Since Electronic Arts and Disney agreed last year to team up and produce games in the Star Wars universe, we've haven't heard much about what they have in mind other than a new take on Battlefront . Now a new interview with EA CEO Andrew Wilson at CNN Money makes it clear the publisher plans to go its own way, rather than tie its games to the stories being developed for the next set of Star Wars films.
Wilson points directly at another iconic, imaginative universe as an example of how EA will work to interpret Star Wars: the Batman Arkham series from Rocksteady Studios and Warner Bros.
"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," Wilson says. "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."
Much like Batman, Star Wars is often characterized as much by some of its films' off-key characters and strange moments as by its epic, genre-defining take on science fiction. What the Arkham series does so well is to decide on what the central experience of the Batman character is—stealth, fluid combat, and gadgets—and focus on making its interpretation a whole lot of fun to play. It doesn't matter that the games exist on their own rather than being linked explicitly to any particular film version of Batman. With that in mind, I look forward to seeing what EA has in store for us as it decides what "the core roots" of Star Wars are going forward.
