Star Wars meets Uncharted has been a pretty compelling pitch even since the ill-fated 1313, and it seemed we’d finally get just that when Amy Hennig started working with Visceral Games on a new entry in the space opera franchise. Of course, that project didn’t work out either, and it seems the former Uncharted director has left EA for new ventures.
Hennig quietly left EA back in January, though she says there are no hard feelings there. “ I get along with all those people, I consider even the guys on the exec team friends. But it made it awkward because I never got the chance to announce that I’m not at EA, so I need to just pull off that band-aid at some point – but also had nothing to announce. It makes it sound like I just went home! But I’m doing all this stuff, working on all kinds of things.”
There’s plenty more to look forward to with the biggest upcoming PC games.
That new venture, Hennig tells Eurogamer, is an independent studio, though the exact plans for the new company seem to be in flux. “I’m hoping to bring some people on board, I would love to have a little company of about six to eight people, 15 at the most, and do some more projects, do some VR stuff – I’m consulting with some VR companies and doing a ton of research because I haven’t played a lot to immerse myself in it.”
EA shut down Visceral Games last year, leaving the Star Wars game that Hennig was creative director for in an uncertain state. The project, codenamed Ragtag, was reportedly troubled throughout, but the studio closure left many wondering about the future of single-player games, especially at EA. The publisher said it would retool the project, and it seems the new iteration will be quite a departure.
Hennig describes the original project as “on the shelf,” and says EA Vancouver “is working on something pretty different.” She adds that “once you go more open world,” as it seems the new version will go, “it’s such a different game to the one we were making. Everybody loved what we were doing and I’d love to see us resurrect that somehow, but it’s complicated.”