One of the creative leads at Respawn Entertainment, Stig Asmussen, made a recent blog post announcing that LucasFilms, Electronic Arts and Respawn Entertainment have entered into a partnership that sees Respawn being in charge of making a brand new Star Wars game, apart from the one that Amy Hennig and Jade Raymond are working on at Visceral Games.
Over on the official Respawn website Asmussen explains that it's an exciting time for everyone at Respawn as they wrap up development on Titanfall 2 and begin hiring for their upcoming Star Wars game. In fact, Asmussen mentions briefly that the upcoming title will be a third-person, action-adventure game.
Beyond that we don't really know what's up with the game. In fact, we have no idea if this is going to be based on the Old Republic, the Clone Wars or the Galactic Empire... or if it's going to take place in the new era introduced by J.J. Abrams.
A lot of gamers have been hoping that maybe EA returns to the Star Wars 1313 concept. I certainly didn't see enough of that game to make me giddy with excitement about it, but there were fans who absolutely adored the concept of getting to dive into the underbelly of Coruscant, which is probably one of the most underutilized planets in the Star Wars universe. Usually every time players get to visit Coruscant it's always briefly, in short segments and never with the possibility of exploring more than just a tiny corner of the city.
The interesting thing about it is that this game is likely going to have some solid gameplay foundations laid by Respawn given that these are the same folks who brought you the original two Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games. Those first two titles were so popular and so beloved by fans that Activision and the new Infinity Ward have even taken a dive back into the original Call of Duty 4 to remaster the game and bundle it in with Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, which is due out this fall for the Xbox One, PS4 and PC.
Respawn is now a collection of designers that came out of the fallout from when the original two creative leads were fired from Activision, which spawned from some allegations of corporate espionage. The firings involved the infamous “Project Icebreaker” that Activision's CEO, Bobby Kotick, put into play in order to oust the two leads. Nevertheless, despite a messy lawsuit and tens of millions of dollars that the two creative leads managed to acquire in result, the developers were back at the helm of designing a game in no time flat.
Respawn's first order of business after forming up was getting picked up by Electronic Arts and producing the sci-fi mech shooter, Titanfall. The game lacked a lot of core essentials to be a proper successor to Call of Duty but just about everyone recognized that the brand has a lot of potential and growing room. After moving millions of copies Respawn and EA announced that Titanfall 2 was coming, and it's scheduled to make its full debut this June during the EA Play press conference.
During the time of building up hype for Titanfall 2 leading toward its fall release, Asmussen noted that they will be hiring in all departments for the upcoming and unannounced Star Wars game. Don't expect to see the finished product until around 2018, unless of course they've been secretly working on the game for the past year.
