EA and Lucasfilm Games have jointly announced that three new Star Wars games are in development at Respawn, the studio that developed Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.

Among those three planned games is a sequel to Fallen Order, which was a story-driven, Souls-like melee combat action and exploration game. The other two games include a first-person shooter and a strategy game, but EA’s press release did not provide details about those titles beyond their respective genres.

The first-person shooter will be led by a former producer for the Star Wars: Battlefront franchise of online shooters set in the Star Wars universe. The strategy game will be produced by Respawn, but its lead developer will be Bit Reactor. Bit Reactor is a new studio formed in part by developers who previously worked on the recent entries in the XCOM franchise.

Respawn is currently best known as the developer of the popular online battle royale shooter Apex Legends, but the studio’s pedigree runs deeper—it is led by many of the same people who made the wildly popular Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare back in 2007. That game established the formula for the next decade of online shooters until that formula was upended by the popularization of the battle royale subgenre. Credit for the battle royale’s triumph goes in large part to Epic Games’ massively successful Fortnite, although Fortnite did not create the subgenre.

Respawn also made both Titanfall games, which were single-player shooters set in the same universe as the more recent Apex Legends. And very recently, Respawn co-founder Vince Zampella was put in charge of EA’s Battlefield franchise of online military shooters after Battlefield 2042‘s mixed critical and player reception last year.

The announcement from EA and Lucasfilm Games did not include any details at all about the characters, stories, or settings in the new Star Wars games.

EA has had exclusive rights to publish games set in the Star Wars universe since 2013. However, that deal ends soon. Non-EA Star Wars games are already in development, including an open-world game published by Ubisoft and developed by Massive Entertainment (The Division) and a narrative adventure game by Quantic Dream (Detroit: Become Human, Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls).

In other words, players who want to play big-budget Star Wars games are going to have more options in the next few years than they have since the 2000s.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1828277