EA shuts down Visceral Games and delays unannounced Star Wars game

[Mr.Puerto]

So like the title says Visceral Games was shut down. Before there is any sort of unreasonable line of thoughts let's analysis the situation with an unbiased approach.

While Visceral Games did create games like Dead Space,they also created Battlefield Hardline, which everyone knows how that turned out.

From EA's statement it can be inferred that Project Ragtag (code name for the unannounced Star Wars game) wasn't going to be good. This is due to the fact that EA stated "Throughout the development process, we have been testing the game concept with players, listening to the feedback about what and how they want to play, and closely tracking fundamental shifts in the marketplace." This means that it wasn't shaping up to either what they had hoped for or what the marketed wanted, or it wasn't particularly good.

This can also be shown by the way they describe the game and how they are going to change it in the future."Our Visceral studio has been developing an action-adventure title set in the Star Wars universe. In its current form, it was shaping up to be a story-based, linear adventure game." and the ladder being "... reimagining central elements of the game to give players a Star Wars adventure of greater depth and breadth to explore." This shows that EA wanted it to at least have some depth to it. Instead of it being a linear game, that you just play once.

It seems like after the failure that was Battlefield Hardline, Visceral and EA were betting all the chips on the table on this new Star Wars game. However, after the game was tested it seems like it failed within those groups in order to save whatever budget was left and to make sure a horrible game wasn't realized. This can be seen as EA learning from the Mass Effect Andromeda scandle.  The only thing left to do in this situation was to shut down Visceral games, move the game development to a different studio and start fresh with the assets they had. This is regular business practice, so its not like EA is a big baddie in this situation. Its just a shitty situation overall.


Links:
https://www.ea.com/news/an-update-on-the-visceral-star-wars-project?isLocalized=true
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-10-17-ea-has-shut-down-visceral-games
https://kotaku.com/ea-shuts-down-visceral-games-1819623990

Edit 1:Another Article explaining things in further detail, showcasing a worrying future.

https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/article/59dn78/todays-star-wars-news-makes-the-future-of-single-player-look-very-messy?utm_source=wptwitterus

Edit 2: At least it isn't Activision

[TonPhanan]

Hmm, there's still BioWare left and they didn't do that badly ;>. Seems that after their BF Hardline disaster, they were kept on a short leash already. Though, I would've liked some old-school linear action game without any of the sandbox and lootcrate elements nowadays' games all seem to include - the statement they've given is the typical, ordinary PC version of "visceral didn't do what we told them to do" with not much to take from it other than the cancellation itself, who knows if it was really that bad, didn't fit the EA concept of milking players dry (hehe, I had to ;>) or if their test players were just delusional. However, with the new movies being released over the next years, I dare to claim we won't have a shortage of SW games anyway ;>, so maybe they put the good elements of it to good use in other upcoming titles. 

EDIT: Wow, VICE has become even more hipster. Didn't know that was possible.

[Mr.Puerto]

Hmm, there's still BioWare left and they didn't do that badly ;>. Seems that after their BF Hardline disaster, they were kept on a short leash already. Though, I would've liked some old-school linear action game without any of the sandbox and lootcrate elements nowadays' games all seem to include - the statement they've given is the typical, ordinary PC version of "visceral didn't do what we told them to do" with not much to take from it other than the cancellation itself, who knows if it was really that bad, didn't fit the EA concept of milking players dry (hehe, I had to ;>) or if their test players were just delusional. However, with the new movies being released over the next years, I dare to claim we won't have a shortage of SW games anyway ;>, so maybe they put the good elements of it to good use in other upcoming titles. 

EDIT: Wow, VICE has become even more hipster. Didn't know that was possible.

I mean you can't simply say that it probably wasn't that bad. If it wasn't that bad they would've put it out there anyway. To me it seems like a pretty simple cut and dry case of it wasn't going to do well so we cut it.
Also that is an opinion piece of one person not VICE's official article. and in my opinion they bring up many good points.

[TonPhanan]

I didn't mean to defend Visceral Studios or paint EA as the bad guy here, the information provided simply doesn't give that much input regarding what the game was, what they intended to do or what EA disliked about it... so there isn't anything beyond mere speculation what has driven them to trash the current version of the game or close down Visceral in the first place, besides them apparently being a money sink. At least they didn't can it completely, and jumping to conclusions, like the VICE article does, is just clickbait in my opinion... SP isn't dead, like he writes in his own article: stuff like Uncharted still gets put out, Witcher 3 was a big hit, the new Assassin's Creed probably will be. It's one of the reasons I dislike some of what VICE does, their articles are mostly purely opinion pieces from people who sometimes don't seem to have a clue about what they're writing. Doesn't mean they don't have the occasional good documentary once in a while, although a few years back they were definitely on a better course.

[Mr.Puerto]

I didn't mean to defend Visceral Studios or paint EA as the bad guy here, the information provided simply doesn't give that much input regarding what the game was, what they intended to do or what EA disliked about it... so there isn't anything beyond mere speculation what has driven them to trash the current version of the game or close down Visceral in the first place, besides them apparently being a money sink. At least they didn't can it completely, and jumping to conclusions, like the VICE article does, is just clickbait in my opinion... SP isn't dead, like he writes in his own article: stuff like Uncharted still gets put out, Witcher 3 was a big hit, the new Assassin's Creed probably will be. It's one of the reasons I dislike some of what VICE does, their articles are mostly purely opinion pieces from people who sometimes don't seem to have a clue about what they're writing. Doesn't mean they don't have the occasional good documentary once in a while, although a few years back they were definitely on a better course.

Okay, I got what you are saying there. I should probably state, that its entirely my opinion. So my bad on that.
and while I agree with you on the VICE angle he does bring up a good points however. He is also a senior reporter on gaming with having 10 years of experience in the field. So while the number might not mean much it is enough to put faith in his article on what he is saying is correct. And with those examples he said that they have to be the literal best in their field or else they fail. Which I agree on, if it was just mediocre or even if it was good but missed the market it'd fail.

[TonPhanan]

Okay, I got what you are saying there. I should probably state, that its entirely my opinion. So my bad on that.
and while I agree with you on the VICE angle he does bring up a good points however. He is also a senior reporter on gaming with having 10 years of experience in the field. So while the number might not mean much it is enough to put faith in his article on what he is saying is correct. And with those examples he said that they have to be the literal best in their field or else they fail. Which I agree on, if it was just mediocre or even if it was good but missed the market it'd fail.

No offense taken , didn't mean to shred your opinion either. Yeah, he has some points but IMO jumps to the wrong conclusions there, furthermore in a very dramatical way.

The gaming market is a relatively young and exponentially growing one, which inherently suffers from the same problems things like cinema suffers from atm - lack of ideas versus way too high expectations, coupled with way too much money and thus has people on top that tend to work more with numbers than dreams (well, games back in the day didn't devour millions of dollars AFAIK, comes with the territory I guess). The whole MP angle is also relatively new, even a few years ago most people on this planet didn't even have a connection good enough to play anything or let alone had any at all. On top of that, every time a new thing hits the market, there were always the naysayers, talking about how the old thing is dead and will never come back, yadda yadda. There was a time when RTS were dominant, then FPS, then RPG, then MMO, etc. Doesn't seem to me like any of them are dead, especially with the indie movement filling the niches. I just hope that, and there I agree with the author, better sooner than later all the loot box and micro transaction stuff gets way more regulated and stays at a level where it won't feel like an attempt to just make some extra bucks by sucking little kids into gambling and selling people half-a**ed products that feel more like a slot machine than an immersive story. Thankfully, there are still very few examples that tried that though. Well, and I mean to each his own cup of tea, but that certainly isn't mine . In the end I think it will be like with everything else - take as an example the super hero movies DC and Marvel put out over the last years - as long as the cow gives milk, they gonna milk it, until the customers get bored of the same old story being sold for the 54th time, so they've to invent a new thing to get our hard-earned cash .

Let's just hope the BF2 SP is good and they create a cool game with the assets they already have from Visceral. BTW, I'd really like a new KOTOR to happen, hehe *fingers crossed*. ;>