EA’s Next Star Wars Games from Visceral and Respawn Teased

As we approach the 2016 Electronic Entertainment Expo, EA has it’s first EA Play event with Star Wars being a huge selling point.

Ahead of the 2016 E3 conference, EA hosted their first EA Play event. Instead of having a booth on the showfloor, EA made the decision to host a separate event nearby in downtown Los Angeles, followed by their signature press conference followed by the opening of the EA Play show, a dedicated space for both fans and journalists to look at the upcoming projects from EA Games, and Star Wars had a huge presence there.

At the press conference, it was business as usual despite the location and day change, with announcements, trailers, and special guests galore. After Star Wars: Battlefront kicked off EA’s 10 year exclusive license partnership with Lucasfilm with solid sales (but its share of criticism), anticipation has been incredibly high for the next Star Wars games. Being developed by an all-star team, with Uncharted‘s Amy Hennig as creative director and writer/actor Todd Stashwick working on the story with her, Jade Raymond, Scott Warner, and more have been hired onto the Visceral Games and Motive Studios project. Now we have our first-ever tease of the game, which until today we’ve only known is some kind of action-adventure title.

The new game wasn’t given a title yet, but the first concept art and a tiny snippet of game footage was shown (featured in the image above). The concept art showed what looked like an organized gang and a group of smugglers facing off against each other. What looks like Original Trilogy-era iconography was also shown, the first hint at when this game takes place. Earlier at the press conference, they confirmed that the characters central to the game’s story will be all-new. In the footage, a character that at least from behind bears more than a passing resemblance to Stashwick with a long jacket on walked out into an outpost of some sort, where Imperial banners hung, a Star Destroyer was in the far background, and TIE fighters flew by.

Another new game, the recently announced action-adventure game from Respawn Entertainment also got some new teases. Raymond teased on stage during the press conference that the game would be in “a new era for Star Wars.” While no concept art or footage was shown, they did show two stunt men in motion capture suits staging a lightsaber battle. With some special effects juice at the end, they added that those two sabers are blue and red.

Finally, BioWare’s James Ohlen teased during the conference that “outside of The Old Republic we have so many more stories to tell,” implying that BioWare is working on both new content for the MMO and other story concepts or games. All in all, there is a lot to look forward to for Star Wars fans in the gaming world.