot.

More digestible are a few of the key skills that EA want from applicants, which include: "Experience implementing Online features such as Matchmaking, Asynchronous interactions, Live services, Server-host migration, etc," aka building large online open-worlds that can be used online.

It's enough to make both Star Wars fans and gaming fans (of which let's assume that there is a large crossover) get very excited, though there are a few caveats.

Firstly, if Electronic Arts are only advertising the job now, it's probably safe to assume that they aren't going to be releasing any hot off the press material any time soon.

Obviously, they have to find a candidate, make the game and then release it, which is guaranteed to take bloody ages. Secondly, Electronic Arts did actually get people very excited about this sort of thing way back in 2013, when they ran a similar job listing, and we're still waiting on the outcome of that particular project.

Thirdly, though probably least worryingly, Electronic Arts are also denying the whole thing.

On the other hand, there is definitely a new Star Wars game in the works, though the form of it is as yet unknown.

Patrick Soderlund, the Executive Vice President of EA, told Gamespot: "Our Visceral studio has been developing an action-adventure title set in the Star Wars universe."

He elaborated that "in its current form, it was shaping up to be a story-based, linear adventure game. Throughout the development process, we have been testing the game concept with players, listening to the feedback about what and how they want to play, and closely tracking fundamental shifts in the marketplace.

"It has become clear that to deliver an experience that players will want to come back to and enjoy for a long time to come, we needed to pivot the design."