You may have heard about the sad news of Visceral Games shutting down with their vision of a new Star Wars game getting cancelled by EA. Well some new details have been revealed on what went down.
Kotaku researched a lot of what went down and it’s sad to see we won’t be getting this game. It was supposed to be a linear style single player game much like Uncharted and Tomb Raider. The main character was a Han Solo type dude with a mustache.
The game would have been set between the events of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. This is a time period that rarely gets explored. Some of the things the characters would be doing is running away from AT-ST walkers, shootouts in Tatooine and rescuing someone from Jabba’s palace.
Despite showing these demos to EA, it seems as if they were not impressed with it. Employees are not sure when the decision was made to shut down Visceral Games, but it seems as if they already made their decision weeks ago.
Well more reasons have surfaced as to why the game got called. According to Kotaku, the game was too ambitious for its budget, had a difficult game engine, conflicts arose between EA and Visceral and lots of other disagreements among staff members and management.
EA denies that it does not like single player video games, although there are signs that the company prefers more profitable genres. Since Dead Space 3 couldn’t sell 5 million copies to break even, EA told Visceral to go on and make Battlefield Hardline instead. Many staff members didn’t like this since the FPS genre is not their area of expertise.
Amy Hennig (who wrote and directed the Uncharted trilogy) wanted this new Star Wars game to from the heist genre. She wanted it to be linear and not just an open world space game. You can play as more than one character, although none of them have Jedi powers.
It was a struggle to make the game because Visceral only had around 100 employees. This is far lower than the over 200 people what worked on the likes of Uncharted and Tomb Raider. Not to mention Visceral was based in San Francisco and paying rent and salaries was really expensive for EA.
The initial plan was for the game to be out in May 2018. Well we now know that plan failed. Development slowed further because they couldn’t make decisions on their own. Everything had to be approved by Lucasfilm first since they own the Star Wars franchise.
Some staff members even said Amy Hennig was hard to work with as she wanted to direct everything. Not to mention EA was hoping the game would get over a 90 rating on Metacritic. A hard task to achieve when they were working on a strict deadline.
The sad part is that EA didn’t want Visceral to hire more staff members. Morale was down and some staff members left the studio already in 2016.
To cut a long story short, EA gave the studio many chances to make the game but it was getting too expensive and no progress was being made. This is why the game was cancelled. Many Visceral staff members are no working at other game studios both inside and outside of EA.
