If you’ve been looking forward to the upcoming Visceral Star Wars game, you may need to calm the hype a bit. In a new post on the EA site, it has been announced that Visceral is closing. The Star Wars game has been moved to EA Worldwide Studios via EA Montreal.
EA & the Visceral closure
Really, nothing says it better than the words of the Visceral team itself:
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. We will maintain the stunning visuals, authenticity in the Star Wars universe, and focus on bringing a Star Wars story to life. Importantly, we are shifting the game to be a broader experience that allows for more variety and player agency, leaning into the capabilities of our Frostbite engine and reimagining central elements of the game to give players a Star Wars adventure of greater depth and breadth to explore.
This move leads to a few other changes:
A development team from across EA Worldwide Studios will take over development of this game, led by a team from EA Vancouver that has already been working on the project. Our Visceral studio will be ramping down and closing, and we’re in the midst of shifting as many of the team as possible to other projects and teams at EA.
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.
What’s ahead for the Star Wars game?
Your guess is as good as ours. It certainly seems that EA is “forcing” the games as a service mantra into all of its titles. Narrative storytelling seems to be, at least for the time being, a thing of the past.
We’ll keep you posted as the story develops.
