The Star Wars galaxy is expanding outward again, as a new open world game is in development at Ubisoft’s Massive Entertainment studio—not at EA.
The newly rebranded Lucasfilm Games is hitting the ground running, first by announcing a new Indiana Jones game with Bethesda yesterday, and now the new Star Wars title today. Massive Entertainment, makers of The Division and Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, have recently begun work, and still recruiting, so details are sparse.
This week’s announcements have big implications as EA seems to be losing exclusive rights to the Star Wars franchise early. The partnership between Disney and EA was originally signed in 2013 for ten years, developments have been rocky on many of their projects since, with a few either being cancelled—like a previous attempt at an open world game—or rocked by controversies upon release, like the Battlefront 2 loot box debacle. EA course-corrected with the last two installments, Jedi: Fallen Order and Squadrons, but they have also launched to less fanfare.
Massive is ready to rise to the occasion. “The Star Wars galaxy is an amazing source of motivation for our teams to innovate and push the boundaries of our medium,” said Ubisoft cofounder and CEO Yves Guillemot. “Building new worlds, characters and stories that will become lasting parts of the Star Wars lore is an incredible opportunity for us, and we are excited to have our Ubisoft Massive studio working closely with Lucasfilm Games to create an original Star Wars adventure that is different from anything that has been done before.”
Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy added, “these new collaborations will allow the Lucasfilm Games team to pursue fresh and exciting directions in the storytelling of Star Wars and Indiana Jones in imaginative and different ways than those explored by our films.”
With development in its first stages, not much is known, but The Division 2 director Julian Gerighty has been tapped as creative director, and Massive will be employing its Snowdrop engine. Like an open-world game itself, the possibilities for where this new game could fall in the larger Star Wars corpus are limitless.