EA has shared a hopeful note on Twitter after its highly publicized breakup with Lucasfilm Games.
Everyone, please keep Electronic Arts in your thoughts this week as it’s going through a tough time. (Who isn’t in 2021, the spiritual successor to 2020?) Just this week, it was revealed that Lucasfilm was seeing other gaming companies after being exclusive with EA for nearly eight years. That’s a long time in relationship years, and we know it must be difficult when a breakup of the sort happens.
Here’s a timeline of the events: The cracks in the relationship began to show on Monday when Lucasfilm announced that all video games would now be produced under the Lucasfilm Games banner. On Tuesday, Lucasfilm Games then announced that it’d be partnering with Bethesda to make an Indiana Jones video game. And then, the salt in the wound came with Wednesday’s news that Ubisoft would be creating an open-world Star Wars game for the company.
It was a slow-moving trainwreck, and as Wired reports, the EA deal was supposedly set to last for 10 years through, 2023. But as we see, they called it quits early. In response to the breakup, EA wanted to share that they were still friends with Lucasfilm Games, having nothing but good things to say about their ex in a tweet shared on Wednesday.
✅ We love Star Wars.
— Electronic Arts (@EA) January 13, 2021
✅ We look forward to continuing our partnership with Lucasfilm Games.
✅ We’re making more Star Wars games.
✅ BD-1 is still the cutest.
EA and Star Wars: Trouble in paradise?
The honeymoon phase for this partnership seemed to be well over a long time ago, though. Over the course of their relationship, EA put out games like Star Wars Battlefront I and II, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and Star Wars: Squadrons. But controversy mainly rocked EA when the loot box scandal broke out in 2018. Add that to other criticisms about EA (even with games like The Sims 4 and The Sims 4’s Star Wars expansion pack), and it wasn’t always a match made in heaven.
One person on Twitter clearly laid out some of the frustrations Star Wars fans had with the EA pairing.
https://twitter.com/wcdgemini/status/1349387996982861826?s=20
That being said, games like Jedi: Fallen Order and even Squadrons have been well-received by fans. But it still looks like fans are itching for something new in the world of Star Wars gaming.
This, of course, all depends on the efforts of the other gaming studios. Bethesda is known for creating games with remarkable stories, but titles like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls have been plagued with Cyberpunk 2077-levels of bugs and glitches. Ubisoft’s Massive Entertainment studio, on the other hand, has had a few projects like Far Cry 3 and Tom Clancy’s The Division 1 and 2. So it’s possible this new game will work out on their end.
Overall, it’s a new era of Star Wars gaming and hopefully, many good things are in store for the future.
For more Star Wars gaming news, keep up with the Star Wars Video Games category on Dork Side of the Force.