EA’s string of cancelled Star Wars games has been the source of a great deal of dismay, and while the recently cancelled EA Motive project is the latest in that line, it all started with Project Ragtag, the Star Wars title that Visceral Games were working on under the direction of Uncharted creator Amy Hennig, before the studio was shut down, and the project was canned.

Recently, while speaking with USGamer, Amy Hennig shed a little bit of light on the development of Ragtag. According to Hennig, the game was much farther along in development than you would think- but its development was not without its issues. Due to having to use EA’s Frostbite Engine for the game, the game’s production was hamstrung, owing to the fact that it’s an engine that is geared toward making first person shooters, rather than cinematic third person action titles, which is what Ragtag was going to be.

“I think Visceral was sort of beset with a lot of challenges,” said Hennig. “Even so, we were making a game; people have said it was an Uncharted Star Wars. That’s sort of reductive, but it’s useful because people can kind of visualize something in their head. But what that meant is we obviously had to take the Frostbite Engine, because there was the internal initiative to make sure that everybody was on the same technology, but it was an engine that was made to do first-person shooters, not third-person traversal cinematic games.”

“So building all of that third-person platforming and climbing and cover taking and all that stuff into an engine that wasn’t made to do that,” she continued. “We did a lot of foundational work that I think the teams are still benefiting from because it’s a shared engine, but it’s tough when you spend a lot of time doing foundational stuff but then don’t get to go ta-da! [laughs] You know, here’s the game.”

“I wish people could have seen more of it because it was a lot farther along than people ever got a glimpse of,” Hennig added. “And it was good, you know? But it just didn’t make sense in EA’s business plan, ultimately. Things changed over the course of that time I was there. So you know, what can you do.”

This is not the first time that we’ve heard reports of EA’s mandate for using Frostbite having hampered the development of games. Mass Effect Andromeda was a game that famously suffered several significant issues during development, simply because Frostbite just wasn’t an engine that could do several basic things that a narrative-heavy RPG like Mass Effect required it to do.

As far as Star Wars is concerned, though EA have made a royal mess of their exclusive rights to the property, the relationship between themselves and Disney doesn’t seem to have soured. EA claims it remains committed to delivering more Star Wars games. Respawn’s Jedi: Fallen Order is due out later this year, while reportedly, EA are also planning on replacing the cancelled EA Motive project with another Star Wars project, albeit one of a much smaller scale.

We’ll never get Knights of the Old Republic 3, though. 

One of EA’s Star Wars projects has been known by many names over the years, and has been handled by a number of different developers. It started off, at least in spirit, with LucasArts as Star Wars 1313, and then morphed into Visceral’s project when EA acquired the rights to the property, led by Amy Hennig of Uncharted fame, under the codename Ragtag. After Visceral was shut down and Amy Hennig moved on from EA to form her own development team, the future of the project seemed uncertain at best.

However, we now have new information to suggest that the game is still very much alive, though in a very different form. Production of the game is now being led up by EA Vancouver, and in an interview with Game Informer, Motive Studios’ Jade Raymond spoke quite a bit about what direction they’re taking the project in. Apparently, it’s no longer going to be a linear story-focused title in vein of Uncharted, but is instead going to be an open world game with focus on player agency.

Raymond also spent some time to talk about how the development team, which has till now mostly been known for work on sports titles, is gearing up to make a completely different kind of game. “Ragtag was being co-developed already with the team in Vancouver, so there was already a group of people who had been collaborating on it,” Raymond said. “The core team there is super, super strong. There are people who had worked on Skate, SSX, and bunch of Need For Speeds back in the day, so there is a core group that was part of EA Black Box when that was a thing. It’s people who worked on a lot of non-sports stuff out of Vancouver over the years. There are people who worked on Sleeping Dogs, a bunch of people who worked on Prototype, some who worked on a new IP that was kind of open world. So, there is a mix of people from the original team and people who we supplemented.”

When asked about how much of the work Visceral did on the game will carry into the new form the Star Wars game is taking, Raymond said that they have access to a lot of great work by the team, but whether or not they would be using any of it, she didn’t really commit to. “I don’t know how much we’re saying about that stuff,” she said, “but the goal is … We have three terabytes of Star Wars artwork, which is crazy, and there is a lot of really good work there. When we announced we were moving the game, the idea was pivoting more into player agency but still keeping a lot of the stuff that was great about it. There was a lot of really cool stuff like tons of assets and really cool characters that had been created. So, there’s the goal of making sure we use all that.”

It should be interesting to see how this project evolves, but more than anything, I’d just really love it if it would stop getting cancelled or shelved all the fricking time. I’m not asking for much here, am I?

Dead Space and Battlefield: Hardline developer Visceral Games has been shut down by its parent company Electronic Arts. The studio was in the middle of developing a new Star Wars title codenamed “Ragtag” with former Uncharted director Amy Hennig at the helm.

In a public statement on the same, EA’s Patrick Söderlund said that the company would have to “pivot” the design based on feedback from players and “fundamental” changes in the marketplace.

“Our Visceral studio has been developing an action-adventure title set in the Star Wars universe. In its current form, it was shaping up to be a story-based, linear adventure game. Throughout the development process, we have been testing the game concept with players, listening to the feedback about what and how they want to play, and closely tracking fundamental shifts in the marketplace. It has become clear that to deliver an experience that players will want to come back to and enjoy for a long time to come, we needed to pivot the design.”

Visceral Games is currently “ramping down and closing” and Söderlund notes that “we’re in the midst of shifting as many of the team as possible to other projects and teams at EA.”

Also, thanks to these developments, the release date for Ragtag is pretty much up in the air now. “Lastly, while we had originally expected this game to launch late in our fiscal year 2019, we’re now looking at a new timeframe that we will announce in the future.”

In an internal email to employees that Kotaku obtained, it was revealed that development on the title has now been shifted to EA Vancouver. The studio, along with other Worldwide Studios, has been working on the project for some time now and EA executive producer Steve Anthony will lead to the team. It was also revealed that much of the assets created by Visceral would form the base for the new title.

As for Amy Hennig, an EA Spokesperson told Jason Schreier over email that, “We are in discussions with Amy about her next move.”

Whichever way you slice it though, the game that’s now in development at EA Vancouver will be fundamentally different from the vision that Visceral Games and Hennig were pushing for. It’s a sad state of affairs all around and hopefully the development team members will find other opportunities soon.