Open-World Star Wars Game in the Works at EA

When EA shut down Visceral Games last year while they were in the middle of developing what looked [...]

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When EA shut down Visceral Games last year while they were in the middle of developing what looked to be a stunning narrative-driven story game, fans of the galaxy far, far away were sad to see the story shift into Limbo. When EA announced that they were "restructuring" what was there into an online game because players "don't want" single-player, linear storylines ... well, things got messy. At least now, for those still holding out hope, we have a small status update on their plans for the unfinished game: an open-world title with "online features."

The update wasn't in some extravagant blog post, it was actually discovered in the career portion of their website. A new job posting has just been listed looking for a Lead Online Engineer to deliver "online features for a Star Wars open-world project." The job itself is based out of their Vancouver studio and boasts both single-player and online play.

Unfortunately, rebels, that's all we know so far. We know that the original title, the one that Visceral Games was hard at work on, was a "story-based, linear adventure game" that had many star-gazing hopefuls excited. Sure there is Star Wars Battlefront II, but online multiplayer isn't for everyone. Though the latest Battlefront did have an incredibly enjoyable single-player campaign, it was short-lived given that MP is the main focus for that franchise.

EA was very honest about gutting the Visceral project. There was so much done, of course it would be a waste to just toss it out as a whole. Instead, the major publisher is picking the parts they want and restructuring it within an online frame. This online open-world title fits that bill perfectly.

Thankfully, the Titanfall studio is also working on a story-focused Star Wars title, so space faring fans hopefully have a good few years ahead of them in the gaming-verse.

Interested in applying for the aforementioned job listing? You can check out the requirements and how to list yourself as a candidate right here.

Key Responsibilities
• Manage a team of Engineers to achieve the product goals using agile development methodologies
• Architect and write code in C++ for game systems in the Online domain
• Work with designers to understand requirements and plan out functional requirements
• Collaborate with other Software Engineers and Team Leads in developing recommendations to improve quality control and team productivity
• Design and develop new content creation tools, workflow tools and general productivity tools
• Implement and debug segments of new and existing code for online technology
• Work with Networking teams on client and server gameplay to ensure designs will maintain high-traffic services for multi-platform games
• Iterate, design, and implement improvements to live systems and workflows
• Identify bottlenecks and performance issues involving cpu time and bandwidth and optimize them.
• Provide solutions that take into account network latency, de-synchronization of data between networked machines/players, packet compression, cheating and interrupted connections.

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