Star Wars: Ragtag’s Amy Hennig Reacts to Jedi: Fallen Order

While many Star Wars fans are excited about developer Respawn’s upcoming single-player Star Wars adventure, Jedi: Fallen Order, few fans have as fascinating of a perspective on the reveal of this upcoming game as Amy Hennig; the creator of Uncharted who worked on an infamously canceled Star Wars project named Ragtag. Hennig admits to being a little confused as to why Fallen Order is being celebrated as single-player experience when Ragtag was partially canceled for being the same thing. 

“[It’s] odd,” said Hennig to Eurogamer in regards to the Fallen Order tweet from EA that celebrated Fallen Order‘s lack of DLC and its single-player experience. “I mean, it’s coming from the EA Star Wars Twitter handle, so it’s certainly part of the plan, but I don’t know whether it’s implicitly referencing previous comments they made after our project was killed?”

Hennig believes that this shift at EA might actually all come down to a series of changes at EA that may just represent a genuine evolution of the company’s infamously greedy policies and love of milking games for all the microtransactions they are worth. 

“This is all speculation on my part, I don’t know why the change of heart happened, because that was very clearly not an acceptable plan when we were working on Ragtag,” said Hennig. “But you know, things change. [The decision to cancel Ragtag] was made in summer 2017. We found out in October 2017. So that’s almost two years ago, and a lot has changed in that time, and there’s been a pretty public and vocal backlash against the idea gamers don’t want single-player finite games without all these extra modes. Of course they do, of course we do. So maybe this is just a demonstration of a change of strategy for EA.”

Hennig specifically cites the departures of Patrick Soderlund and Jade Raymond as possible reasons for EA embracing Fallen Order despite their well-known previous attitude to such single-player experiences and Star Wars games. She also says that she’s happy for Respawn and has heard “great things” about Fallen Order. Still, she (understandably) admits that she wishes Ragtag had gotten the chance to see the light of day. 

“Obviously it’s disappointing not to be able to share the game we were developing, because I think it was really cool and pretty compelling.”

Listen to the latest Den of Geek Podcast:

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Acast | RSS

Matthew Byrd is a staff writer for Den of Geek. He spends most of his days trying to pitch deep-dive analytical pieces about Killer Klowns From Outer Space to an increasingly perturbed series of editors. You can read more of his work here or find him on Twitter at @SilverTuna014.