This week brought bad news for anybody excited about Quantic Dream’s Star Wars game. A report from Insider Gaming quoted a source who said Star Wars: Eclipse was still “years off from completion.” That’s despite the game being announced almost four and a half years ago, in December 2021. It’s been known that Eclipse was seeing the kind of struggles that are too common in the games industry, including its lead writer, Adam Williams, leaving the company in 2024. Game development can be a long, arduous process, especially for big budget titles with massive expectations, as any Star Wars game would have; if Eclipse is still years away, though, it will have spent an especially long time in the oven. And all for a game that was met with intense skepticism when it was announced due to Quantic Dream’s checkered track record and history of workplace toxicity—not to mention the kneejerk hatred of Star Wars’ infamous anti-fans. Frankly, a Quantic Dream Star Wars game sounded like a terrible idea from the start, and it might be best for almost everybody if Eclipse never actually comes out.
On the surface Quantic Dream might have looked like a good fit for a game based on a major film series at one point in time. That time would’ve been 16 years ago, though; the French studio, known for games that prioritize narrative over action, and its founder and creative director David Cage hit the apex of their acclaim with 2010’s murder mystery Heavy Rain. It was widely praised by game critics for its acting and storytelling upon its release for the PlayStation 3, and still retains some fans to this day.
The studio’s next two games didn’t come close to matching Heavy Rain‘s reception, but it wasn’t any game’s lack of quality that most damaged its reputation; it was Cage and CEO Guillaume de Fondaumière’s own alleged toxic behavior, as reported in 2018 by the French newspapers Le Monde and Mediapart and the gaming magazine Canard PC. The outlets accused the two of creating a culture of racism and sexism at Quantic Dream, as well as violating various French labor laws. In response Quantic Dream sued Le Monde and Mediapart for libel, and was itself sued by multiple former employees for a host of violations; Cage and de Fondaumière won a personal libel suit against Le Monde due to the paper refusing to reveal its source, but lost to Mediapart, and corporate libel suits with Quantic Dream as the plaintiff were found in favor of the newspapers. Cage and de Fondaumière both remain at the head of the studio.
The legal issues are a thorny matter, and at least one former employee’s 2018 legal victory was overturned in the studio’s favor in 2021. Even if the specter of workplace hostility at Quantic Dream had never been raised, though, one major issue still justifies extreme skepticism about it making a Star Wars game: the fact that pretty much every Quantic Dream game, even the lauded Heavy Rain, is terrible.
Heavy Rain was acclaimed for its storytelling at a time when big budget console games weren’t trying to be anything other than action blockbusters. The fact that it wasn’t based around shooting reams of enemies, acknowledged the fact that humans could have emotions other than rage or lust, and borrowed the atmosphere of neo-noir thrillers (something unique for video games) blinded many to its enormous faults. Sure, it told a story, but it was an incoherent one told incompetently, with insulting writing and inert, unnatural acting, and suffused with the kind of racism and sexism Quantic Dream would later be accused of. Any praise for Heavy Rain proving games could rival movies—a common claim at the time—needed a footnote that the movies it was talking about were direct-to-VHS thrillers from the ’90s. And not even the upper tier of that ignoble class, but the real bottom-shelf stinkers that couldn’t even afford William Katt or C. Thomas Howell.
Quantic Dream’s next two games—the last two games it has shipped—were both less incompetent than Heavy Rain, but not noticeably better, and weren’t nearly as acclaimed. 2013’s Beyond: Two Souls is best remembered today for its star Elliott Page threatening legal action over fully nude images of their character leaking online, while 2018’s Detroit: Become Human is a deeply misguided racial allegory about androids and artificial intelligence that many found racist. Neither is the kind of game that should make anyone think “hey, these cats should do a Star War.”
Star Wars, of course, has seen a litany of bizarre creative decisions since Disney acquired it in 2012. So many Star Wars movies have been announced and quietly cancelled that it’s become a running joke, and more than one of the movies that have gotten finished replaced directors in the middle of production. And the intense dislike of aggrieved former fans (and the online grifters that stoke that resentment for clicks and views) basically guarantees any new Star Wars project will get hit with a wave of negative hype as soon as it’s announced. There’s so much actively working against any new Star Wars media that it makes no sense that a studio with Quantic Dream’s sullied history would ever even get an assignment like Eclipse. Even if it does come out, who would want to play it, between the Star Wars fans who hate Star Wars, and the gaming audience that has rejected every Quantic Dream game released in the last 15 years? Instead of a years-long delay, maybe Eclipse should just be quietly cancelled—one more Star Wars project to never actually see the light of day.