Star Wars: Why Project Ragtag Was Canceled

Uncharted alum Amy Hennig and EA’s Visceral Games were working on an ambitious single-player Star Wars game at Visceral, under the codename Project Ragtag, before the project was canceled by EA in 2017. Fans never got to see much of Ragtag, which reportedly focused on a group of scoundrels and thieves, but Hennig has now revealed that development and production on the title had gotten quite far along before the plug was pulled.

“I think Visceral was sort of beset with a lot of challenges,” Hennig explained in an insightful new interview with US Gamer. “Even so, we were making a game; people have said it was an Uncharted Star Wars. That’s sort of reductive, but it’s useful because people can kind of visualize something in their head.”

In order to make a Star Wars game that looks and functions similarly to Uncharted, Hennig recalled that Visceral “had to take the Frostbite Engine” and build upon it, since EA’s engine “was made to do first-person shooters not third-person traversal cinematic games” like Project Ragtag.

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This meant a lot of work. Hennig explained that the devs at Visceral built “all of that third-person platforming and climbing and cover taking and all that stuff into an engine that wasn’t made to do that. We did a lot of foundational work that I think the teams are still benefiting from because it’s a shared engine, but it’s tough when you spend a lot of time doing foundational stuff but then don’t get to go ta-da! Here’s the game.”

She also hinted that a lot of Ragtag was made that we’ll never get to see: “I wish people could have seen more of it because it was a lot farther along than people ever got a glimpse of. And it was good, you know? But it just didn’t make sense in EA’s business plan, ultimately. Things changed over the course of that time I was there. So you know, what can you do.”

It’s always gutting to hear about a game that you can’t play, isn’t it? Here’s hoping, as something of a consolation, that some cool stuff gets made using that revamped version of the Frostbite Engine that Visceral put so much work into.

As it stands, Respawn’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is the only single-player Star Wars game that hasn’t been canceled yet. It could be our last hope for solo adventures in the galaxy far, far away…

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