Earlier this week, EA has announced that Visceral Games, the developer of such games as Dead Space and Battlefield: Hardline is going to be closed and their untitled Star Wars game (codenamed Ragtag) is getting rebooted and will be further produced by the EA Worldwide Studios, led by EA Vancouver.
There's an argument to be made that the obvious reason behind the game's reboot is publishers' declining interest in making AAA strictly single-player products and it's exactly what the writer duo, Amy Hennig (Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception) and Todd Stashwick were trying to accomplish.
In an interview with Kotaku, EA Worldwide Studios boss Patrick Soderlund denied that the Visceral's project was cancelled because of the similarities to action-adventure games like Uncharted: "This truly isn't about the death of single-player games--I love single-player, by the way--or story and character-driven games. Storytelling has always been part of who we are, and single-player games will of course continue", the executive vice president elaborated.
Many gamers seek the reason of the reboot in the "games as service" general trend, but Soderland doesn't think that it has anything to do with Ragtag: "This also isn't about needing a game that monetizes in a certain way. Those are both important topics, but that's not what this is. At the end of the day, this was a creative decision. Our job is to give people a deep enough experience and story, and it's also to push the boundaries forward. We just didn't think we were getting it quite right”.
EA is in talks with Henning on her next moves, as the game is in development at EA Vancouver and won't match its March 2019 release date. Visceral Games worked on Ragtag for four years.