Quantic Dream has been having problems with the production of Star Wars Eclipse, despite an excellent launch trailer at The Game Awards 2021. The trailer’s main aim, according to insider Tom Henderson, was to attract talent for development, and it was still three to four years away from release. In a new report on XFire, insiders told Henderson that it hasn’t had the expected effect.
This suggests a release date of 2027 to 2028. The studio’s Jobs page lists 67 available opportunities, several of which are for its Paris studio and are fairly recent. Henderson discovered that the “Published on” date for some items was being manually modified using Archive.org — some of the listings are actually rather old. The post of Senior Level Designer at the Paris studio, for example, is advertised as having been announced on February 28th, 2022, yet it appears to have initially gone live on June 28th, 2021.
According to a report from December 2021, the game’s release date had been pushed back to 2026-2027, but ongoing staffing issues appear to have pushed it back even further. This story also included further information about the game’s current state, including the fact that it was originally conceived as an MMORPG that Sony rejected. Despite the fact that some assets were reused for Eclipse and it has already been in production for over 18 months, there was no playable build as of December and various basic difficulties with the multiplayer mode, according to reports.
At the 2021 Game Awards, a cinematic trailer for Star Wars Eclipse was released. It’s the first game set in the High Republic era, around 200 years before the events of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The events of the High Republic are already being explored in a series of interconnected books and comics, but no word on whether Eclipse will feature any of the Jedi or villains established in the books. The game is described as “a new action-adventure, multiple-character branching narrative game set in the classic Star Wars galaxy’s High Republic era,” according to a press release at the time.
This is being done in order to alleviate concerns about a shortage of fresh hires. As a result, the studio has had difficulty recruiting new talent in the wake of reports of poisonous workplace culture. It’s unclear how things will pan out in the following years, especially in light of other concerns such as the game’s breadth and engine limits.