When it comes to “Star Wars” games, two titles many have long wanted to play never got beyond the development stage.
The first was “Star Wars 1313,” an adult-centric game in development at LucasArts which followed bounty hunter Boba Fett navigating the lowest levels of Coruscant. That development was terminated in 2013 following George Lucas selling off his companies to Disney.
The other was the title dubbed “Project Ragtag” that “Dead Space” franchise creators Visceral Games were working on. It’s also the one that original “Uncharted” trilogy creator/director Amy Hennig was working on, bringing her famed cinema sensibility to the title.
After several years of work on that, EA shut down Visceral Games and scrapped that incarnation of the project with plans to turn it into a larger open world and more of a ‘game as service’ model which EA Vancouver would take over. It was soon after reportedly cancelled.
Recently producer Zach Mumbach, who worked on the Visceral games title with Hennig, opened up a bit about the project with MiniMax Show and offered some new details on the title we missed out on. Mumbach says:
“I think we would have made the best Star Wars game ever made. 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’. At the time, when we got shut down, [EA exec] Patrick Soderlund was even like – what’s the game with ‘Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner’? PUBG? – they even sent out a press release that was like ‘no one cares about single-player any more’. I just wish they’d figured that out two years ago.”
Mumbach added that the main character was a “well-formed Robin Hood and Star-Lord” mashup roguish type. He also had nothing but praise for Henning, saying she brought clever decision-making around story and characters – staying professional even as EA’s goals drifted from Visceral’s own:
“[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.”
The game itself was well into the design phase with several levels and a major set-piece involving an AT-ST chase nearly completed when the plug got 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. [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, barrelling through and crashing and using all the destruction of Frostbite… You would have been like ‘oh that’s like Star Wars Uncharted’.”
Of course in the time since, EA’s multiplayer only push with “Star Wars” exploded in their face with the microtransaction debacle of “Star Wars: Battlefront II”. The company then changed its tune and releasing the single player title “Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order” last year which was met with strong sales and good (but not great) reviews.
