Today at Celebration, EA revealed Jedi: Fallen Order; it looks like a game that is lifting the plot of the Kanan comics and Rebels, which isn’t a terrible idea.
I desperately want a good Star Wars game. I absolutely long for it. But so long as EA holds the license, I cannot be excited, even when it’s from a developer I really like. I really like Respawn’s Titanfall games: they were unique in mechanics and gameplay, very fun to play, and the second one had a great story to it. I don’t like Battle Royale games, but by all account, Apex Legends is a really good one saddled with a bad business model.
That being said, during the Q&A following, Respawn founder said it’s a Single Player, story game and said there is no multiplayer. That’s kind of a shame, because multiplayer, especially in a Star Wars game, isn’t inherently bad. The multiplayer in Jedi Knight was stupidly fun… it was just an accent on top of the single player game.
One thing that does make me hesitant to get excited is that the trailer is entirely cinematic and contains no gameplay. EA can make great cinematic videos, but that means exactly nothing when it comes to release. I mean, they can even show faked gameplay and use it to get people talking about a game.
Case in point, look at Anthem, the most recent terrible mess of an unfinished game EA has released: their E3 reveal video was a proof of concept that didn’t represent the game we got, and most of the things they talked about as features wouldn’t be in the final game. Before that was Mass Effect: Andromeda, which is part of one of my favorite series of all time, but was a muddled messy nightmare of a game (thanks in great part to EA’s micromanagement and Anthem’s terrible dev cycle).
Hopefully they stick to that commitment, because the problem with the last Star Wars game they made, Battlefront II, was that they crippled the game to the point of being unplayable, with microtransactions. In defending it, they made the single most downvoted comment in the history of Reddit:
The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.
Star Wars should make for great games. In fact, it has made for great games. EA owns Bioware, which made two of the greatest Star Wars games (and RPGs) ever made. The template is there for some great games, like Jedi Knight, X-Wing vs. TIE, and even average stuff like The Force Unleashed.
Respawn has the ability to make for a compelling game, and good single player stories. The sorely-underrated Titanfall 2 had one of the best single player campaigns in an EA game made in the past decade. This is the same studio, so that gives me hope, but it’s EA, so it doesn’t matter how good they make it look, I am firmly in the “wait and see” camp.
