EA has reportedly scrapped the major Star Wars game once known as Ragtag. Ragtag has gone through many mutations over the years and must undoubtedly have drained a lot of resources at this point, but clearly EA doesn’t feel pot-committed.
Visceral Games, under former Uncharted director Amy Hennig, was working on Ragtag until EA shut it down in October 2017. Ragtag was then handed off to EA Vancouver with support from EA Motive under Jade Raymond, while Hennig quietly left the company in January, saying that Vancouver had rebooted Ragtag, turning it from a linear action-adventure to an open-world game. Raymond, perhaps or perhaps not incidentally, also left EA near the end of October 2018.
According to a report from Kotaku last night, Vancouver’s rebooted game was codenamed Orca, and it has finally been canceled. Kotaku says EA executives felt they needed something “earlier than the planned release date for Orca” when they considered their road map for the next few years. So Orca has been scrapped for a “smaller-scale Star Wars project” that can be released sooner – perhaps late 2020, which is also a good bet for the launch date of next-gen consoles.
Kotaku’s sources also say that EA didn’t let anyone go as part of this latest tumult, which is notable in a difficult time for the big publishers (to pick just one example from many in recent weeks, see Activision’s decision to walk away from Bungie and Destiny, once one of its great money-spinning hopes, as is reflected in the impact on its share price).
Related: everything we know about Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order
This news is a shame, as both Ragtag and Orca sounded pretty promising. The former would’ve been a gritty heist story with multiple protagonists, while the latter, according to Kotaku, would’ve cast you as “a scoundrel or bounty hunter who could explore various open-world planets and work with different factions across the Star Wars universe.”
We’ve reached out to EA for confirmation. Remember, Respawn, the maker of Titanfall, is also making Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order – you can catch up on that at the link above.
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