A new job posting on Electronic Arts official jobs site suggests that the publisher is working on an open world Star Wars title. The position states that they are looking for a lead online engineer at EA’s Vancouver studio in Burnaby. The initial part of the description for the position plainly reads “Lead a team to deliver Online features for a Star Wars Open World project.”
The requirements for the position are “experience implementing Online features such as Matchmaking, Asynchronous interactions, Live services, Server-host migration, etc.” EA hasn’t shared any information on this project after the shut down of Visceral Studios, and stated that they would be making major changes to the Star Wars title that they were working on.
This in turn sparked many discussions concerning the future of successful triple-A single player games. EA CEO Andrew Wilson denied that the shutdown of Visceral and their Star Wars game were because they wished to turn the single player title into a live service title. Patrick Soderlund, the executive VP of EA worldwide studios also denied this claim but argued that quality was the underlying issue.
When the news of Visceral’s closing was announced Soderland stated, “Our Visceral studio has been developing an action-adventure title set in the Star Wars universe. 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.”
EA has been in the middle of quite a bit of controversy as of late with the Star Wars: Battlefront II microtransaction fiasco, the comment on Reddit that seriously upset the game’s community, and their newly announced title Anthem seemingly putting pressure on its developers. Perhaps maybe this will be a step in the right direction for EA to regain the trust of fans that they recently have lost. Although we have no clue what EA’s new open world Star Wars game will look like, House did state that some of the assets and content from the game Visceral was working on may be added into this new title.