‘The Division 3’ In Doubt As Disney Gives Massive A ‘Star Wars’ Game

The Division 2, hitting a little close to home

Massive

When Disney announced they were forming Lucasfilm Games for future Star Wars projects this week, that led to an obvious question. Who will be making those games? But rather than assemble their own studio from scratch, it appears Disney is content to keep farming out Star Wars to existing publishers, and they are expanding past their previously exclusive EA deal to include Ubisoft.

The news today (via Wired) is that Massive, the developer owned by Ubisoft and the force behind The Division series, is being given a new Star Wars game led by Division series head Julian Gerighty. We know next to nothing about the game besides this, other than it’s in early stages and may be open world (I mean it’s Ubisoft, so duh).

But before this, when considering Massive’s next moves, the question was whether they were going to make The Division 3, and what the status of their long fabled Avatar game was. Now this new Star Wars project puts both of those in doubt, at least for the time being.

The news

Massive

The Division 3 always seemed unlikely for a host of reasons, some of which have only been amplified recently:

The Division 2 was never a smash hit for Ubisoft and was said to underperform sales expectations near launch. It’s unclear how many copies it’s sold to date, and if that’s been good enough for Ubisoft or not, but we’ve never heard them bragging about sales, despite better reviews than the first game.

The general appetite for live service loot shooters that aren’t named Destiny or Warframe is starting to wane with so many high profile misses like Anthem, Avengers and Godfall. Yes, The Division navigated this space better than most, but continuing down this rocky road may not be the best use of Massive’s talent.

There’s also the fact that the actual plot of The Division series seems a little on the nose right now, the breakdown of US society into factions of militarized gangs and vigilantes in the wake of a deadly pandemic. If there has been any piece of media more prescient for our current situation in the US, I’m not sure what that would be.

The Division 2

Massive

As for the Avatar game? I mean, who knows. Those movies have been delayed so many times at this point it’s hard to believe they exist, and even though there was a “seriously, they’re happening” push in the last year or two, whatever was going on there has now likely been derailed by the pandemic shutting down the global box office. This is supposed to be a game they’ve been working on for a while, so maybe it will still materialize, but we’ve heard quite literally nothing about it all this time.

I’m not going to say it’s impossible for Massive to work on both a Star Wars game and either The Division 3 or an Avatar game, but certainly not both of those, and Star Wars has to be the priority in any case. So if Avatar is already in the works and Star Wars is on the table now, I feel like that’s goodbye to The Division 3 (which has not been announced or really, even hinted at).

As for what type of game this will be? I mean the obvious guess is that if we’re talking about an open world Star Wars game that plays to Massive’s strengths, this seems like it could be a third person shooter rather than something that has us controlling Jedi and their lightsabers. And given Massive’s use of gadgets and tools in battles in The Division, I’m definitely picturing a game with the potential to have us controlling a bounty hunter. Maybe The Mandalorian, maybe Boba Fett, maybe neither, but that would make the most sense to me given what we’ve seen from Massive for most of the last decade. Not to say they can’t pivot (I would not have expected Respawn to go from FPS action to third person Jedi combat with Fallen Order), but it’s just a guess.

More info to come, but probably not for a while. If this “breaks” the 10 year EA deal that was set to expire in 2023, my guess is that this game isn’t coming until 2023 anyway, based on how early stages it appears to be.

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