Visceral Games' Amy Hennig shared some new details about the developer's upcoming Star Wars game.
During Star Wars Celebration 2016, creative director Amy Hennig took the stage to discuss Visceral Games' upcoming Star Wars action-adventure game. While she didn't reveal any concrete details about the game, which is being kept under wraps at Electronic Arts, Hennig did describe the process of making the game. She also brought some concept art for the game, which you can see below.
When discussing the writing, Hennig said that she was focused on catching the "humor and bouyancy" of a Star Wars tale in the game's script. She also wants to make sure the story has stakes.
Said Hennig, "It means getting the tone right. It's what my writing partner Todd [Stashwick] calls breezy urgency. It's the idea that there's sort of a swash-buckling charm to the thing. There's humor and buoyancy but at the same time there's stakes and jeopardy."
Hennig discussed the creative process behind the untitled Star Wars game:
The reason [we're collaborating with Lucasfilm so closely is] we're writing an originalStar Wars story with new characters, locations, tech, creatures, you name it. All of it has to sit authentically alongside the stuff people know now.
The process that I've been using is really similar to what I did with Uncharted, to be honest. If you're trying to re-create that classic—in [Uncharted's] case—pulp action adventure experience, you need to deconstruct the films so you know how to reconstruct them in an interactive context as gameplay.
The end goal is by the time the player has finished playing they feel like they really did play a Star Wars film. So I've done the same thing for Star Wars. What does that mean? It's getting the structure right. It means you have to understand where the act breaks fall, where all the obstacles and reversals fall, and the set-pieces. [You need to know] what are all the component parts that make up a Star Wars story.
Hennig also teased that the game could have an ensemble cast, keeping with Star Wars story tradition:
What I was really eager to discover is what distinguished Star Wars films from the others I'd been studying in the action adventure genre. The first thing that jumped out was these are always ensemble stories ... People would say there's other characters in something like Indiana Jones, but they're side characters. In Star Wars, they're co-protagonists, so if you think about the original trilogy it's as much Leia's, Han's, and Vader's story as it is Luke's.
Think about Star Wars Rebels, that tradition continues now. Think about Rogue One, it's the same thing, and the same thing is true of our game. Part of our deconstruction is to figure out how we enable that in the story and honor it in the gameplay as well. It's not a lone-wolf story because that's not Star Wars. Your characters have to be a coordinated ensemble acting in the moment and in parallel. If you think about the film and the Death Star, they only escape because everybody does their part in parallel.
[Characters are] always outnumbered and outgunned, so they have to be smarter than their enemies, more improvisational, and work together. The challenge for us is to figure out how we enable that in gameplay so that the player really feels that experience, so that it's not just part of the story but also the gameplay. That's why you deconstruct and reconstruct.
The mystery game has been the subject of much speculation. Since Hennig's hiring after her departure from Naughty Dog, it's been speculated that Visceral's game would follow in the tradition of third-person action-adventure games such as Uncharted. Some rumors suggest that the game might be open-world. Nothing concrete has yet been shared about the game, though.
Electronic Arts showed a few seconds of footage from the game during its EA PLAY presentation at E3 2016. The footage wasn't exceptionally revealing, but it did tease that the game would take place during the era of the Empire.
