It was supposed to be a dream come true – Amy Hennig, the writer and director of many classics (most notably the “Uncharted” trilogy), was hired by Visceral Games (the people behind “Dead Space”) to make an “Uncharted”-style “Star Wars” game. I mean, I couldn’t come up with a better team-up if I tried, except maybe From Software developing a “Castlevania” game with Koji Igarashi at the helm or something. In any case, while literally all we saw from the game was maybe three seconds of footage during one of publisher EA’s many press conferences, I believe all of us “Star Wars” fans were beyond stoked to get our hands on it! But alas, it wasn’t meant to be. On October 17th, it was announced that Visceral Games would be shut down, and its “Star Wars” game – retooled by a different developer from the grounds-up.
This, of course, sparked a lot of outrage, since EA’s comments on the matter made it seem like the game was being changed from a linear single-player game into a massive multiplayer shooter in the style of “Destiny”, which wasn’t going to be a good fit for it at all and made many gamers concerned about the game’s future, and the future of gaming in general. Was this what we were going to be getting from now on, games as a service rather than as an experience? Something that costs a substantial sum of money from the get-go, and then costs even more in microtransactions, loot boxes and a never-ending string of expansion packs? It seems like a rather dire future, especially in a world where single-player games like “Shadow of War” and the newer iterations of the “Assassin’s Creed” series encourage you to spend real cash on them, as if they’re some kind of free to play mobile game and not a major AAA release.
So, what’s going on here? Did EA have a perfectly good single-player “Star Wars” game on their hands that they thought wasn’t going to make money in the long run, and so cancelled it in favor of something that would? Well… No, not really. Jason Schreier, a journalist famous for his many, MANY connections within the gaming industry, posted a gigantic post-mortem of the game’s development, exposing that, according to quite a few of its actual developers, the game was in trouble from the get-go. Its lack of focus and direction changed the core principles of the game numerous times, necessitating the hiring of Amy Hennig as creative director. Problem is, she decided to assume full creative control over the project (rather than merely writer/director like before), stretching herself far too thin due to what Visceral employees perceived as a lack of trust in them. The fact that EA essentially forced Visceral to work on “Battlefield: Hardline” smack-dab in the middle of the “Star Wars” game’s development definitely didn’t help morale. They went way over budget, making it quite clear that if the game was released it would never break even, let alone rake in a profit, thus necessitating the studio’s closure.
Did the cancellation of the game have anything to do with EA’s desire to turn their games into services? Yeah, partially. Reportedly, one of the executives said “FIFA Ultimate Team makes a billion dollars a year. Where’s your version of that?” So even if the game was actually released, chances are it would’ve featured some form of loot box system or something along those lines. But the sad truth is that the game was pretty far from being released no matter what. Many mistakes were made very early in development, and even the people who work on it admitted that there wasn’t a huge chance of it ever seeing the light of day. For better or for worse, its cancellation – which coincides with the release of “Battlefront II”, another EA “Star Wars” game which heavily features loot boxes, may mark a pretty radical shift in the focus of a company that not too long ago gave us smaller, single-player oriented classics like “Mirror’s Edge”. Linear single-player games aren’t dead, not by a long shot. But as games become more and more expensive to produce, they’re also going to need to bring in more and more profits to justify their costs. And, to be fair, I personally feel like adding lootboxes or microtransactions for those that want them is a better step towards that than outright increasing the base price of the games themselves by 20-30%. It’s a decent compromise, even if it’s one that will inevitably cost us some decent games in the future. But Visceral’s “Star Wars” is not among them. It was doomed way before the talk of microtransactions was ever on the table.