Since Star Wars Eclipse was first revealed two years ago, we’ve seen and heard little about the next game from Quantic Dream, the developer behind Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human. However, the devs behind the game have revealed that as in the studio’s previous adventures, Eclipse’s storyline will continue no matter which characters die, a quality which hasn’t been seen in any other Star Wars game to date.
We first confirmed Star Wars Eclipse was in development in September 2021, before its official reveal at The Game Awards that December. Eclipse is set in the franchise’s High Republic era, a time hundreds of years before Anakin Skywalker and Han Solo. It’s a golden age for the Jedi and the republic it defends, and a vastly different time than the period covered in the films and TV shows.
And unlike past Quantic Dream games—which were narrative driven, QTE-filled adventure affairs—Star Wars Eclipse is set to be an action game. Even so, the studio confirmed that the DNA of its more contemplative back catalog will remain evident in Eclipse, too.
No matter what happens, this Star Wars story moves forward
Lisa Pendse, vice president of marketing for Quantic Dream, told IGN during a recent interview at the Tokyo Game Show that while the studio wants people to know this is an action-adventure game, it will still have “all of the elements that you would come to expect and want from a Quantic Dream title,” including “intricately branching narratives” and the ability to play as different characters. Another key element is that no matter how badly you screw up or who dies, the game’s story will keep on chugging.
“There’s no game over,” said Pendse. “Anyone can die, anything can happen and the story sort of continues so that those signatures are still there.”
As mentioned, this has been the case in past games from the studio. For example, in Beyond: Two Souls, there were parts of the game where you had to escape the police, like while onboard a train. If you screwed that up, you would get caught and the story would change as you had to escape from a different scenario featuring different characters.
What’s interesting to me, as a Star Wars nerd, is that this amount of freedom isn’t something we commonly see in Star Wars games. Sure some have had alternate endings, but outside of the Knights of the Old Republic RPGs, most Star Wars games don’t let you screw things up too much. I’ll be curious to see how the Star Wars community handles this level of freedom in places like Wookieepedia. The perpetual fan question of “What is canon?” will be trickier to answer in a game like Eclipse, and I find that exciting.
Meanwhile, in other Quantic Dream news, the studio has spent the last few years battling some of the former employees involved in a series of 2018 reports accusing the studio of being a terrible place to work.
The report also detailed sexist and racist jokes, and lots of extended crunch. Quantic Dream denied the reports and later sued the publications reporting on the accusations and some former employees in a series of court battles, some of which have ended conclusively.
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