It has been three years since EA scrapped Visceral's single player Star Wars game, and even though gamers only got to see seconds of footage, the disappointment at the time was significant.
EA would make up for that, to some degree, with Jedi: Fallen Order, but producer Zach Mumbach has made it clear in an interview with Eurogamer that we missed out on something special.
Describing the lead as a cross between Star-Lord and Robin Hood, he detailed the disorganized structure of EA and how that led to troubles for the game from the start.
"[EA] were like ‘We need to ship this thing, let’s go, cut this, cut this, cut this’. And I’m thinking, this is effing [Uncharted director] Amy Hennig, we have the chance to make the greatest Star Wars game ever made and a possible Game of the Year contender. This isn’t an Army of Two game."
"I think we would have made the best Star Wars game ever made," Mumbach adds. "The story and the setup and the characters [were] set up for success but what we had to execute was going to take a while. I think the company saw that – ‘Hey, you guys are eventually going to make a crazy good game.'" He also adds that a move to multiplayer games was part of the issue, but later detailed one sequence they were able to finish before the plug was pulled.
"We just had a lot of gameplay people never got to see. We had levels, they weren’t done but they were close. We had one set-piece which was basically done – we were putting the final touches on it right when the studio was shut down," he explains. "[It was] this crazy AT-ST moment which was really cool. You were on foot running from it and it was trying to hunt you down but you were more agile, slipping through these alleyways, barelling through and crashing and using all the destruction of Frostbite. You would have been like ‘Oh, that’s like Star Wars Uncharted.'"
This is probably as much as we will ever learn about Visceral's Star Wars game, but a cross between the Galaxy Far, Far Away and Uncharted sounds like it had all the makings of a hit for fans of the franchise and hardcore gamers alike. Sadly, it seems it simply was not meant to be.
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