Ubisoft is working on an open world Star Wars game

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Lucasfilm Games tells EA: "I am altering the deal."

Star Wars: Battlefront 2
(Image credit: Electronic Arts)

The newly rebranded Lucasfilm Games has announced that Ubisoft is developing an open-world Star Wars game. Wired got the scoop, and a few details: the game is being worked on by Massive Entertainment, developer most recently of The Division and its sequel, and its creative director is Julian Gerighty (director of The Division 2 and the Crew). Development is early days and the game will use Massive's Snowdrop Engine.

This all screams multiplayer to me, but obviously such is speculation. The news follows hot on the heels of yesterday's announcement that a new Indiana Jones game will be developed by Bethesda Game Studios and Machinegames.

A subplot here is that EA had agreed a much-publicised ten year exclusivity deal with the Walt Disney Company for Star Wars games in 2013, which was signed one month after Disney had closed Lucasarts. EA will keep making Star Wars games but there's no further clarity on what's happened here, beyond the fact that Lucasfilm Games is now clearly making Star Wars games with multiple other publishers.

Ubisoft CEO and co-founder Yves Guillemot says Massive is working with Lucasfilm to "create an original Star Wars adventure that is different from anything that has been done before." There are no further details on the game, though for some reason a substantial playtime is being teased.

"[It] really leans into why we are doing what we're doing, because these are massive entertainment experiences that last many hours, much longer than film," Sean Shoptaw, SVP of global games and interactive experiences at Disney, told Wired. "When people are paying $70, or they're paying good amounts of money to spend time with your content and play your game, you've got to reward that investment."

A couple of hours after the Ubi announcement, Electronic Arts posted a tweeting reassuring fans that it's still in the Star Wars game business too:

No release window for Ubisoft's Star Wars project has been floated yet. Over on the PCG forum there's one simple question: what do you want to see?

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Rich Stanton
Rich Stanton
Senior Editor

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."