EA Allegedly Cancels Open World Star Wars Game

Citing "three people familiar with the matter," Kotaku claims that a long running Star Was project under development in EA's Vancouver office has been canceled. This "open world" Star Wars game allegedly inherited some art assets from Visceral Games' Uncharted-like Star Wars game, which itself was canceled in 2017 when EA shut down the studio. Sources later told Kotaku that the project was code-named "Orca," and would involve playing as a "scoundrel or bounty hunter" across multiple planets. Some of those sources hope that the project might be restarted after the studio finishes the smaller scale project they were tasked with instead. EA had not shown any of EA Vancouver's open-world Star Wars game publicly, but the publisher talked about it when it announced Visceral's demise...On October 22, 2018, EA announced that it had installed executive Samantha Ryan to oversee Motive. Subsequently, Raymond left the company... When EA's top decision-makers looked at their road map for the next few years, they decided that they needed something earlier than the planned release date for Orca, according to two people familiar with what happened. So they cancelled Orca in favor of a smaller-scale Star Wars project that's now aimed for much sooner-likely, late 2020, which also happens to be around the time that I've heard next-gen consoles will launch. (Might be a bit earlier; might be a bit later. From what I've heard, next-gen plans are definitely still in flux.) To EA's credit, those people said, the publisher did not lay anyone off as part of this transition.