All Articles: Star Wars: Visceral

We all expected it, but Lucasfilm made it official yesterday by doing away with the existing Star Wars Expanded Universe in preparation for Episode VII. Originally infamous for the multiple levels of canonicity it imposed on the franchise, going forward, every Star Wars project produced by Lucasfilm (including all movies, games, and books) will hold an equal place in franchise’s continuity. This includes both of EA’s in-production games: DICE LA’s Star Wars: Battlefront and Visceral’s “open world” game.

“We have an unprecedented slate of new Star Wars entertainment on the horizon,” said Kathleen Kennedy, Lucasfilm’s President. “We’re set to bring Star Wars back to the big screen, and continue the adventure through games, books, comics, and new formats that are just emerging. This future of interconnected storytelling will allow fans to explore this galaxy in deeper ways than ever before.”

In addition to the six movies, two previous Star Wars television productions will remain valid in the new continuity: The Clone Wars and the upcoming Rebels. But that doesn’t mean that your favorite Star Wars novels will fall into the Holiday Special hole. Many of the books, including the Thrawn Trilogy, will be republished under the “Legends” banner. However, Lucasfilm was quick to point out that “the universe that readers knew is changing, it is not being discarded.” New writers may use previously published EU material in the new continuity, with the approval of the new Lucasfilm Story Group, of course.

And about those future books… io9 has revealed that the first Star Wars book in the new continuity will be September’s A New Dawn, which will serve as a prequel to Rebels. It will be followed by Tarkin on November 11, and Heir to the Jedi and Lords of the Sith in early 2015.

So say farewell to the characters from all the fantastic Star Wars games over the years. Shadows of the Empire, Jedi Knight, Rogue Squadron, Knights of the Old Republic, The Force Unleashed, and many others… they may be gone, but they’ll all live on in our memory banks.

Electronic Arts wasted no time in tasking top men (“TOP. MEN.”) from DICE LA and Visceral to create two games in the Star Wars universe after signing a deal with Disney earlier this year. DICE LA is hard at work on a reboot of Star Wars: Battlefront while the subject of Visceral’s project is still a mystery. But now we know what it won’t be about.

Speaking at the UBS Global Technology Conference earlier this week, Blake Jorgensen, EA’s CFO, has confirmed that the publisher has no plans to release any games based on the upcoming Star Wars movies such as 2015’s Episode VII.

“We’ve done movie games over the years and we wanted to make sure that we weren’t doing a movie game, i.e., game based on the movie,” Jorgensen said.

He continued: “We have [a] team in DICE building some early stages of various games and building them in Frostbite, so it will be a very exciting gameplay and you’ll hear more about it in the years to come. And so, we’re excited and we think that it will be a great 2015 and 2016 when we’ll start to see the emergence of possibly the Star Wars titles along with the Star Wars movies that will start to come out in late calendar 2015 or fiscal 2016.”

Jorgensen also confirmed that EA’s deal with Disney will last for ten years and will include “games in many different genres across multiple types of platforms.”