EA shut down Visceral lower than two weeks in the past, resulting in tons of hypothesis across the writer’s mandates and whether or not there would be a future for single-player video games there – or within the business as an entire. But based on a massive new report from Kotaku’s Jason Schreier constructed from interviews with nameless former staff, Visceral’s Star Wars mission could have been doomed from the start.
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The mission started as an open-world pirate sport, which EA in the end shut down due to Ubisoft’s then-upcoming Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, and due to their current acquisition of the Star Wars license. The mission shifted from the excessive seas to deep house, however with the identical fundamental ideas of open-world piracy, however issues fizzled out when Visceral needed to pull from this workforce to complete work on Battlefield Hardline.
The Star Wars mission modified path completely when former Uncharted director Amy Hennig got here on board, as she needed to do a linear action-adventure sport much like these Naughty Dog had produced. Codenamed Ragtag, it will characteristic an ensemble solid in a large heist caper set within the gritty underbelly of the Star Wars universe. Everyone on the workforce beloved the story.
But whilst they started work on the sport, the scope appeared to be past what Visceral was able to making. Everyone within the heist workforce (as proven within the idea above) can be playable, and AI would take up the slack whenever you weren’t controlling them. It was a method of sport the workforce hadn’t tried earlier than, they have been a lot smaller than Naughty Dog, and their consideration was cut up between the sport and continued assist of Hardline.
The causes that may ultimately result in the studio’s shutdown and the sport’s cancellation are quite a few, and go far past the altering mandates EA’s preliminary assertion implied. The Frostbite engine was ill-suited to third-person video games. Visceral’s San Francisco location made them one in every of EA’s most costly studios, resulting in a continuously rotating set of different, cheaper EA studios coming in to make up for employees shortages. Visceral had shifted to a flat company construction with out producers, and so they had problem adjusting to this beneath the calls for of such a large new mission.
There have been reportedly pressures from EA executives as properly who have been involved with the sport’s potential for revenue, and the way marketable the gritty story can be to extra mainstream Star Wars followers, however these have been apparently only a small a part of the issues which plagued the sport’s improvement. Regardless of the shape the brand new EA Vancouver sport takes, it appears that evidently choosing up the items of Visceral’s title would’ve been extremely tough.
Quotes from former Visceral staff assist to inform the story. “Honestly, it was a mercy killing,” stated one. “It had nothing to do with whether it was gonna be single player. I don’t think it had anything to do with that. That game never could’ve been good and come out.”
The lengthy feature is stuffed with much more element and properly price a learn, notably for the way it highlights the problem of creating AAA video games.
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