LucasfilmElectronic Arts has cancelled the open world Star Wars game that was in development over at the publisher’s Vancouver office, according to a new report from Kotaku.
This open world Star Wars game had originally started life under the care of Dead Space developer Visceral Games under the codename Ragtag. This first incarnation of the game was to be a linear story driven experience directed by Uncharted veteran Amy Hennig, with EA Vancouver assisting on the project.
EAUnfortunately, EA shut down Visceral Games in 2017, at which point Vancouver took full control of the project and rebooted it, keeping some art assets, but otherwise shifting the focus and making it an open world game.
Here’s what EA said when they announced Visceral’s Closure:
It has become clear that to deliver an experience that players will want to come back to and enjoy for a long time to come, we needed to pivot the design. A development team from across EA Worldwide Studios will take over development of this game, led by a team from EA Vancouver that has already been working on the project.
Now, this second version of the game has been scrapped by EA too. Multiple sources close to development told Kotaku that the project, codenamed Orca, was still pretty early in development, but would have seen us playing as a bounty hunter exploring various open world planets.
Yeah, that does sounds amazing and yes, it is a damn shame we’ll never see it. So why was such a promising project binned off?
Apparently EA bigwigs decided they needed to release the game sooner than the release date would have been if Orca had continued as it was.
As such, they scrapped the open world game for a smaller scale Star Wars adventure that’s allegedly set to launch late 2020. This really is Star Wars 1313 all over again.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.