It’s going on eight months since the closure of Visceral Games and still, EA’s decision to shutter the Redwood-based developer leaves a sour taste in the month.
Best known for Battlefield Hardline and the beloved Dead Space series, Visceral was reportedly working on a single-player Star Wars experience at the time, one built around a Solo-esque heist story involving the “scoundrels of space.” Co-writer Todd Stashwick, another Uncharted graduate, even went so far as to suggest that the final product would have been “beautiful, amazing and funny,” three superlatives one would typically associate with Lucasfilm’s galaxy far, far away.
Alas, Visceral Games has now been shuttered, leaving its promising Star Wars project wholly in the hands of EA. And while she’s now left the company to pursue her own indie studio, former game director Amy Hennig holds no ill feelings towards the mega-publisher, as host Geoff Keighley learned during a recent Gamelab conference (h/t IGN).
Asked whether single-player games are “dead” in light of Visceral’s closure and the subsequent reconfiguration of her Star Wars title, Hennig replied:
I don’t fault EA for that decision, as hard as it was personally for me. I understand the challenge. We have to come at this in different ways. I think it’s about portfolios of games at different price points that allow us to do more than just PUBGs and Fortnites and Destiny clones.
Elsewhere on EA’s portfolio, Titanfall dev Respawn Entertainment is currently hard at work on an original Star Wars story set shortly after the fallout from Revenge of the Sith. Holiday 2019 is the current release window for that one, which ought to ease the pain of losing such a promising, single-player-focused title due to the closure of Visceral Games.
Published: Jul 11, 2018 09:03 am