Just Cause developer nearly landed deal to develop an open-world Star Wars game

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Following yesterday's news that studios like DICE and Visceral would be working on new Star Wars games under EA's new exclusive deal with Disney , we've been wondering just what those games might look like. A cinematic shooter of nonstop action set in the parched, gritty landscape of Tatooine, maybe? Or how about the series reinterpreted as a survival horror? Apparently, one very real possibility was an open-world Star Wars game, as revealed today in an exchange by former Just Cause developers from Avalanche.

"Actually, wanting to work with SW goes deep in [Sweden]," Burman tweeted. "Long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, we almost got that deal when I was at Avalanche."

Sundberg replied, "If they had given us the deal back then Lucas Arts would be alive today. A massive SW open world game! We would have rocked it."

Rocked it, they probably would have—imagine Just Cause's stunt-tastic vehicle play transposed into the Star Wars universe! This possibility would have been explored sometime between 2005 and 2009, when Burman was still working at Avalanche. There's unfortunately no word of why an open-world Star Wars game never became a thing; we can only hope now that DICE or Visceral will hit upon a similar idea. Now that we think about it, there's probably no better way to explore a universe as richly crafted as Star Wars'.