Visceral’s Star Wars game isn’t Visceral’s Star Wars game anymore – not since EA closed the studio and moved development to its Vancouver location. With direction from Uncharted lead Amy Hennig, the leaked Ragtag pitch sounded like an intriguing premise, and it seems the work done on that edition won’t go to waste.
General manager of Motive Studios – another EA division taking a major role in the Star Wars game’s development – Jade Raymond says “We have three terabytes of Star Wars artwork, which is crazy, and there is a lot of really good work there.
We don’t have Ragtag, but we’ll always have the best Star Wars games on PC.
“When we announced we were moving the game,” Raymond tells Game Informer, “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.”
Amy Hennig left EA earlier this year to start a new studio, and mentioned that the new game would be “pretty different” to what her team was building, owing to the open world setting. Still, it seems Ragtag – the project’s codename – and its promise to explore the gritty underbelly of the Star Wars universe won’t entirely be left to die.
Raymond also says “Ragtag was being co-developed already with the team in Vancouver, so there was already a group of people who had been collaborating on it.” The current team includes folks who worked on “Skate, SSX, and bunch of Need For Speeds back in the day.” There’s also talent from Sleeping Dogs, Prototype, and some from “a new IP that was kind of open world.”
We don’t know much about the game’s new form, other than the fact that it’ll be open world with online elements. It’ll likely be some time before we hear much more, either way – we’ll probably see the Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order release date from Respawn long before we see Ragtag’s eventual new form.