It would seem that EA are working on a new online Open World Star Wars game based on this advert for a job in their Vancouver studio.
Career Opportunities: Star Wars – Lead Online Engineer (118206)
The Role: Lead Online Engineer
Lead a team to deliver Online features for a Star Wars Open World project.You will design, architect and implement the Online infrastructure for the project while working with industry-leading central technologies. You will lead a team of Engineers to accomplish the goals for the product as well as be an effective people manager to grow the talent on the team. You will report to the project Technical Director and ensure that the Online systems are meeting the robustness and performance requirements.
This from PC Gamer….
The listing doesn’t provide any more details about the game, but it could be a continuation of the Star Wars project that Visceral Games was working on before EA closed the studio down. That was a “story-based, linear adventure game” but EA wanted to completely rework it, and the company’s vice president Patrick Soderlund talked about giving it “greater depth and breadth”.
An open-world game would fit the bill. EA also said at the time that future work on Visceral’s game would be led from its Vancouver studio, which matches up.
When Visceral was closed down, fans were worried that it meant the single-player project would morph into a multiplayer game heavy on monetisation—EA spoke of making something that “players wanted to come back and enjoy for a long time”. It later clarified that, saying: “It wasn’t about this [being] just a single-player game or it needed to be a live service, it was more about how do we get to a point where the overall gameplay experience was right for players.”
More news on this as it develops.
