Since EA shut down Dead Space developer Visceral Games, the question of the single-player Star Wars game has been an increasingly worrying one. Well, it seems the bad news is piling up further with director and writer Amy Hennig revealing she has parted ways with EA and is no longer working on the Star Wars game.
The story-focused game codenamed Ragtag was deemed too linear by EA higher ups, who moved the game’s development over to EA Vancouver to “deliver an experience that players will want to come back to and enjoy for a long time to come,” basically to make the game more of a games as a service style of campaign rather than an Uncharted-style one.
At the Gamelab conference in Barcelona, Hennig revealed to Eurogamer that she had parted ways with EA all the way back in January and was in the process of starting up her own independent studio:
“I’m not, I have not worked at EA since January, technically, legally. Yes.”
Hennig also revealed her intentions to go independent for the foreseeable future:
“I’m working independently and staying independent. I just started my own small little independent studio and am consulting with some people. 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,”
Though she clarified that she is still on good terms with both the developers and EA execs surrounding the project, Hennig said that her Star Wars project was effectively shelved, but who knows what may happen in the future?
She also commented on the Star Wars project now being worked on over at EA Vancouver:
“The Vancouver studio is working on something pretty different. It’s really not… Y’know, once you go more open world it’s such a different game to the one we were making.”
With all the troubling rumours and changes to the project, it seems Hennig’s departure and comments are the final nail in the coffin of the dream of a true single-player Star Wars project. While it definitely stings to know we’ll probably never get the Star Wars game we wanted, the prospect of future Amy Hennig projects with the freedom of being independent is a good consolation.
