According to Kotaku’s report, EA has decided to cancel Orca project, this was an open-world Star Wars game that was in development by EA Vancouver. The information comes from three insiders of EA Vancouver, reportedly EA will be working on a much smaller scale Star Wars game.
Visceral Games started a project for a Star Wars game under the code name Ragtag with the direction of Amy Hennig, but when EA closed the studio in 2017 EA Vancouver took over the task of continue the project and it was announced that they will be working on a Star Wars game under the code name Orca, they kept some of the assets and changed from a linear-action-adventure approach to an open world adventure game.
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. “It has become clear that to deliver an experience that players will want to come back to and enjoy for a long time to come, we needed to pivot the design,” the company said at the time. “A development team from across EA Worldwide Studios will take over development of this game, led by a team from EA Vancouver that has already been working on the project.”
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.)
This decision has make some fans a bit angry as there is some kind of cliché that EA doesn’t care for gamers doesn’t try to deliver what players demands, what’s true is that with our demands of quality an ambitious project turns out to be a very expensive and time consuming, we can use Star Citizen as an example so maybe I can understand this decision from an economical standpoint, what we need to do as consumers is to support ambitious projects and let the developers know what do we want. There might be a EA representative reading this article, how this decision make you feel?, let your opinion be heard in the comment section below and keep it tuned to Gaming Instincts for the official statement by EA.
Read the full article at – Kotaku.
A Nintendo Switch trailer was also released.
According to SteamDB.
An announcement trailer was also released.