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Earlier this year, Frontier Developments (Planet Coaster, Elite: Dangerous) announced that its next project would be based on a film franchise, and the first hints of what that game will entail have emerged.
Although the identity of that project remains unconfirmed, Frontier Developments’s CEO, David Braben, recently assured Glixel that the new IP will release in 2018 with the first concrete details being revealed later this year. Despite refusing to release any certain information about the project, Braben did say that the franchise is “a biggie,” while his comments about games in general suggest the direction it will take.
Braben said that a strictly linear narrative fails to make “full use of the [gaming] medium,” which is characterised by player agency. “The style of game was particularly common five or so years ago,” he said, “where you have a game like a film, and… you play through almost like the film,” with success and failure determined by how closely the player sticks to the script. According to Braben, the gaming industry, as a whole, “need[s] to slightly realign how [it] look[s] at story.”
The hints are vague, but suggest that the project will not be a straight adaptation, but rather a non-linear extension to an existing universe.
In addition to working on the new IP, the team at Frontier Developments continues to support its older projects, most recently incorporating the TRAPPIST-1 star system into Elite: Dangerous and a massive ‘Summer Update’ to Planet Coaster last month.
OnlySP will continue to follow Frontier Developments to uncover the identity of the studio’s next project, so be sure to bookmark the site and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr for all the latest.
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