A dead studio just left behind footage of a Star Wars looter shooter starring a Jedi and a Mandalorian, and the internet has not recovered.
Echtra Games, now shuttered, was building a multiplayer ARPG with “shoot & loot” gameplay set in the galaxy far, far away. Assets from development surfaced after the studio closed. What’s visible of it looks genuinely impressive.
The one Mandalorian spin-off nobody knew existed
Here’s the strange part. The Mandalorian was a shot in the arm for a franchise that’s spent recent years struggling to find its identity. It didn’t carry that momentum flawlessly through its run, but it was widely seen as a fun outing that proved original stories in this universe still have room to breathe.
We got the feature-length movie adaptation. What we didn’t get, oddly, was a flood of spin-offs and new releases riding the show’s popularity during those early, heady days when the appetite was at its peak.
Turns out one almost happened. And it could easily have been the most interesting of the bunch.
Reddit went in, and then went quiet
The reaction was about what you’d expect from a fanbase that has learned to grieve on schedule. Fans dissected the project’s potential on Reddit, and the mood ranged from wounded to furious.
“I was fully prepared to be underwhelmed by this Magellan footage as Reddit usually gets too clouded by emotion claiming every canceled game could’ve been a gem… and wow, people weren’t kidding. The gameplay slice is simply insane. Game seemed to be in quite an advanced state of development as well.
“This had the bones to become a classic sub franchise like the Force Unleashed games. Made by the Torchlight creator (and Diablo co-creator) still,” one comment read.
That last detail is the one that stings. The pedigree was there.
What fans wanted it to be
Others started drafting the game they’d rather have. “This saying it has multiplayer could have been interesting. What they should do is make something like Destiny, a semi-MMO looter shooter. There’s a huge hole now for the kind of game and I think Star Wars would fit pretty well into it,” another added.
A third went further back into the archive: “I would kill for another good game in the vein of Bounty Hunter. Have beautiful hand-crafted levels that you run through and try to kill or capture as many high-value targets as possible. Could even make it open world and have it basically be Star Wars: Shadow of Mordor.”
You can hear the specificity in those posts. These aren’t people asking for anything. They know exactly what they want and roughly when they stopped getting it.
The next one on the chopping block
There is a floor to the despair, at least. Plenty of Star Wars projects are coming down the pipeline, and there are enough of them that it’s unlikely they’ll all be canceled.
The one in the most jeopardy right now is Quantic Dream’s Eclipse, which has been very quiet since it was announced several years ago. Quiet in this business rarely means calm.
Forty-nine years of this
George Lucas started Star Wars in 1977. After Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope arrived (originally just titled Star Wars), the franchise exploded into sequels, prequels, TV shows, video games, comics and more. Disney bought the rights and moved fast on Disney+, and the first thing they built there was The Mandalorian.
Which is how you end up here: a show that saved the brand, a studio that’s gone, and a few minutes of footage of a Jedi and a Mandalorian shooting their way through a game nobody gets to play.
