It appears as if Disney isn't revoking the Star Wars license from Electronic Arts just yet. While the two corporations had a slight tussle last year over the premium loot boxes in Star Wars: Battlefront 2 after parents put together a viral campaign on Facebook, it appears EA is now looking to build a new open-world Star Wars game.
Over on the official career opportunities page for Electronic Arts, there's a job opening for a lead online engineer for a Star Wars game. The job description plainly lays out that the publisher is looking to hire an online engineer for a "AAA Star Wars title" at the EA Vancouver studio. Previously, the posting advertised that the recruit would work on "online features for a Star Wars open world project," though that statement has been removed from the posting.
Just as the title implies, this job will focus on online infrastructure for the new game, and will be in charge of constructing and working as an architect for C++ libraries and systems, along with developing new content creation tools and workflows. The job will also require this individual to be in charge of providing solutions to the network engineering team for creating anti-cheat utilities, and maintaining network optimization solutions for smooth online play.
What's also interesting is that the job description doesn't mention anything about the Frostbite game engine. This likely means that this may not be an iterative re-imagining of the Star Wars game that Visceral Games was working on under Amy Hennig. The Visceral Star Wars title was running on the Frostbite engine that's maintained by DICE.
The job description for this upcoming multiplayer game makes no mention of knowledge of working with Frostbite. If it were the engine being used it would have seemed like something that would have been plastered on the job description page, especially since that's usually something that appears on the Battlefield job descriptions when EA is hiring engineers for the multiplayer.
Why is this significant? Because if the team is using a different game engine then it likely means that this is a completely different kind of gameplay experience compared to what was built for Battlefield and Star Wars: Battlefront.
So what kind of game can we expect out of this? Well, it's possible that this is not going to be a standard PvP game like Battlefield or a PvE game like Mass Effect 3 or Mass Effect: Andromeda. It's possible that this could end up being a CCG, a MOBA, or an all new MMO that could end up replacing BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic.
Right now we don't know what this new game will be, but at least we do know that it's likely not Star Wars: Battlefront 3, and it obviously doesn't appear to be the game that Visceral had been working on.
EA Vancouver is known for being a support studio for series like the FIFA and NHL series, while also having worked on older titles for the sixth and seventh gen consoles. It's a bit tough to tell what sort of game this will end up being but EA is ramping up hiring for this online open-world game themed around Disney's Star Wars universe.
