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EA/LucasfilmsIt’s not just in movies and television projects that Star Wars is getting a makeover following Disney’s buyout of Lucasfilm; the video game side of things is undergoing an upgrade too, with EA aiming to give the franchise the same kind of treatment that livened up the console life of a certain Caped Crusader.
“The most important thing for me is that we take the Star Wars license and come up with games where peoples’ jaws drop,” EA’s Patrick Soderlund told gaming site Polygon. “We need to do with this what [Arkham Asylum] did for the Batman license.”
For those unfamiliar with the reference, describing the 2009 Arkham Asylum as “critically acclaimed” would be an understatement. Applauded not only for its gameplay, but also its writing and voice acting, the game received numerous awards and accolades, and deemed one of the games of the year by multiple outlets, including Time, Wired and The A.V. Club.
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Pushing Star Wars gaming to this level doesn’t mean an abandonment of everything that went before, however. Soderlund said that EA “didn’t toss anything out” when it came to development work done on earlier games, including the never-released Star Wars: 1313 and Star Wars: First Assault, adding “We’re looking at the old games. We have access to everything that was done during the LucasArts era. But we do want to take our own stance.”
Star Wars: Battlefront, EA’s first game under the new agreement, is “going to take awhile” to get to release, according to Soderlund. But it sounds like it might be worth the wait.
