A job listing at EA’s Vancouver Studio was recently spotted, which indicates that the studio is already hiring for a Star Wars open-world project that will include online features.
GameSpot discovered the listing via EA Vancouver’s career page. The job opening is for a lead online engineer, who will “lead a team to deliver online features for a Star Wars open-world project.”
Although the job listing did not provide any more details on the game, it’s likely that this will be the continuation of the Star Wars project that Visceral Games started developing before EA shut the studio down. Initially, the game was supposed to be a story-based, linear adventure title. However, EA decided that they wanted to take a different approach and give players with a more open-world experience.
In fact, last year, EA’s Executive Vice President, Patrick Soderlund announced the studio’s stance on what they want the upcoming game to be like:
“In its current form, it was shaping up to be a story-based, linear adventure game. Throughout the development process, we have been testing the game concept with players, listening to the feedback about what and how they want to play and closely tracking fundamental shifts in the marketplace.”
“We are shifting the game to be a broader experience that allows for more variety and player agency, leaning into the capabilities of our Frostbite engine and reimagining central elements of the game to give players a Star Wars adventure of greater depth and breadth to explore.”
Whether this is an entirely new project or a continuation of Visceral’s work, at least we can be sure of the fact that EA did not abandon the project. Currently, the studio still has not released a launch date for the Star Wars open-world game.
