EA Shuts Down Visceral Games, Shifting Development On Its Star Wars Game (kotaku.com)

Visceral Games, the studio behind games like Battlefield Hardline and Dead Space, is being shut down by EA. The Star Wars game in development at Visceral will be revamped and moved to a different studio. Kotaku reports: "Our Visceral studio has been developing an action-adventure title set in the Star Wars universe," EA's Patrick Soderlund said in a blog post. "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." Soderlund added that Visceral will be "ramping down and closing" and that "we're in the midst of shifting as many of the team as possible to other projects and teams at EA." "Lastly," he said, "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."

Comments

Re:Better cancel SWTOR!

[lgw]

A story-based single-player RPG would be hard to shove a cash shop with loot crates into, and that all EA or Ubisoft wants these days. An MMO, though, easy for a cash shop (SWTOR already has one of course).

Good call, EA.

[Leuf]

No Star Wars fan would want to come back to and enjoy a story-based linear adventure for a long time to come.

Design by committee?

[The Cynical Critic]

Now is it just me, or does the talk about focus group testing sound an awful lot like the publisher decided to convert the game from something designed by professionals to something designed by committee?

I mean the game was being directed by Amy Henning of Uncharted fame and seemed to be much in the same vein as the games she'd worked on before being ousted from Naughty Dog so it's pretty clear that EA's management was originally looking to make a Star Wars themed Uncharted game, but it seems like they decided to go with what the committee said instead.