Visceral’s third-person Star Wars game is no more.
The once-promising project flickered into life under the stewardship of Amy Hennig, former Game Director of Naughty Dog and its beloved Uncharted series. Few game developers garner as much praise and respect as Hennig, so when she waxes lyrical about a creative venture, people tend to stand up and listen.
Such was the case when Venture Beat spoke to the industry stalwart last month, at which point Hennig reflected on Visceral’s ill-fated Star Wars game – a project “too expensive” to see the warm light of day. Cost wasn’t the only hurdle that the project failed to overcome though, as Amy Hennig tells VB:
But we knew going in that was the goal. We were going to put this functionality into Frostbite. A lot of the team was hired to do Battlefield, and so that was a bit of a cultural shift, to make this different kind of game. Normally your cache for the project you’re making rather than trying to–it’s hard to convert the people you have if that’s not their type of game.
The notorious Frostbite game engine, coupled with EA’s affinity for online-based titles in the vein of Anthem, meant Visceral’s budding IP faced an uphill battle from the get-go.
I think that where EA is at right now, they’re looking more at games as a service, the live service model. More open world stuff, trying to crack that nut, versus this more finite crafted experience. We were trying to make sure that we built in other modes and extensibility and all that stuff. But the fundamental spine of the thing was more like Uncharted than one of these open world, live service games. That’s a big gap to cross.
Turns out the doomed project would have focused on a Han Solo-type character caught up in the destruction of Alderaan – not directly, mind you – and follow his adventures across a galaxy ruled by the Empire. And yes, sadly it seems Visceral’s new IP was further along than many realized…
Back in the land of the living, EA and Respawn are currently hard at work on Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, a new current-gen title expected to release sometime in 2019.