LOS ANGELES, April 5 ― Amy Hennig, Creative Director on the acclaimed video games “Uncharted 2” and “Uncharted 3,” has joined “Dead Space” studio Visceral Games with a view to directing an untitled “Star Wars” game.

The coup comes a calendar month after Hennig departed “Uncharted” and “The Last of Us” studio Naughty Dog, based in the Los Angeles County city of Santa Monica, and will instead see Hennig based 5½ hours north along the Californian coast, in Redwood City, San Francisco Bay.

Hopes had been high for an “Uncharted” style spin-off set in the “Star Wars” universe, triggered by “Star Wars 1313,” in development at LucasArts until the firm’s acquisition by The Walt Disney Company.

And plentiful comparisons had been made between swashbuckling “Uncharted” protagonist Nathan Drake and the Han Solo, Indiana Jones roles occupied by Harrison Ford, with a not insignificant amount of Nathan Fillion’s Malcolm Reynolds from Joss Whedon’s space-faring “Firefly” series.

So should we expect Visceral to produce its own take on “1313”?

Like the LucasArts title and  “Uncharted” too, previous games in Visceral’s back catalogue sport third-person perspectives ―  “Dead Space,” “Dante's Inferno" and two based on “The Godfather” films ― and while “Dead Space 3” retained elements from the series' survival horror origins, it moved significantly closer to a traditional action-adventure template.

Hennig teams up again with Steve Papoustis ― the two having worked on “Legacy of Kain” in the '90s ― with Papoustis these days operating as VP and GM of Electronic Arts' studio Visceral.

And speculation aside, Hennig is clearly jazzed at the opportunity to fuse video game expertise with a long-held appreciation for “Star Wars."

“Two amazing things entered my life in 1977 - Star Wars and the Atari 2600,” she told her Twitter followers (via @amy_hennig). “I couldn't be more excited to go on this journey.”

“This fits in perfectly with what we're trying to do here at Visceral,” wrote Papoustis on the EA website. “Amy's a huge fan. We happen to be making a ‘Star Wars’ game. Just thinking about the possibilities made both of us even more excited about having her join the team.” ― AFP-Relaxnews