So my friends, Star Wars, the franchise that has a warm place in many a nostalgic Sci-Fi nerd’s heart, has been gobbled up by the Disney Corporation and spat out for EA Games to play with. Yes, the “Worst Company In America” for 2 years running has taken on the reigns for turning the beloved franchise featuring that gold bikini, into what will probably be a hundred games in the next two years built on the spangly new Frostbite 3 engine.
If there aren’t Guns… Put Em In!
I have a feeling there will be a considerable amount of Star Wars games that will focus less on the characters, the rich stories that can be tapped from the equivalent of thousands of years of fictitious history and the fun that embodies Star Wars and more on the “PEW! PEW!” side of it. Don’t get me wrong, Star Wars: Battlefront 3 would be great to finally have released, but there should be more than those types of games. Will EA notice this, listen to the fanbase and react accordingly? No. It is all in the money. Take Dead Space, the brilliant horror game that completely blew all of its competition out of the scene. In comes EA, sprouting that the game didn’t do well enough for them and to make it more on the action, set-piece heavy sequences. “Yes that’ll do nicely” is what I can hear executives saying when they see the numbers and not the fans’ reactions. Will the same thing happen with Star Wars? Quite probably.
IT’S A TRAP!
Oh, you want access to that final lightsaber that will make you the best Jedi/Sith in the universe? Either complete the game or, for a small fee, get it in the first level and unbalance the game… ahem, we mean the force
So here is the basis of a conversation between me and a friend yesterday after the announcement: “$20 for a new lightsaber DLC” followed by “$5 to shut Jar Jar Binks up for an hour”, “$10 for captions for R2D2″, “$5 for a pet Ewok” and “$10 for princess Leia costume.” You get the idea. EA love the microtransactions and unnecessary downloadable content. Obviously EA are not the only one who use them as almost all publishers and developers use them nowadays, but EA seems to love them. Love them with a passion. I for one do not want my beloved Star Wars games to be ruined by needing to pay to get ahead. Thankfully there will be no mobile games available for the publisher to shoehorn in the microtransactions but will that really stop them on the consoles? Look at Dead Space 3, if you couldn’t craft your super awesome weapon… Why not spend your lovely cash that you earned on materials to build it?
Truly, this is a troubling time for the galaxy, EA taking the license for Star Wars games and trade routes around Naboo are being controlled by the Trade Federation. What will we do?
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