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Report: Electronic Arts Canned A Star Wars Battlefront Spin-Off Last Year

The lineage of proposed Star Wars titles from publisher Electronic Arts continues to sprawl outwards as a new report has surfaced telling of yet another game that never made it to the light of day. Coming from Kotaku’s News Editor Jason Schreier, he reveals that a new project going by the codenamed alias ‘Viking’ went on for some time before its ultimate demise of being cancelled in spring 2019.

More on the matter of the unannounced project, we learn that the title would act as a spin-off entry to the Star Wars Battlefront series conjured by Swedish studio DICE. He disclosed that the game would offer aspects of open-world elements that would diversify the foundation of the current reboot even more than we are familiar from the two current entries. Even more, Schreier explains that Electronic Arts’ in-house developers such as Criterion Games and EA Vancouver were also contacted to be involved in the game’s development.

However, with supposedly three different teams involved with the game’s development, it swiftly got overwhelming seeing how many hands were in the pot. Or as one source would tell it as, “too many cooks,” the unnamed developer told Schreier. But despite the strong-armed Criterion Games displaying heavy ambitions for the game’s story and cast, juggling a cross-country development process stressed any potential outcome for the game.

It is truly upsetting seeing the efforts that go into projects, especially for the Star Wars property, and nothing come to fruition. Especially with the amount of potential pouring out of these unreleased titles, fans could only wish to see what could have been for the cancelled games. Another being the late codenamed ‘Ragtag’ following the closure of Visceral Games in 2017. Uncharted trilogy director Amy Hennig helmed the project while working for EA Motive until her departure the year following which ultimately resulted with the title being canned entirely.

Schreier also mentioned one scheduled to launch for next generation consoles dubbed ‘Orca’. The title held some similarities to Viking as the project would also offer open-world interactivity while remaining unique outside of the Battlefront series. It wasn’t until 2018 that the title was met with being cancelled due to cost-cutting initiatives.

As of now, Criterion Games now holds the keys to the Need for Speed series thanks to the property being handed back from Ghost Games and Electronic Arts earlier this month. EA Vancouver stands as a support developer for other internal projects like Apex Legends and Anthem. Developers who worked on Orca share to hopefully restart work on the project since it only reached early phases of the development.

Source: Kotaku

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