EAPublisher Electronic Arts has responded to recent reports that the open world Star Wars game in development at EA Vancouver has been cancelled, reaffirming their commitment to the license.
Kotaku first published a report claiming that EA shut down the open world Star Wars game, codenamed Orca, in favour of releasing a smaller scale game a little sooner. Sadly, EA’s statement doesn’t actually deny this report.
EAThe publisher told GameSpot:
There’s been speculation overnight about one of our Star Wars projects. As a natural part of the creative process, the great work by our team in Vancouver continues and will evolve into future Star Wars content and games. We’re fully committed to making more Star Wars games, we’re very excited about Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order from Respawn, and we’ll share more about our new projects when the time is right.
My first thought is that if Orca hasn’t been cancelled, EA would have straight up denied the claims that it had been, surely? Given that they dance around the subject, I think the implication is clear: the open world Star Wars game is deader than Han Solo.
It’s a real shame, especially since the Kotaku report outlines what Orca could have been; a massive Star Wars adventure that saw us play as a bounty hunter, exploring various open world planets.
The project originally started life as a linear story driven adventure game from Dead Space developer Visceral Games and Uncharted director Amy Hennig, but EA Vancouver retooled the title when Visceral was shut down.
For now, we have Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order to look forward to, a single player story driven adventure from Titanfall developer Respawn. It’ll launch towards the end of 2019, and is set in the shady period between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope.
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.