While many hoped that once George Lucas got his paws off the Star Wars franchise things would get better, it appears that the new owners – Disney – might be headed for similar daft decisions.
A month after Disney announced it would be shutting down all internal development at its LucasArts game division, the mickey mouse outfit reported that it was going to appoint the Jar Jar Binks of the games industry, EA Games to develop software for the franchise.
While EA has all the developers and programmers to create great games, its recent SimCity launch proved that it could not run a blaster fight in a Tatooine canteener. In fact if there was a bright star in the software games universe, then EA games is probably the furthest away from it.
EA’s problem is that it is completely obsessed with the dark side of DRM which it insists is the Death Star to software piracy. Like most Death Stars it keeps getting flattened by kids in small flimsy fighters and is only successful at destroying the innocent.
However, EA said it will create and publish Star Wars games for a “core gaming audience” across multiple (undisclosed) platforms and genres.
Disney will retain rights to publish certain games on mobile, social, tablet and online so it has a get out Carbonite block free card if EA cocks it up.
The EA studios creating those “core” Star Wars games are Battlefield developer DICE, Dead Space developer Visceral Games and BioWare, which has plenty of spacefaring experience with Mass Effect, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Fans will be praying for more of the latter.
It looks like the games will use DICE’s Frostbite 3 engine, the same engine that powers Battlefield 3.
In a statement, EA Games label president Frank Gibeau said that the games will use new experiences borrowed from films, but the games will be entirely original with all new stories and gameplay.
