Today, Lucasfilm Games announced that it is partnering with Ubisoft to create an open-world Star Wars game. The title will be developed by Massive Entertainment at Ubisoft, marking the first time a company outside the EA has produced a Star Wars game since Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, ending nearly eight years of exclusivity. Also in the works is a new Indiana Jones game, which will be developed by Bethesda Game Studios, a newcomer to Lucasfilm and Disney.
Let’s start with Star Wars. The development of this new title is still very early – Massive continues to recruit even for the project – so details are scarce. Julian Gerighty, director at Division 2 and The crew, will serve as the game’s creative director, and the title will use Massive’s Snowdrop engine. Beyond that, Lucasfilm Games did not reveal anything about the characters or settings in the Star Wars universe that the game will present.
This announcement follows yesterday’s news that Lucasfilm is partnering with Bethesda to create an Indiana Jones title, Lucasfilm’s first non-Star Wars AAA game in recent years. The move marks a seismic shift in Lucasfilm’s approach to gaming, widening the tent for developers who want to create games using Lucasfilm franchises, especially in the Star Wars universe.
While EA previously suggested that the company will have exclusivity in Star Wars games for 10 years, it seems that either it was wrong or the clock ran out early. (Lucasfilm would not confirm for WIRED in any way.) Regardless, EA will continue to make games in the future, but Lucasfilm Games is free to look for other partners.
“EA has been and will continue to be a very strategic and important partner for us now and in the future,” Sean Shoptaw, senior vice president for Global Games and Interactive Experiences at Disney, told WIRED. “But I felt there was room for others.”
In 2013, Disney laid off 150 employees at LucasArts, ending the game’s internal development. The motivation at the time was that the move would minimize “the company’s risk while creating a broader portfolio of quality Star Wars games,” according to a statement to the company. The Hollywood Reporter then.
However, in the years that followed, the EA exclusivity agreement was criticized as an obstacle to achieving this goal. In addition to a few small mobile or VR games, the number of the main Star Wars games from EA in 2013 can be counted on one side. By allowing more developers to bring their ideas for games, Lucasfilm hopes to diversify the titles it offers.
“I think if you look at the gaming landscape, it’s such a diverse population of people around the world who play games,” Shoptaw explains. “For us to capture the amount of quality that exists in the world and be fast on the market, it would be a great challenge for us to do that domestically.”
As with previous EA games, any new Star Wars game will be part of the same Star Wars canon and continuity shared in all the movies and TV shows produced since the Disney acquisition. James Waugh, Lucasfilm’s vice president for content and strategy for the franchise, explains that while this means that games will not always connect directly to content from other environments, the possibility is on the table.
“I think if people stumble, sometimes it’s like saying, ‘Oh, then that It has to connect to anything else. And that’s not necessarily what we always say, “Waugh told WIRED. “That’s what will happen if it’s right for that story.”
This new non-exclusive arrangement for Star Wars games – as well as the rest of the Lucasfilm franchise library – leaves the door open for developers to present their own story ideas at Lucasfilm Games. “We don’t miss the people knocking on our door, wanting to play with our toys,” Lucasglm Games vice president Douglas Reilly told WIRED.
That camp includes Todd Howard. The famous director of Skyrim (among many other games) is also a huge Indiana jones fan. “What inspired Indy in particular the most is that it’s a passion project for Todd Howard,” Waugh explained. “He came up with a point of view and a story that he really believes in.”
Of course, these franchises are still, in Reilly’s words, Lucasfilm’s toys. “Finally, we have the final approval for everything,” Reilly explained. While developers – including but not limited to EA – may be free to submit story ideas to the company, those developers will continue to play in the Disney playhouse.
Keeping both players and developers inside that playhouse seems to be the ultimate goal of the new Lucasfilm Games brand. Increasingly, video games compete for free time and entertainment with film and television. Disney has a long history of dominant film and television, competing for consumer eyeballs, but does not have the same level of experience with video games. Exploiting the talent of outdoor studios could mean that consumers spend far more hours a day in the company’s extensive franchises than they would if Disney relied solely on film and TV.
A single story-based game can take tens of hours. An open-world game, like the one Ubisoft makes with Lucasfilm Games, can take hundreds of hours, depending on how long you want a player to explore. “That’s really based on why we do what we do, because these are massive entertainment experiences that last many hours, much longer than the movie,” Shoptaw explained.