Former Naughty Dog Game Director Amy Hennig was recently quoted as saying that the creative team Visceral Games has pulled together for its as-yet-untitled Star Wars game is the “perfect collision” of talent, though had things turned out differently, Hennig may have never been involved in the first place.
Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Hennig revealed that prior to enlisting for Visceral’s licensed game, she had considered parting ways with the AAA development scene.
I thought about doing something more small, independent. I thought about VR, more of a start-up kind of thing. But then Star Wars, right? When Star Wars comes calling, you say, ‘Yes sir.’ How do you turn that down, even with all the inherent challenges I knew there were going to be?
Alas, the sheer magnitude of Star Wars as an IP sealed Hennig’s fate. Appointed as Creative Director on the studio’s new release, there’s still an awful lot we don’t know about the game itself. Said to be stylized after the Uncharted series, early signs have indicated that it could be pirate themed.
And though Hennig had nothing more to reveal at such an early stage, she did outline some of the inspirations behind Visceral’s nebulous Star Wars title.
You want to fulfill the fantasy of being in a Star Wars film, and that means certain things. Without saying too much, there was a similar spirit to how we tackled Uncharted, the aspirational fantasy of a pulp action-adventure game, a movie like Indiana Jones.
You can deconstruct that and reconstruct it as structure, pacing, mechanics, sequences. And you can do the same thing with Star Wars. This sounds so cynical, but it’s not. You can derive the recipe for telling a Star Wars story from really studying the films and then reconstructing it in an interactive context.
For the fascinating full piece documenting both Amy Hennig and EA’s newly-appointed Jade Raymond’s experience in AAA development, you can check out GamesIndustry’s coverage.
[Source: GamesIndustry.biz]
