Electronic Arts has canceled its planned open-world Star Wars video game, according to a new report by Kotaku. The game had first been announced in 2017 during the shutdown of developer Visceral Games, and had been in development in EA’s Vancouver office.
Visceral had been developing its own Star Wars title before the studio’s shutdown. EA Vancouver had been working on the Star Wars title since late 2017 and had otherwise been assisting Visceral on the project before then. EA had not publicly shown any part of the game, but had discussed it before, saying during Visceral’s shutdown, “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 Star Wars project at EA Vancouver had been codenamed “Orca,” and would have involved players taking control of a bounty hunter or scoundrel-type character that explored various planets in the galaxy. The game was allegedly canceled in favor of a smaller-scale project that would hopefully be out by 2020.
Currently, EA’s only big Star Wars gaming project is Jedi: Fallen Order, which is being developed by Respawn and is currently scheduled for a late 2019 release.