In December 2019, I had the most disappointing theater-going experience of my life. As I walked out of The Rise of Skywalker, crushed by how badly J.J. Abrams’ saga-capper had bungled the promise of the sequel trilogy, I was only heartened by one thing. The movie might have been bad, but there was so much other good 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Wars stuff coming out that I knew I wouldn’t be kept from th🍰e galaxy far, far away for long.
I published a game of the year list with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order in the top spot on the same day TROS hit theaters in the United States. A new episode of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Mandalorian landed on Disney’s fledgling streaming service two days before that. The saga’s run as a big screen phenomenon was ending, but there were plenty of othe✱r places to 🌌get a fix.
Four years and one novel coronavirus later, things are looking a little different. In 2019, Pedro Pascal's Din Djarin was inaugurating a new era of Star Wars. Until then, the vast majority of live-action Star Wars content was contained to the nine theatrically released movies. Transmedia stories, like the novels and the video games and various animated series built out the world, but new live-action Star Wars was incredibly rare.
I've been talking about everything wrong with the Disney+ era 𝓀of Star Wars for almost as long as I've worked at TheGamer. This particular train of thought was set in motion and heavily inspired by , a Nebula-exclusive video essay from YouTuber 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Patrick Willems on the modern state of the franchise.
As Patrick Willems argues in that video essay, the franchise still felt special in that era. Now, four years on, Disney has taken so many small bites of the apple that it can sometimes feel like there isn't much left. After that first season of The Mandalorian, Disney rolled out The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Andor, Ahsoka, and two more season-length adventures with Mando and Grogu. While there was a 16 year gap between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, and a 10 year gap between Revenge of the Sith and The Force Awakens, a year hasn't gone by without new live-action Star Wars content since 2015. Animated series have long been par for the course, but that continued apace, too, with The Bad Batch, Visions, Young Jedi Adventures, Tales of the Jedi, and the final seasons of The Clone Wars and Resistance.
So, while it still felt like a big deal to spend time in this world when Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order launched in 2019, Disney's pivot to streaming that same year has resulted in a deluge of Star Wars stuff. Though Andor has shown me that I can still get excited about the franchise when the right story comes along, the threshold has gotten higher. In the same way that superhero movies now need to be great to perform as well at the box office as mediocre ones did a few years ago, Star Wars stories have to be terrific to stand out in this saturated market.
This has been driven home by my experience with Fallen Order’s successor. I'm about 15 hours into 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and I'm having a decent time with it. But, being in a Star Wars setting isn't enough by itself to get me excited anymore. After dozens of hours of TV in the last few years, it just doesn't feel all that noteworthy. I'm directly comparing my experience with Survivor to how I felt playing Fallen Order four years ago, and much of the wonder is gone, through no fault of the game itself.
In theory, Ubisoft’s upcoming 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Wars Outlaws looks like the Star Wars adventure I've wanted to play my whole life. It's an open-world action game set in the world of Star Wars, and the gameplay presentation showed its heroine, Kay Vess, hopping in her spaceship and flying seamlessly from a planet's surface to space. Typing that out, I still feel excited about the prospect of getting to explore the Star Wars universe with that degree of freedom. But, I also know that some of the things I'm ignoring now, may end up being big problems later. For one, it's an Ubisoft game, and though I've enjoyed plenty of the publisher's games over the years (particularly developer Massive Entertainment's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Division 2), I also knoꦿw that I tend to get tired of them befor𝕴e they come to an end.
That, paired with the amount of fatigue I'm already feeling at the current Star Wars status quo, has me worried that it just won't be that exciting. That, after years of Star Wars being a consistent presence in our lives, it just won't feel special. I hope I'm wrong. But as it is, I’m convinced that the most exciting place Star Wars could go, at least for a little while, is… away.
Dave𝓰 Filoni Will Turn Star Wars Into The M🍬CU
The interconnectedness and required view🎀ing homework that hurt Marvel are coming for Star Wars.
