Much like Lucasfilm’s rollout of new movies, Visceral Games’ gritty Star Wars title will make its bow after DICE’s popular crowd-pleaser Battlefront.
As we learned during E3, it’s tentatively been pegged for release in 2018, though during a panel at the recent Star Wars Celebration Europe, Creative Director Amy Hennig offered up new details about what fans can expect, and how it compares to the third-person action found in Naughty Dog’s Uncharted series.
Per GameSpot:
“The process that I’ve been using is really similar to what I did with Uncharted, to be honest. If you’re trying to re-create that classic–in [Uncharted’s] case–pulp action adventure experience, you need to deconstruct the films so you know how to reconstruct them in an interactive context as gameplay.
“The end goal is by the time the player has finished playing they feel like they really did play a Star Wars film. So I’ve done the same thing for Star Wars. What does that mean? It’s getting the structure right. It means you have to understand where the act breaks fall, where all the obstacles and reversals fall, and the set-pieces. [You need to know] what are all the component parts that make up a Star Wars story.”
Having left Naughty Dog early on in the development of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, both Hennig and writing partner Todd Stashwick did carry over some elements from the Uncharted franchise – not lest of which being Nolan North, the illustrious voice actor who portrayed Nathan Drake himself.
Here’s what Hennig had to say on the matter: “It’s what my writing partner Todd calls ‘breezy urgency’, the idea that there’s a sort of swashbuckling charm to the thing, there’s humour and buoyancy. At the same time there’s stakes and jeopardy.”
In accordance with Electronic Arts and Lucasfilm’s partnership, Battlefront 2 will be the next title to tumble off the production line in 2017, followed swiftly by Visceral’s Star Wars title the following year.