Star Wars: Squadrons will bring spaceship dogfights to October
Prepare to boldly go
EA today revealed Star Wars: Squadrons as a first-person spacehip dogfighting game, coming in October. It's set after Return of the Jedi, will let you fly both Rebel Alliance and Empire, and yes, it will have a singleplayer campaign as well as 5v5 multiplayer. Three pleasant surprises: it'll have cross-platformer multiplayer between PC and consoles; it'll support VR; and it will be on Steam at launch.
The singleplayer campaign will switch between goodie and baddie perspectives, with pilots in the New Republic's Vanguard Squadron and the Empire's Titan Squadron. On the multiplayer front, it'll offer 5v5 battles to smash the opposing flagship in Fleet Battles mode as well as team deathmatch in plain ol' Dogfights mode. Then it has persistent progression to unlock new weapons, hulls, engines, and shields, plus cosmetics.
EA say rewards and bonuses "are earned solely through gameplay" so they might have actually learned from Battlefront 2's loot box hell.
Star Wars: Squadrons is coming October 2nd to Steam and Origin at £35/€40/$40. See its website for more. It's also on Xbone and PS4.
EA plan to show more of Squadrons during their EA Play Live stream, which starts at 4pm Pacific on June 18th (that's just gone midnight for us in the UK).
Star Wars: Squadrons is being made by EA Motive, who previously worked on Star Wars: Battlefront 2's story campaign. Battlefrontlead devs Dice launched Battlefront 2's final multiplayer content update in April.
How rare to see another Star Wars game making it out. While games get cancelled before announcement all the time at big publishers, EA seem to have binned some high-profile Star Wars games after a fair stretch of development. They made a big deal of hiring Uncharted director Amy Hennig to lead a linear action-adventure game codenamed Ragtag, which got scrapped when EA closed developers Visceral Games. They handed the remains of Ragtag to EA Vancouver, who reportedly reused assets to make some sort of open-world game codenamed Orca - which was also cancelled. Kotaku reported that EA have since scrapped a Battlefront 2 spin-off too. Again, projects get scrapped for all sorts of reasons all the time, but it's wild that EA have held chuffing Star Wars for so long and done so little with it. Disney certainly haven't been cautious.
If you wish to boldly go where no man has gone before right now, see our best Star Wars games list for ten good'uns already out on PC. Yes, of course that includes ye olde 90s Tie Fighter game - which Rob Zacny says aged better than X-Wing.
Whatever you call it, hit our E3 2020 tag for more from this summer's blast of gaming announcements, trailers, and miscellaneous marketing. Check out the PC games at the PlayStation 5 show, everything at the PC Gaming Show, and all the trailers from the Xbox showcase, for starters.
