EA Vancouver will cannibalize Visceral's Star Wars assets

EA Vancouver, who's now handling the development of Visceral Games' previous Star Wars project, aims to tap the rich vein of assets and content left behind by its predecessor.

Last year EA closed down Visceral Games and handed off the studio's ambitious Star Wars game, codenamed Ragtag, to a big team led by its Vancouver-based studio. Amy Hennig (of Uncharted fame) was spear-heading the project alongside the team at Visceral and was invested strongly into making a unique story arc that tapped the magic of the original trilogy, and in the many months of developing, iterating, and concepting, the studio had created a wealth of assets to shape its new vision.

But ultimately the third-person action adventure project was canned. Not exactly cancelled, mind you, but the original vision didn't appeal to EA's testers (and the company's engagement-driven business model likely had something to do with it). Now EA Vancouver has inherited the responsibility of salvaging the game and making it into something that fits while using the smorgasbord of blueprints, concept art, and other myriad of assets left behind by Visceral. According to EA Motive exec Jade Raymond, the big team wants to cannibalize as much as possible from Ragtag and put it to good use.

"We have three terabytes of Star Wars artwork, which is crazy, and there is a lot of really good work there," Raymond told Game Informer.

"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."

via GIPHY

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Ultimately it feels like Visceral Games wrote the movie script while another team is bringing it to the big screen with a host of changes. Granted EA Vancouver did work alongside Visceral on Ragtag, and we're not sure just how much collaboration there was (or the proportion of content creation), but if anyone can pack in as much of the original vision as possible it's probably the Vancouver studio.

Considering Respawn confirmed its action-based Jedi: Fallen Order game is coming in Holiday 2019, Ragtag's new iteration probably won't be out until 2020 or beyond.