It doesn’t matter that Star Wars Eclipse will be bad…
So The Game Awards aired the past Thursday, and as expected there were plenty of big reveals and a bunch of awards no one really cares about. The most controversial moment of the entire evening may in fact been the unveiling of the strongly rumored in-development Star Wars game by developer Quantic Dream, Star Wars Eclipse. We don’t know a ton besides that the game is very early in development, as in several years away, and set in the “High Republic” era that has been explored in recent comics and novels, but this would be the first videogame set during that period that’s been announced (Ubisoft also has a game in development but beyond its announcement, we don’t know much else about the title).
And it’s likely that it will be a pretty bad game, just given Quantic Dream’s track record. Indigo Prophecy, Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls & Detroit: Become Human are all pretty terrible games. They have high production values for the time but the writing and acting, which is really all these games have going for them because they are narrative games with little to no action, is at best on the level of enjoyable trash.
And if David Cage at least was sort of aware he’s at best an enjoyable trash writer, that might be fine, but David Cage thinks he’s a goddamn visionary, ultimately convinced of his brilliance no matter the evidence otherwise, and also often thinks all his themes ideas are subtle and original when they’ve been done a thousand times before and better. Detroit: Too Human was a clear race allegory, but Cage claimed it was only a game about androids with no particular message and that it was like Blade Runner if you were meant to sympathize with the replicants.
Honestly though, whether or not Star Wars Eclipse will be any good or not isn’t the real problem here. Star Wars has tons of awful media attached to it. There’s a long legacy of pretty atrocious or at best fairly mediocre movies, books, comics, TV shows, and especially video games. Overall there’s a lot more bad Star Wars media out there than good. It ultimately doesn’t matter that much if Star Wars Eclipse is a good game.
What does matter is that a studio known for years to have a toxic person at the head of it who is on record as a misogynistic abusive homophobe and the company itself being a pretty toxic environment as well has been handed the keys to one of the biggest media franchises to play in, and frankly that almost feels like a reward for years of bad behavior. That’s the real issue here.
The best thing I can say about this is that obviously a studio that does the type of games Quantic Dream does is not the kind you typically associate with Star Wars, which shows a willingness by Disney to think outside the box with their properties, however there’s a ton of developers that aren’t Electronic Arts or Ubisoft or Square Enix or any of the other really big players in the video game space that not only would be better more interesting choices in terms of thinking outside the box but don’t have this well-documented history of abuse and pretty awful statements by the guy who runs the company.
The odds are that Star Wars Eclipse will just be another bad Star Wars game in a long history of mostly bad Star Wars games, but Disney had made a very poor choice in letting a place with the well-established history and reputation of not just David Cage but Quantic Dream in general and while it’s incredibly unrealistic to think Disney will just pull out of the partnership and the game will never see the light of day unless it just never really comes together, I can realistically hope it’s a choice they won’t make too often if ever again in the future.
That’s all for today, I will certainly have at least one blog post next week though that might be it for December depending on certain things. See ya real soon!
