EA developing open-world Star Wars game

EA Canada is developing an open-world Star Wars game. That's according to several job advertisements spotted by Superannuation at Kotaku today. It would be the second major open-world Star Wars game, following MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic.

An animation director job posting from October says EA Canada is developing a "major new next-gen open-world action game." What's more, a former recruiter for EA Canada tweeted a link to a combat designer job, mentioning that the position was for a Star Wars project.

EA Canada is now the third EA-owned outfit known to be working on Star Wars games as part of the publisher's ten-year deal with Disney. DICE is working on an all-new Star Wars Battlefront for Xbox One and PlayStation 4, while the project from Dead Space studio Visceral Games, described as a "core" game, remains officially unannounced.

It is possible that EA Canada's open-world Star Wars game is the same title in development at Visceral Games, as the animation director job ad calls for a person with "mutli-site development" experience. What's more, few AAA games today are developed by one studio alone. In the case of Grand Theft Auto V, Rockstar put more than 1,000 developers to work on the open-world game from its network of studios.

To date, Star Wars games from EA and other publishers have spanned numerous genres, but the open-world space has been mostly untouched, outside of MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic, though it has not been for lack of effort. Star Wars 1313 was reportedly designed as an open-world game at one point, while Just Cause developer Avalanche Studios said this year that it nearly struck a deal to make an open-world Star Wars game.