I’m with Penny Arcade on this: better for it to have never been.
Kotaku is reporting that Electronic Arts has cancelled its planned open-world Star Wars game, citing three sources close to the company. The game had been in development at EA Vancouver, the studio responsible for games such as FIFA and Battlefront, since 2017. The site reports that EA canned the game in favor of a different Star Wars title that had a shorter timeline of development.
The open-world version had previously been hacked apart and put back together again back in 2017, after EA decided that single-player games weren’t exploitable ‘popular.’ …Oops, did I type that out? Anyway, that’s why Penny Arcade is grimly approving of all of this. This particular Star Wars game is at peace, now. It’s not in pain anymore. EA can’t hurt it.
Moe Lane
PS: BUT I’M NOT BITTER.
EA: Murdering Quality Gaming IPs Since 1996™.
.
Star Wars was not the first, nor will it be the last. The real surprise is that anyone is surprised by their scrap heap any more.
George Lucas killed the franchise.
Disney sodomized the corpse.
EA zeks nearly got lynched for exploiting gamers to pay the mouse’s vig.
.
Rats flee sinking ships.
And products that can’t turn a profit, won’t be produced.
.
EA is a company I don’t have any affection for.
(See also: Respawn, murder of)
But any company with any sense should run far, run fast, from Star Wars. Mary Sue Ray, Chuck Wendig, Soylo, Battlefront, and retcons of nearly every main (and many minor) characters are only leading indicators. It’s going to get worse. Desperation and flailing hasn’t kicked in yet. It will.
“EA is a company I don’t have any affection for.”
I do.
Back in the day, they made some REALLY good stuff. MULE was an EA product. And there were lots of others. That was back when their logo was a stylized ECA.
But they’ve changed a lot since then. And I try to forget that the company with the name nowadays is the same company that published those neat old games back in the 8-bit era.
While it is the fashion these days to say that Star Wars is somehow played out and limited in the types of stories it can tell, that is horseshit. It is only limited by the imagination and talent of the people who try to write for it.
–
KOTOR showed us that there are plenty of great stories that can be told, as long as you are not a hack.
–
Star Wars, like anything else, is best when the setting is just a backdrop to explore fundamental human stories. Love, revenge, redemption, friendship, betrayal. You know, human stuff.
–
I always wondered, why not do something like Outlaw Josie Wales/Shane meets Star Wars. Sith Apprentice, weary, decides to hang up the lightsaber and eschew the Force. Opens on a simple farming planet. No blue milk, no desert, minimal effects. Just a guy and his family. Past catches up to him. An old rival sends men to kill him and only succeeds in killing his family and pissing him off. Just your standard revenge/redemption good/evil story.
–
And I always wanted a lightsaber duel in the rain. A visceral, actual fight between two guy who want to kill each other. Lightsaber fights in the movie always seem cold and impersonal somehow.
–
Games have been better than any other medium in the past few decades because they have still explored themes that movies by and large have eschewed (save for some like John Wick.) KOTOR and Planescape explored ideas about what makes a person who they are, can someone change? Witcher 3 is superb, not just because it is well written, but because it is really a story about a man and his daughter, that daughter growing up, and setting it against a backdrop of monsters and magic. The monsters and magic are not the point, the people are.
Star Wars in not played out, but the people in position to do anything with it are. Lucas and The Mouse could have done wonders with some of the EU stories, but are more interested in telling their audience that everything they know is wrong.
^This.
.
We wouldn’t be saying Star Wars is dead if Disney was doing straightforward adaptations of the Expanded Universe.
We’d be clamoring for more.
Especially yearly serial releases from Stackpole’s X-Wing saga! (Please, just take my money! )
.
People wouldn’t have been running RPGs in the setting for fourish decades if there wasn’t room for more stories!
But Lucas and Disney aren’t telling those stories, and have no intention to do so.
There were excellent stories of the next generation. We know, because we’ve read them. Even if they’ve been retconned out of existence.
There are any number of amazing writers deeply familiar with the canon. We’ve seen their work. But they were forbidden from contributing anything more.
.
Star Wars isn’t dead because of anything intrinsic.
It’s dead because those who have control over the intellectual property are sworn enemies of the things that made Star Wars iconic in the first place.
As a corollary, Star Wars stands as an example of why someone should never bet against a woman named Kathleen Kennedy being able to screw up a sure thing.