Right after Electronic Arts revealed their first look at some breath-taking gameplay footage from Star Wars: Squadrons during their EA Play Live online event, the official Star Wars site was updated with an article featuring their time spent speaking with Lucasfilm’s Orion Kellogg and Motive Studios’ Ian Frazier about designing this new space combat game. Check out the intro to their interview copied below and then head on over to StarWars.com for the entire read.
Star Wars: Squadrons will be released later this fall on October 2 for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One (crossplay across all platforms is supported) and offers several pre-order bonuses. For more information and to pre-order your copy, visit the game’s official website.
One never knows when inspiration will strike. For EA’s Motive Studios, the concept for the recently-revealed space combat game Star Wars: Squadrons came at a rather surprising time: while working on another Star Wars game.
“There are a ton of Star Wars fans at Motive, myself included, with a lot of desire to create our own adventures in this universe. This project is one example where that desire resulted in something new springing to life,” Ian Frazier, creative director at Motive, tells StarWars.com. “Back when the team was working on the single-player campaign for Star Wars Battlefront II, they were having a great time with the space missions in particular, and it sparked an idea. Three of the devs — James Clement, Pat Lalonde, and Steve Masters — waxed nostalgic about the fun times they had in the late ‘90s playing other flight combat games, and formed an early pitch that essentially asked the question, ‘What would a modern-day Star Wars game focused entirely on the pilot experience look like?’ As a huge fan of the classic Star Wars flight games myself, I was very excited to help answer that question.”
From there, that core group at Motive took the first steps toward realizing this idea. “We formed a very small conception team and started working on the game design and art direction. The first thing we built was a 5v5 dogfight prototype,” Frazier says. “From that prototype, the game that would eventually become Star Wars: Squadrons was born.”
And thankfully, they ended up with the support of Lucasfilm.
“So many millions of Star Wars fans have dreamt of being the hotshot pilot that gets to take the one-in-a-million shot. But that shot only lands with careful planning, great skill, and an experienced team by your side. In Motive, we have all of those ingredients,” says Orion Kellogg, senior producer at Lucasfilm Games. “It was easy to rally behind the dream of fine-tuned Star Wars dogfighting and it has been thrilling to see the dream become reality.”
