Portal Designer Joins Visceral's Star Wars Game
By Rob Gordon 20 January 2017
Motive Studios, which is working with Visceral Games on an as-yet-untitled Star Wars project, reveals that Portal lead designer Kim Swift has joined the team.
Even though details about the Visceral Games Star Wars project are remaining scarce, fans of the beloved sci-fi universe are extremely excited about the in-development title. Part of this comes down to the number of brilliant minds working on the game, with director Amy Hennig just one of many examples. Now, the project has received one more acclaimed creator to help bring the game to life.
Publisher EA has announced that Kim Swift has joined Motive Studios, which is helping Visceral Games with this highly anticipated Star Wars title. Revealing the news over on the EA website, Jade Raymond, Group General Manager for Motive Studios and Visceral Games, confirmed that Swift is now part of the Motive Studios team. Swift has a huge list of incredible video game projects under her belt, with perhaps the most well known role being that of lead designer for Valve’s Portal.
“We’ve devoted much of the past year at Motive to building a team of amazingly talented people to work on our new IP and Star Wars projects,” said Raymond in the statement. “I could not be more excited to welcome an all-star like Kim, who shares our enthusiasm for building exceptional games.” With Motive Studios both helping with Visceral’s Star Wars project and working on a new IP similar to Assassin’s Creed, Swift will certainly be kept busy.
Alongside her work on Portal, Swift also has number of other well-loved projects on her resume, including both Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2. With such impressive games in her roster, this is yet another strong addition to the team working on this new Star Wars project, which is being spearheaded by the aforementioned former Ubisoft director Jade Raymond.
At the moment, Visceral and Motive are not sharing concrete details about the project, but the noises so far have certainly caught the attention of the gaming community. Compared to the Uncharted series, the title has been described as an authentic Star Wars game by Amy Hennig, with the director stating that completing the game should feel like the user has played a Star Wars film. Meanwhile, Raymond has suggested that the game will be groundbreaking.
Exactly when gamers will be able to get their hands on the title is still up in the air, though, with EA placing the project under an expected 2018 release date. However, it may well be that Star Wars fans get a preview of the game earlier than that, with some hoping for further details during EA’s E3 2017 event. Whenever more news arrives, Star Wars aficionados are bound to be tuned in.
