[CydeWeys]

My dream is a modern Star Wars/TIE Fighter space shooter. Those were some of my very favorite games back in the late Win 3.1/early Win 95 era.

I suspect it wouldn't have the same widespread appeal as an adventure/shooter/RPG like Jedi Knight, but it could be also be made at a pretty low cost, and it's not like the license restricts how many Star Wars games they can release. May as well go make a space shooter with a smaller team while they still have the license.

Why does everything have to get the AAA treatment these days?

[verisimilidude]

My dream is a modern Star Wars TIE Fighter space shooter...in VR.

But I doubt the VR market is big enough to justify the investment that’s demanded by the Star Wars license. Like you say, AAA is sometimes a straight-jacket.

[dleslie]

Elite Dangerous is as close as you'll get.

[llukas]

VR or non VR, refresh of X-Wing vs TIE Fighter with modern graphics would be epic...

[falcolas]

> Why does everything have to get the AAA treatment these days?

The same thing that causes companies who are making record profits to be considered underperforming: growth at any cost. For EA and Activision/Blizzard (and their big name kin), if a game doesn't have the potential to make significantly more money than its peers, it's not worth making.

[DerDangDerDang]

Which has the knock on effect that championing a smaller project through internal green light is not as good for your career as waiting for the chance to lead a AAA title- I’m guessing

[strictnein]

Some of the space battles in Battlefront 2 approached the fun I had playing X-Wing and TIE Fighter, back in the day.

It's a little too fast paced and frenetic, but dodging between large girders on a huge space station while being chased by an enemy A-Wing is still quite fun. Or looping around the back of a Star Destroyer in an X-Wing.

If they took that engine (which already featured decent enough AI controlled bots), slowed things down a bit, and wrapped a campaign around it all, I'd be sold.

[Thaxll]

Because Disney will never give its licences to a company that ships less than 5m copies per SW game.

That's one of the reason EA is one of the only publisher big enough to have the rights.