Star Wars and Uncharted probably aren’t two franchises you’d think to put together – but really, it makes perfect sense.
Great news then, as Amy Hennig – writer of the first three Uncharted games – has been talking up the new Star Wars game from EA and Visceral Games, and it sounds like it’ll be taking a lot from Nathan Drake’s adventures.
Speaking during a panel at the annual Star Wars Celebration in London, Hennig – who is creative director on Visceral’s Star Wars game – explained how she analyses movies to see how their tropes and tricks can best be adapted to videogame.
Part of the challenge, she explained, is that their new game will feature entirely new characters, locations, tech, and creatures – but still needs to feel unmistakably like it’s set in that Galaxy far, far away.
As such, she’s been deconstructing the Star Wars films:
The process that I’ve been using is really similar to what I did with Uncharted, to be honest. If you’re trying to re-create that classic–in [Uncharted’s] case–pulp action adventure experience, you need to deconstruct the films so you know how to reconstruct them in an interactive context as gameplay.
The end goal for Hennig is for us to feel like we’ve just played through a Star Wars film by the time the credits roll, in the same way that finishing Uncharted felt like getting to the end of a (long, interactive) film.
Frustratingly, the game remains shrouded in mystery, but Hennig did reveal that it’s tonally similar to Uncharted, in that there’s plenty of action, but it’s still a relatively light-hearted affair.
She explained:
It’s what my writing partner Todd [Stashwick] calls breezy urgency. It’s the idea that there’s sort of a swash-buckling charm to the thing. There’s humor and buoyancy but at the same time there’s stakes and jeopardy.
Hennig also revealed that, much like the films, the new Star Wars game will feature an ensemble cast:
Part of our deconstruction is to figure out how we enable that in the story and honor it in the gameplay as well. It’s not a lone-wolf story because that’s not Star Wars. Your characters have to be a coordinated ensemble acting in the moment and in parallel. If you think about the film and the Death Star, they only escape because everybody does their part in parallel.
The general consensus is that Visceral’s project will be a third person action game (again, like Uncharted) but nothing has actually been confirmed yet.
Whatever it is, Visceral’s game will be released sometime in 2018, while EA works with a number of external studios – including Respawn, BioWare, and DICE – on multiple Star Wars projects.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.