Highlights
- The rise of multiverse stories in mainstream entertainment has made the concept of "What If" stories more popular, leading to the possibility of a Star Wars What If game.
- The Walking Dead: Destinies offers a blueprint for a potential Star Wars What If game, allowing players to alter the series' canon and make different choices at pivotal moments.
- Although there have been previous Star Wars What If spin-offs, a Star Wars What If game has the potential to provide endless possibilities and explore different outcomes within the Star Wars universe.
The concept of "What If" stories has been around the comic book industry for a good few decades now, with Marvel's own What If? comic series starting in 1977, and DC's Elseworlds series beginning in 1989, but they've only just started to get popular in the mainstream pretty recently. Thanks to the rise in popularity of multiverse stories, the What If concept has started to become more of a common theme in the wider entertainment industry, and it's only a matter of time before it becomes a prevalent part of the video game landscape, where Star Wars should be leading the charge.
The canon Star Wars timeline has fluctuated a few times in the past, but ever since the Disney acquisition back in 2012, things have remained pretty constant. But while it's great to have a clear timeline of canon events, especially for a universe as vast as Star Wars, it's also fun to occasionally break that canon and ask What If? And with The Walking Dead: Destinies potentially about to set a blueprint, it might be time for a Star Wars What If game.
Star Wars Should Follow in The Walking Dead: Destinies' Footsteps
Set to release on November 14, The Walking Dead: Destinies is a third-person shooter that puts players in the boots of Rick Grimes as he makes his way through the first four seasons of the Walking Dead AMC show. The big hook of Walking Dead: Destinies, however, is that players can alter the series' canon. When players reach pivotal moments in the Walking Dead storyline, they can either choose to stick with the canon, or divert, and choose a What If-style alternative that sees different characters die and presumably a number of alterations to subsequent story events.
This sounds like a pretty great blueprint for a potential Star Wars What If game. Much like The Walking Dead: Destinies, fans could play through the events of the Star Wars saga, or even just the original trilogy, and choose to mess with the canon timeline at key moments. Each of these decisions should then greatly impact the story moving forward, just as they would in any other choice-driven game such as those from Quantic Dream.
This wouldn't be the first time that the Star Wars universe has had its own What If spin-off, but it wouldn't take much to be the best. Back in the early 2000s, Dark Horse published a series of Star Wars comics titled Star Wars: Infinities. Broken into three separate parts, these comics put a What If spin on the original Star Wars trilogy, with each part seeing a different change occur, some of which lead to some truly absurd outcomes. Star Wars: Infinities' New Hope storyline sees Luke Skywalker fail to blow up the Death Star, which leads to Leia becoming a Sith, and Yoda eventually crashing the space station into the Imperial Palace on Coruscant. Empire Strikes Back sees Luke die on Hoth, and Leia becoming a Jedi in his place. And Return of the Jedi has C3PO simply fall over in Jabba's Palace, which somehow leads to Darth Vader turning to good at the end and wearing a white version of his iconic outfit.
Though Star Wars: Infinities wasn't all that great, the concept of a Star Wars What If story is still incredibly exciting With there being more Star Wars media than ever before, there's almost limitless potential for What If outcomes. A Star Wars What If game could see Ahsoka staying with the Jedi Order and fighting alongside Anakin and Obi-Wan in Revenge of the Sith, or see what would happen if Kylo Ren didn't kill Han Solo in Force Awakens but instead turned to the light, and that's really just scratching the surface.