It looks like the success of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order has enticed LucasFilm and EA into furnishing Respawn Entertainment with more dollar than can be found in Big Whoop itself. A big press release from LucasFilm announces that three new Star Wars games are coming from the aforementioned developer. Three!
Shepherding the next installment in the Star Wars Jedi story is game director Stig Asmussen of Respawn; Peter Hirschmann, game director, who has a long and accomplished history with Star Wars, leads the development of Respawn’s Star Wars first-person shooter. A new studio helmed by games industry veteran Greg Foertsch will create the new Star Wars strategy game, developed through a production collaboration between Respawn and Bit Reactor. Respawn will produce the new Star Wars strategy game while Bit Reactor leads development of the title.
Now, Respawn Entertainment is the real deal, founded by key personnel involved with driving Call of Duty to monumental success. Titanfall 2 offered one of the best single-player first-person shooter experiences of the last generation, and Apex Legends was and is a refreshingly good take on the hit-and-miss battle royale concept. The studio’s Fallen Order effort was considered a solid experience for Star Wars aficionados.
I can’t help but be a little saddened, though. Respawn Entertainment has bags of potential as a powerhouse of original games, or at the very least it could continue carving out its own lovely little universe a la Arkane Studios. Instead, I fear it is just going to become ‘the Star Wars studio’, apparently taking on genres it doesn’t really have experience with and neglecting the original IPs that put it on the map. Hopefully its developers love them some Star Wars.
I also worry for the mental health of Vince Zampella, who is apparently overseeing this new effort in addition to having been announced last month as taking the helm of the Battlefield franchise. This follows and is likely because of the disastrous launch of Battlefield 2042, which was executed with about as much finesse as delivering a new Monkey Island title that is actually a disguised Candy Crush Saga. That franchise is handled by DICE, which funnily enough was primarily handling the Star Wars: Battlefront games beforehand. What a yarn this all is.
