Star Wars Eclipse - the first High Republic-set Star Wars video game - was initially revealed at The Game Awards 2021, but rumors of the game experiencing troubled development make it seem as if it could already be on its way to getting canceled. News of development struggles has revealed that Star Wars Eclipse could be too ambitious of a project, and that it could take many years to complete. Add on top of this the developer Quantic Dream's reported controversies and those of its head, David Cage, and it sounds as if Star Wars Eclipse could already be on its way to getting canceled.
Both Quantic Dream and Cage have come under fire in recent years. The French developer saw a workplace scandal similar to Activision Blizzard's in 2018. Alleged overbearing workloads, verbal harassment, racist and homophobic tendencies, and even the photoshopped images of employees in sexual positions culminated in Quantic Dream being sued by a former employee and a media takedown of the company in France. That Quantic Dream even got the opportunity to create Star Wars Eclipse has thus come across as surprising, as the amount of controversy associated with the company and Cage after a slew of scandals and heavily critiqued games like Detroit: Become Human have left the studio's reputation badly damaged.
News of development struggles suggests that Star Wars Eclipse may only worsen Quantic Dream's reputation. The well-known leaker Tom Henderson previously claimed that the game would come out in three to four years due to production troubles, but a new report from him suggests that Star Wars Eclipse may not release until 2027 because of the alleged difficulty Quantic Dream is having in attracting developers and new employees. Many were already touting David Cage's Star Wars game as a bad franchise decision by Disney, and if rumors of its development troubles are true, then it could be possible that the game will eventually be canceled.
Star Wars Eclipse's Trailer May Have Been Made To Attract Talent
According to Henderson's article, a major point of concern for Star Wars Eclipse's release date is Quantic Dream's inability to hire new employees. The company is reported to have had difficulty acquiring new staff since the Star Wars Eclipse trailer dropped in December 2021, with over 60 job openings at that time. Flash forward over three months later, and Quantic Dream still has 67 job openings in March 2022. Henderson believes this will further set back Quantic Dream's plans for Star Wars Eclipse, as without the personnel to complete the game, the developer cannot move forward.
Quantic Dream's ostensible response to this issue is emblematic as to why the developer may be having difficulty finding new talent. According to Henderson, Quantic has been manually changing the post date for its job listings to make them appear as if they had only recently been posted. Many have been left unsatisfied with the studio's response to its own scandals - it cannot simply sweep these matters under the rug in the same way it has attempted to hide its difficulties finding new employees.
This is perhaps why Quantic Dream has also had difficulty finding support from other companies. Henderson claims that the TGA 2021 Star Wars Eclipse trailer was less designed to market the game and more designed to market the developer to other studios. In the midst of its 2018 controversies, Quantic Dream became fully independent. To make a game as big as Star Wars Eclipse appears to be, the company is going to need not only a greater quantity of staff but also possibly the support of other studios. That Quantic Dream has supposedly accomplished neither of these tasks despite the popularity of the TGA trailer shows that Star Wars Eclipse could be in danger.
David Cage's Controversial History Could Derail Star Wars Eclipse
As the figurehead of Quantic Dream, David Cage has led the development company down strange, controversial paths. From his first major title Indigo Prophecy onwards, Cage's games feature troubling patterns in terms of both thematic material and storytelling integrity. Needless sexual assault scenes, a narrative structure that confusingly hops through time, and the reliance on a deus ex machina to both create and resolve a story's tensions are like free spaces on a Cage bingo card. Between Heavy Rain's manipulative twist and Beyond: Two Souls' offensive Native American sequence, it's easy to grow tired of seeing the same, negative tropes reappear in Cage's games.
Detroit: Become Human saw a slight deviation from Cage's past self-indulgence and even skipped over the pointless shots of female characters in showers that appear throughout his work. However, the game created another issue: a controversial commentary. Detroit is an allegory about race relations in America that tells the story of humanoid androids fighting for freedom. While addressing important, real-world issues is welcome in video games as it is in all art, equating the struggle of people of color who are humans to the struggles of robots designed to be subservient creates obvious problematic issues and reduces Detroit to an irrational, harmful metaphor.
This issue in Detroit: Become Human highlights other past controversies in Cage's career that make it clear why Quantic Dream may have a hard time finding people to make Star Wars Eclipse. On top of including a nude model of Elliot Page in Beyond: Two Souls against his will, Cage has seemingly created a toxic work environment at Quantic Dream and is alleged to have openly used misogynistic and homophobic language. When both the workspace and the product this workspace produces have been recognized as problematic and ineffective, working at Quantic Dream - even if it is to make a revolutionary Star Wars game set in the High Republic - can thus seem like a nightmare.
Cage's alleged poor leadership may have now left the future of Quantic Dream’s Star Wars Eclipse in shambles. Whether the game will come out in seven years or at all, it sounds as though Cage and Quantic Dream's broader controversies may be having a negative impact on the studio's attempts to attract both talent and interest from other publishers. This in mind, it's not outside the realms of possibility that Star Wars Eclipse suffers the fate of other previously announced Star Wars games and is canceled during development.