A new report by Kotaku’s Jason Schreier has revealed that EA canceled another Star Wars game making it the third since 2017. The first game canceled was being developed by Visceral Games until the studio was closed. The game, code-named Ragtag was being lead by Amy Hennig. The second game, code-named Orca was canceled last year. The third game, code-named Viking was planned to be released in Fall 2020 with the launch of the next generation.
Viking was designed to be a spinoff of Star Wars: Battlefront with open-world elements. Another studio, Criterion was planned to help out EA Vancouver. The studio was designing concepts and prototypes of what the game could be but the logistics of two studios developing the same game across the world proved to be too difficult.Criterion is located in London, England. EA Vancouver is located in Canada. On top of that, one person involved with the game said that there were “too many cooks” with Criterion being the lead studio even though EA Vancouver had already developed some ideas of what the game could be. EA Vancouver also has art assets from Ragtag that was sent over after the game was canceled and the studio shut down.
Since Viking was coming out this Fall, and the developers had only a year and a half to make the game, EA decided to cancel the project as they didn’t want to extend the development of the game. The game was canceled in the first half of 2019. Now, Criterion is back developing Need for Speed while EA Vancouver is a support studio helping other EA Studios such as Bioware and Respawn and working on the sports titles.
Now, there are two new Star Wars games in development. One of them is a sequel to the highly successful, much to the surprise of the company, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. The other is smaller, more unusual project at EA Motive.