Heat On EA’s Handling Of Star Wars License Grows

Pressure is mounting on EA to handle their ownership of the Star Wars gaming license better, as trade publications and notable figures in the Star Wars fandom criticise the company for its poor performance.

Kotaku broke the story of the most recent cancelled project:

Electronic Arts has canceled its open-world Star Wars game, according to three people familiar with goings-on at the company. The game, announced alongside the shutdown of Visceral Games back in 2017, had been in development at EA’s office in Vancouver.

EA Vancouver, a large studio that mostly handles support for a variety of the publisher’s games including FIFA and Battlefront, had been working on this open-world Star Wars game since October 2017, when EA closed Visceral Games. Until then, Visceral—best known for its popular Dead Space horror series—was developing its own Star Wars game. That project, code-named Ragtag, was a linear action-adventure game directed by Uncharted director Amy Hennig. EA Vancouver had been assisting on the project, and when EA closed Visceral Games on October 17, 2017, the Vancouver studio took it over.

But it wouldn’t be accurate to say that EA Vancouver’s Star Wars was the same game as Ragtag. When EA Vancouver took over, it rebooted this Star Wars project entirely, keeping some of the art assets but transforming it into an open-world game.

Now, that project is canceled, too. (EA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

UPDATE (10:17pm): Since the publication of this article, I’ve talked to several more people familiar with EA Vancouver’s now-cancelled open-world Star Warsgame. This project, which was code-named Orca, was very early in development but would involve playing as a scoundrel or bounty hunter who could explore various open-world planets and work with different factions across the Star Wars universe.

When EA’s top decision-makers looked at their road map for the next few years, they decided that they needed something earlier than the planned release date for Orca, according to two people familiar with what happened. So they cancelled Orca in favor of a smaller-scale Star Wars project that’s now aimed for much sooner—likely, late 2020, which also happens to be around the time that I’ve heard next-gen consoles will launch. (Might be a bit earlier; might be a bit later. From what I’ve heard, next-gen plans are definitely still in flux.)

Which led to EA having to issue an embarrassing statement addressing the state of Star Wars games.

UPDATE 2 (1/16, 1:40pm): The day after publication of this story, EA sent over the following statement:

There’s been speculation overnight about one of our Star Wars projects. As a natural part of the creative process, the great work by our team in Vancouver continues and will evolve into future Star Wars content and games. We’re fully committed to making more Star Wars games, we’re very excited about Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order from Respawn, and we’ll share more about our new projects when the time is right.

From Window Central comes their assessment of the star of Star Wars gaming:

It’s not a surprise that EA hasn’t managed its exclusive rights to the Star Wars franchise well this generation. While the original Xbox and Xbox 360 saw a tremendous amount of Star Wars content, EA has only managed to release the mediocre Star Wars Battlefront games which haven’t been well-received by critics or gamers. Star Wars Battlefront II featured egregious pay-to-win microtransactions which caused various governments to crack down on the practice. However, that’s not all. Recently, a troubling report emerged which said that EA wasn’t allowing BioWare to make any more Knights of the Old Republic games.

Many months ago, EA closed Visceral Games. The team was working on a linear Star Wars game that Star Wars writer Gary Whitta said would’ve been the franchise’s Uncharted. A few days ago, EA cancelled the open-world Star Wars game at EA Vancouver — a title which was seen as an expansion of the Visceral Star Wars project — in favour of a small-scale title which could launch early. Instead of delivering a game that would’ve lived up to the legacy of the franchise, the company is content with releasing smaller titles in order to increase revenue.

Right now, it seems like there are only two single-player Star Wars games in development at EA. Respawn is working on Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and EA Vancouver just started work on a smaller title. DICE may be developing Star Wars Battlefront III, but given the underwhelming reception of the past two, it’s probably not the title gamers and critics want.

Respected writer Gary Whitta, who was the co-writer of Rogue One, and a former editor in chief of PC Gamer also weighed in on the topic on a Kinda Funny Games video via ScreenRant:

In the eyes of Gary Whitta, this is unacceptable and serves as grounds for Disney’s revocation of the exclusive Star Wars license from EA. Whitta details his thought process and frustrations in a video interview with Kinda Funny Games, referring to EA’s efforts as “an embarrassment.” Musing that if he were in charge of the deal, he bluntly states, “I would just take the license away from EA because it’s been catastrophically mismanaged.” Aptly referring to a Star Wars deal on the caliber of EA’s as “the crown jewel of video game franchise licenses,” Whitta articulates, “If I was an EA shareholder, I’d be f-cking furious at the way [it’s been handled].”

Though Whitta says he has faith in the potential of Respawn’s upcoming Star Wars game “to right the ship a little bit,” he expresses nothing but perplexity at EA’s thought process (or perhaps its lack thereof) when cancelling Visceral’s and EA Vancouver’s licensed titles, saying:

“[Ragtag] basically would have been Star Wars Uncharted…My understanding of what they were saying all the way through was, ‘But we don’t want to make Star Wars Uncharted.’ Well maybe don’t hire the narrative director from the Uncharted games to make it for you then! Like, figure out what it is you actually want. So they cancel that, they throw their resources into this other, more ambitious game, and then they cancel that!”