A major upcoming 'Star Wars' game just got canceled, and its studio is closing down

E3 2016 star wars electronic arts visceral games amy hennig

Game publisher EA just killed a major upcoming "Star Wars" game.
The veteran game developer behind the "Uncharted" series was working on it.
Now it's being turned into something else, and EA is closing the studio that was behind it.

A new blockbuster "Star Wars" game just bit the dust before anyone could play it.

The game didn't have an officially announced name, but it was shown briefly back in June 2016. It was an ambitious new story in the "Star Wars" franchise, with a major game veteran at its helm: Amy Hennig, the creative director and writer behind the first three "Uncharted" games.

Now, the game is being turned into something else, and the studio behind it — Visceral Games — is being shuttered.

"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," EA executive vice president of Worldwide Studios Patrick Söderlund said in a blog post on Tuesday evening. Söderlund described the game as "a story-based, linear adventure game." It also appears to be a third-person game based on the footage from 2016.

Though this "Star Wars" game may be scrapped, Söderlund said that the project will live on in another form through "a development team from across EA Worldwide Studios." That group includes EA Maxis, Bioware, DICE, and all other internal development studios. Additionally, he said that EA is "shifting as many of the team as possible to other projects and teams." Visceral Games is most well-known for creating the "Dead Space" video game series; it's based out of EA's headquarters in Redwood City, CA.

It's unclear exactly what form that the new "Star Wars" project will take, but Söderlund described it as "a broader experience that allows for more variety and player agency." The original game, under Hennig's direction, was expected to arrive in 2018; that window no longer applies to the new project.

Star Wars Battlefront 2

EA has a 10-year exclusive video game license agreement with Disney for creating and publishing games based on the "Star Wars" franchise. "Star Wars Battlefront 2," seen above, is one of many "Star Wars" games in the works at the publisher. It's planned to launch for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC on November 17.

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