In a market that's already crowded with Star Wars games, Quantic Dream's Star Wars Eclipse might offer a refreshing change of pace. The developer, probably most well-known for the investigative adventure game Heavy Rain and the futuristic title Detroit: Become Human, announced its upcoming Star Wars entry during The Game Awards 2021. Like many of the developer's previous releases, Star Wars Eclipse will apparently feature a branching narrative that can be experienced through a number of different playable characters.
Not much else is known about the upcoming game, but it's likely to be many years away at this point. Naturally, fans have been desperate to fill in the gaps with their own assumptions, speculations, and hopes for the mysterious Star Wars Eclipse, but it will probably be awhile before any of them are confirmed or substantiated. From what players do know about Star Wars Eclipse, it seems as if the game will be moving in several interesting directions, including featuring the High Republic for the first time ever in a video game. This underused setting should definitely be utilized more in Star Wars content, and a game with the same setting released in the interim while fans wait for Star Wars Eclipse could be perfect.
Star Wars Eclipse's Setting
Lucasfilm Games and Quantic Dream have said that Star Wars Eclipse will focus on an original story with a unique cast of characters, and will explore a brand-new High Republic setting. The game will also feature areas of the galaxy's Outer Rim, as gamers work through the selection of playable characters to weave together a narrative and achieve a balanced peace. Like previous Quantic Dream titles, Star Wars Eclipse's story can be approached in a few different ways, giving players not only choice but also freedom as they navigate this underutilized Era.
One of the most interesting aspects of this setting is that it is considered to be the golden era of the Jedi. Although players have seen the Jedi in various degrees of prominence, most Star Wars content focuses on the devastation of Order 66 and the aftermath as only a handful of Jedi survive in the galaxy for decades afterwards. In the Prequel Trilogy, audiences get a glimpse of what the galaxy looks like with the Jedi in a position of power, but already the cracks are showing in their power base as corruption and arrogance seeps in. It will be fascinating to see this side to Star Wars canon, where the Jedi that fans think they know might operate in very different ways to what they're used to seeing.
Exploring A Different Era
Star Wars canon is incredibly vast – almost more so than any other fictional universe in the world – but a lot of the storytelling content released in films, TV shows, books, comics, and video games tends to focus on quite a narrow slice of history. There are of course a few exceptions, but the majority tends to retell the same few decades from different perspectives and in different parts of the galaxy, rather than explore some of the more distant areas of the timeline. Fans know that the films have had a single-minded fixation on the Skywalker family, and while this has yielded some of the most popular movies in modern times, it also leaves a lot of other narrative possibilities behind.
Some games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic have successfully explored very different eras to the ones that players and audiences are more used to, and have shown the Star Wars universe thousands of years before Darth Vader ever donned his helmet or Han Solo got behind the controls of the Millennium Falcon. BioWare's RPG received critical acclaim and has been a firm favorite with fans ever since its release in 2003, but it's easy to see why developers might prefer to stay in the safer and more familiar areas of Star Wars' impressively long timeline. However, this is also why a game set within the High Republic Era could work so well.
Although it's not necessarily a period of time that all fans will be familiar with, there are plenty of elements that they'll know, like the Galactic Republic and the Jedi, and it's only a few hundred years removed from the more popular periods. As the trailer for Star Wars Eclipse already showed, it looks like there will be both familiar locations and characters featured, which provides some useful touchstones for any new story to build upon. This mixture of familiar and new could be ideal, and allows the story to take risks and tread new ground while not being too alien to audiences.
How A New Game Could Fit In
While it's true that the High Republic Era already has many aspects that fans will already know, it's also a vast period that offers a variety of new narrative possibilities. Star Wars is an IP that is undeniably creative, unique, and compelling, so it can be a little disappointing when the stories tend to flock around the same points in time instead of branching out. Star Wars video games have covered a number of different genres, but like other content from the sci-fi behemoth, they usually stick to similar eras with only a handful of exceptions. Players would love to see more games that break this mold and show off other timelines and eras, just like Star Wars Eclipse.
The upcoming game has generated a lot of buzz and has fans speculating about what kind of characters they'll be able to play as and what new sides to the Star Wars world they'll be able to experience. But with its release still many years away, there's space for other games to fill in the gap.With the High Republic Era being a newcomer to the gaming sphere, there's plenty of scope for other, potentially less ambitious titles to tide players over until the release of Star Wars Eclipse.
Star Wars Eclipse is currently in early development.