Back in November 2013, after Disney’s acquisition of LucasArts and LucasFilm, EA signed a 10-year licensing deal with Disney to develop multiple games that are set within the Star Wars universe for multiple platforms. Aside from Star Wars: Attack Squadrons , a browser-based game powered by the Unity engine, the only officially confirmed Star Wars title to be expected from EA is DICE’s Star Wars: Battlefront , which was revealed at last year’s E3, since Disney cancelled the development of Star Wars 1313 in mid January of this year.
According to Fortune Magazine , EA’s new CEO Andrew Wilson has made it clear that the publisher will not be developing its future Star Wars titles based directly on the upcoming new Star Wars trilogy– Episode VII of which will drop in theatres by the end of next year on December 18. Instead, the publisher will be taking a page from the Batman: Arkham series, where it will take Star Wars back to the roots of its IP and build up from there.
“What Warner Bros. did with Batman was take the core roots of that IP and manifest that inside the walls of Gotham City and delivered an interactive experience that had real ties to what you would see in the films and what you had read in the comics, while having its own life because it could provide such deep and more immersive storylines,” explained Wilson. “When we look at the Star Wars properties that’s how we’re looking at it. We’re not trying to build a game that replicates the storyline of any particular film.”
DICE’s Star Wars: Battlefront is slated to drop in Q2/Q3 of 2015, next year. The title will be released for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4, and will utilize DICE’s Frostbite 3 engine.