Back in October 2018, Visceral Games, the studio behind the Dead Space series and Battlefield Hardline was officially closed down. Electronic Arts vice president Patrick Soderlund confirmed the unfortunate closure in a special statement beck then, in which he also said that the design direction of Visceral's Star Wars project codenamed Ragtag would undergo a "significant change."
That unannounced Visceral's Star Wars project was under the care of Amy Hennig, the former creative director of Naughty Dog's Uncharted series, who took on the same role for Ragtag in 2014.
The game was said to be too linear by EA bosses and development was instead "pivoted" to EA Vancouver. Earlier this month, Mitch Dyer, one of the writers behind Battlefront II's single-player mode announced that EA Motive officially expanded to two offices and the new Motive office joined EA Vancouver in British Columbia, the studio best known for developing the annual FIFA and NHL games.
Today, at the Gamelab conference, Hennig revealed to Rob Purchese that she had parted ways with EA as of January. "I have not worked at EA since January, technically, legally. Yes. This is the problem, it was hard enough for them, but people were immediately asking them 'is Amy working with you?' and the answer was 'well, we're in negotiations...' like, hmm. It was, sort of the soft pedal answer."
"I'm not doing anything Star Wars. Who knows what the future may hold, but that project is on the shelf now. The Vancouver studio is working on something pretty different. It's really not, once you go more open world it's such a different game to the one we were making. Everybody loved what we were doing and I'd love to see us resurrect that somehow, but it's complicated," Hennig concluded.
It looks like Ragtag is cancelled or it's not what it used to be under the Visceral and Hennig direction in the best case. As the director said, it's more open-world now, meaning that its single-player, cinematic nature is gone. With the ongoing struggles of Battlefront II, the ultimate cancellation of LucasArts' Star Wars 1313, it’s been a rough few years for players looking to explore a galaxy far, far away.