EA Vancouver Star Wars game - the shadow of Visceral Games

Wonder if this means Deadspace is now officially dead or if they might allow other EA teams to work on the ip. I miss that series...

I really hate videos like this...

I have a feeling its a few factors that were not mentioned so far...

I guess the feedback they got didn't gel well, maybe the game wasn't fun ultimately or something. Or maybe they were worried it could become like Andromeda?

I really don't know in the end. 

This Star Wars game reminds me of what EA did before to EARS (Redwood Shores) laterly Visceral with the LOTR franchise and the proposed "The White Council" game.  They cancelled a deep story based rpg and transformed the assests into a poor dumbed down action game namely LOTR - Conquest.  Now with this closure we again see them repurposing the game assests and transferring them to another studio only this time they've went one step further and just closed them down outright. 

"With both the movie and book licenses, EA's restrictions were lifted. Almost immediately, development began on The Lord of the Rings: The White Council, a role-playing game that would transform Middle-earth into a massive open world for players to explore. Developer EA Redwood Shores announced the title in summer 2006 and promised a world filled with characters controlled by powerful simulation AI previously used for The Sims 2 and a seemingly endless number of things to do with a story-based quest structure. Players would play as either a Man, Dwarf or Elf and move through Middle-earth as an ally of the White Council, the collection of powers fighting against Sauron's encroaching darkness.

"It was going to be The Elder Scrolls [4]: Oblivion meets The Lord of the Rings," Monif said. "The book rights landed, so we were able to do all sorts of cool shit, that was the mandate. We got them and just went, 'Go go go!'"

Monif described massive hand-drawn maps that were scanned and placed into the game, which would give players detailed directions to consult as they ran through large areas. Monsters wouldn't randomly spawn; instead, there would be roving bands of creatures covering the map, with players having the option to engage or use stealth. And the story would dig into Tolkien lore found outside of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy — namely, The Silmarillion and, briefly, Unfinished Tales.

Prototyping was nearly complete and The White Council had been officially announced. But in February 2007, EA announced during an investor call that project had been put on hold indefinitely, and shortly afterward a large round of layoffs hit the company. Sources told Polygon that around this time, EA executives came to look at the project and asked how much time the developers needed to complete the game. According to Monif, Redwood Shores asked for three more years. EA killed the project and let the company's limited hold on the literary license run out. "  Remaining resources were transferred to developer Pandemic Studios to work with Weta Digital on action game The Lord of the Rings: Conquest.

There and back again: A history of The Lord of the Rings in video games by Alexa Ray Corriea www.polygon.com/2014/9/23/6414775/lord-the-rings-tolkien-video-games


The lesson is, if you want your studio to survive in the EA Empire don't innovate or be too ambitious.  EA want simple formulaic, lowest common denominator games,  that they can manipulate gullible morons with. The only innovation, creativity or ambition they want to see in games is in monetization mechanics.  They're not game makers they're asset strippers.

I only knew them for the Dead Space games. That LOTR game sounds interesting, sad they cancelled it, we don't really have LOTR games anymore (not counting Shadow of War/Mordor).
To be honest, EA is like a monkey with a knife, I just wouldn't trust them ever. I wondes, was Visceral always part of EA? or at some point they were independent? Companies really thought back then it'd be a good idea to sell themselves to EA. If I were Bioware, i'd be careful, you never know when papa EA when come with the big hammer.
The directives of mandatory multiplayer and now probably either microtransactions or season passes is retarded. Instead of focusing on creating something interesting and bring people in that way, they focus on milking as much money as possible before call it a day.


First DS is pretty good, second is an improvement over the first one, the 3rd... eeeeh. It was a good somewhat innovative franchise.

EA lost the LOTR game license to WB in 2009. The Visceral LOTR games had development issues and EA losing the license might have been know when it was cancelled (i.e. they knew they couldn't release the game before losing the license).

Yeah, BF Hardline, the game didn't do well. Mainly because the setting on PC wasn't super appealing, plus lots of server issues and really bad content. On consoles it did better as I recall. I never bought it either, thankfully.

They've always been EA, originally called EA Redwood Shores based at EA HQ they were rebranded as Visceral Studios in 2009. 

The current license agreement ends in 2023, so I don't think that was a factor. They started in 2013 when EA got the license and the closest estimate for release before closing down the studio was 2019. 6 years for a linear adventure game when you already have an engine and even assets (I'm sure there is stuff from SW Battlefront they could have reused) means that something went terribly wrong during development of the game.

AskAGameDev also suggest that Disney might have requested a retooling of the game at some point because it was too close to another project. It always looked similar to the SOLO movie pitch to me, so I can believe that.

EA half-way through their 10 years license have 2 Battlefront games and SWTOR (which got an influx of money 2 years ago for KOTFE/KOTET but EA seems to have cut the purse again unsatisfied with how many players stayed around as if lack of content is going to improve that).

I wonder what the reaction in here would be if Bioware suffers the same fate. After Andromeda, Anthem might as well be their do or die game.