“I have a bad feeling about this…”, it’s the same line that occurred in my mind when Visceral Games was shut down by EA, they even laid off Amy Hennig, a known game director of PlayStation’s first-party franchise Uncharted. The development of Project Ragtag was transferred to EA Vancouver and the publisher wanted to make a Star Wars game similar to Destiny so they could integrate their live services – microtransactions, loot boxes, and the like. EA thought that, during the time when they transferred the development to EA Vancouver, single-player games are not significant anymore and that Hennig’s approach to a linear single-player experience was great but not ideal from a business perspective.
However, according to Kotaku New Editor, Jason Schreier, the project name was Orca. This open-world Star Wars game was still in the early stages of development. The target was to have the players experience a bounty hunter’s life in the Star Wars universe where they can explore across the galaxy in different open-world locations in different planets. It sounds like a great idea but it’s highly ambitious. Now, since EA wanted to have a Star Wars game launch earlier, a target release date in 2020, they canceled Orca for a smaller scale Star Wars game project.
If they only went for Amy Hennig’s Project Ragtag idea and game direction, EA would’ve had an amazing game with a great narrative and level design, but they decided to become overly ambitious.
Now, we are worried about Respawn Entertainment’s Jedi: Fallen Order, if this gets canceled too then Disney’s decision of leaving the Star Wars license to EA wasn’t a good idea after all.