Yet another STAR WARS video game cancelled

The Star Wars franchise is in a really weird place right now. The movies are on hiatus (again), but the franchise is taking off on television. The pen-and-paper roleplaying game from Fantasy Flight has been canned despite good sales, but the current books and comics seem to be doing okay. Most puzzling has been the way that Electronic Arts has mishandled the video games licence since acquiring it seven years ago, with the news that an open-world spin-off from the Star Wars: Battlefront series has now been cancelled as well.

In May 2013, Electronic Arts announced that it had joined forces with Lucasfilm to develop a new generation of Star Wars video games. Previous games had been developed either by LucasArts (Lucasfilm's video games division) or in partnership between LucasArts and a host of talented third-party studios, including Totally Games, BioWare, Obsidian Entertainment, Pandemic Studios and Raven Software. These had included well-received titles including TIE Fighter, Knights of the Old Republic, Dark Forces, Jedi Academy and Republic Commando.

EA had worked closely with Lucasfilm and LucasArts on The Old Republic, a massively multiplayer game developed by EA's subsidiary BioWare and released in 2011. EA confidently believed their roster of talented subsidiary studios could release a plethora of high-quality Star Wars video games over the succeeding years. At first EA considered continuing the two Star Wars games in development at Lucasfilm, namely First Assault and 1313. The former was an online multiplayer shooter, whilst the latter was a story-focused action game set in Coruscant's criminal underworld. The former was feature-complete and beta-ready, whilst 1313 was starting to come together in a satisfying manner after several years of false starts.

Ultimately EA decided to bin both games and set their own studios to work. BioWare would continue to work on developing The Old Republic, with an eye to developing a new single-player game further down the line, possibly Knights of the Old Republic III. However, that idea never made it very far as BioWare's next several projects (Dragon Age: Inquisition, Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem) all hit hugely troubled development periods themselves.

Next up was Visceral Games, where a story-focused Star Wars heist game entered development under Uncharted producer Amy Hennig. Simultaneously, Respawn Entertainment was set to work on a story-focused Star Wars shooter/action game and DICE was to work on resurrecting the classic Star Wars Battlefront multiplayer series.

Visceral and Respawn developed their projects in tandem until late 2017, when Visceral was shut down and its Star Wars game abruptly cancelled. The assets from the game were moved to EA Vancouver to develop a brand new "open world" Star Wars game, possibly a reaction to the success of open world games like Skyrim, The Witcher III and Grand Theft Auto V. What exactly a Star Wars "open world" game would look like was rather unclear, but it sounds like it would have involved bounty hunters and space travel between several regions on several different planets. This new game was cancelled in turn in late 2018.

Respawn's project pivoted away from being a straight shooter to being a more general action game, which may have been the reason for Visceral's game being dropped (the two projects sounded more distinct at the start but then became more similar). Respawn's buy-out deal with EA was apparently very generous towards Respawn and granted the company a degree of self-autonomy which EA's other subsidiaries do not enjoy, explaining why the company got priority in this race. Respawn eventually released their game, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order last autumn to reasonably strong reviews.

EA Vancouver meanwhile set to work on a derivation of the Star Wars Battlefront series, potentially an open-world title which would have used the engine and systems of Battlefront but with a different focus, potentially similar to the relationship between the multiplayer Battlefield games and the single-player/coop-focused Bad Company and Hardline side-games. However, EA wanted the project for the release of the next-gen consoles in late 2020. When it became clear the game would miss that window, they cancelled it last year.

The result is that after seven years, five studios and untold hundreds of millions of dollars, precisely three games have actually been released: Battlefront (2015), Battlefront II (2017) and Fallen Order (2019). Avoiding total embarrassment, these games have sold very well: the Battlefront games have totalled over 24 million sales and Fallen Order has sold over 8 million copies in just two months on sale. But questions need to be asked about why so many promising games from talented developers have been canned and wrecked along the way.

Particularly interesting is the news that a Knights of the Old Republic reboot is in development at EA (but not with BioWare), along with a Fallen Order sequel at Respawn. The future roster of video games beyond that is doubtful at the moment, especially given that the EA deal reportedly expires in 2023, meaning that any game that started development right now is unlikely to be released before it expires.

MIRROR'S EDGE: CATALYST trailer

EA have released a gameplay trailer for Mirror's Edge: Catalyst, the forthcoming prequel to the excellent (if short) original game.

The new game will, like the first, see the player controlling lead character Faith, a free-runner able to scale (almost) any building, acrobatically jump between ledges and leap out of the way of danger. The developers have confirmed that this time Faith will not use any guns at all, instead preferring to run from danger or use her acrobatic skills instead to disable foes.

Mirror's Edge: Catalyst is due for release on 23 February 2016.

Mirror's Edge

In the future there is almost no crime. The City, a beautiful landscape of towering white buildings, is well-policed and life is pleasant. But this is only possible through a government which is totalitarian and repressive. There are those opposed to the way the City operates, from reformers working within the system (usually to no avail) to the Runners, free-running messengers and couriers working to unseat the regime. When an innocent cop is framed for the murder of a key reformer and the police declare war on the Runners, it falls to Faith Connors to fight the system and expose the truth.

Mirror's Edge is an interesting game developed by DICE, the creators of the perennially popular Battlefield series. After many years of making manly games about guns and explosions, DICE decided to change tack with a game that mixes puzzles and parkour (though there are still a few guns and the occasional explosion). The game can be summed up as Portal by way of Prince of Persia, mixing the environmental puzzles of the former with the athleticism of the latter.

The game's striking art aesthetic is the first thing that hits the player: the game strongly emphasises the colours white and red, sometimes glaringly so but mostly in a way that gives a feeling of high-tech isolation. The simple use of colour (the skies of the game are a particularly strong blue colour) gives the game a different feel to many other first-person games, which tend towards brown and grey. The high-tech feeling of the game also contrasts the dingy, gritty and dystopian feel of many other games. Playing Mirror's Edge is often a pleasure down to the sheer beauty of the art style.

Faith is fairly athletic and can run, jump, wall-run and cling onto ledges. She can also do a reverse-jump off surfaces to reach more inaccessible areas. Though played from the first person, Faith's arms and legs can be seen at all times, giving the player a strong sense of physical presence in the game. There is also a vivid sense of momentum and speed, with Faith needing to build up a fairly strong head of steam if she wants to clear a particularly large jump. The rooftop sequences are great, if occasionally a little too hamstrung by there being just one or sometimes two routes to your destination rather than being fully-open playgrounds. Combat is also satisfyingly physical: Faith can do flying kicks, punches and disarming manoeuvres (which also work as takedowns).

Gunplay is much more insipid. The developers seem to have included it very reluctantly out of a sense of realism: if Faith can disarm someone, why can't she just pick up the gun and use it? The problem is that gunplay, shooting at people across the large levels, feels like it goes against the ethos of the game. Some sort of character or plot-based reason why Faith refuses/cannot use firearms could have been introduced and led to be a more interesting game. As it stands, those moments when the game screeches to a halt as Faith has to shoot her way out of a lobby packed with bad guys feel like admissions of failure.

The game is at its best when Faith is running across rooftoops, jumping gaps, shimmying up the side of drainpipes, crashing through offices and out of the other side. These moments are frequent, but intercut by frustrating moments of the game screeching to a halt for some more tiresome combat, or lengthy sequences in railway tunnels where you have to move cautiously to avoid getting run over by trains.

The story is slight, but told well through some wonderfully-animated minimalist cut scenes. Superbly, the game isn't a 'bring down the system' story but something more realistic, with much more achievable objectives (expect the sequels - if there are any, as Mirror's Edge 2 sounds like it'll be a prequel instead - to go down more the path of overthrowing the government). The length - about six hours - is more of an issue, though there are also a number of time challenge maps which extend interest. Fortunately, the game is five years old now so it can be found pretty cheap.

Mirror's Edge (***½) is a small, curious game which packs in a huge amount of atmosphere. It often feels like the prototype for a much bigger and more interesting game (another comparison to the original Portal), but is certainly playable and fun in its own right. The game is let down by some compromised design decisions regarding combat, but its ambition elsewhere is laudable. The game is well worth a look, though its slightness means you shouldn't think of paying full price for it. The game is available now in the UK (PC, X-Box 360, PlayStation 3) and USA (PC, X-Box 360, PlayStation 3).