Visceral’s Star Wars game is aiming for ‘swash-buckling charm’

The creative director of EA and Visceral Games’ Star Wars action title has likened it to the Uncharted series.

Amy Hennig, who previously worked on the Uncharted series, offered some insight into the project at a panel at this weekend’s Star Wars Celebration, as reported by GameSpot.

"The process that I’ve been using is really similar to what I did with Uncharted, to be honest,” she said. If you’re trying to re-create that classic pulp action adventure experience, you need to deconstruct the films so you know how to reconstruct them in an interactive context as gameplay.

"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 humour and buoyancy but at the same time there’s stakes and jeopardy."

Hennig explained that as well as staying loyal to the Star Wars franchise, she wants the game to stand on its own merits and have its own identity. Therefore lots of work is being put into creating new designs to give Visceral’s Star Wars a feel of its own that sits comfortably alongside the existing universe.

"The end goal is by the time the player has finished playing they feel like they really did play a Star Wars film,” she added. 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.

"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.”

Her conclusion? Ensemble casts, for a start. Whether you’re talking Luke, Han and Vader or Rey, Fin and Poe, the Star Wars films always have co-protagonists. These are not lone wolf” stories. The challenge, therefore, is making this design, with numerous players working towards a common goal, pay off in a gameplay sense.