Amy Hennig’s canceled Star Wars game sounds like it would have paid very close attention to what made the films so great before incorporating those elements into its own design. Hennig, best known for her work on the first three Uncharted games, recently stated in an interview that the now-canceled game would have prioritized an ensemble cast and story-telling to match.
EA and Visceral’s canceled Star Wars game was code-named Project Ragtag, and was being developed by the team behind Dead Space. Hennig’s role was as creative lead, a position she had previously overseen during the rise of Naughty Dog as one of the premier narratively-driven game studios in the world. Visceral’s Star Wars game was never really shown off by EA, though, and the project was canned before anyone even really knew what it was about. Later, the same thing would happen to another canceled Star Wars game, and fans began to worry that the license would never produce something meaningful again.
While EA’s Star Wars license remains a hot topic for fans, it seems like the publisher was close to yielding a game that would have helped improve its standing within the community. During an interview with IGN, Hennig stated she had big plans for the game, some of which included paying closer attention to what made the films such an enduring and beloved element of the multimedia juggernaut. Here’s what Hennig had to say regarding the game’s structure and story:
Hennig’s use of Indiana Jones as a comparison point is intentional, as she also stated her vision of the game would be pretty close to the serialized adventures of the character made famous by Harrison Ford with one key difference, that being the ensemble cast. Hennig noted that the characters in the canceled Star Wars game would have been much more improvisational, giving the example of Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, and Chewbacca figuring out disguises on the fly while rescuing Leia as a taste of what that might look like. Improvisation was meant to be a fully-fledged game mechanic, which sounds as though the title would’ve had a lot of branching paths available, alongside a much more thematically-consistent take on the classic Star Wars adventure.
“You look at Indiana Jones, he’s the protagonist. The other characters are side characters. They’re important, but they’re not co-protagonists. In Star Wars, those are ensemble stories, all of them. If you didn’t do that in a Star Wars game that was meant to feel like a Star Wars movie, something would feel off.”
Unfortunately, Visceral and Hennig’s canceled Star Wars game will never see the light of day. There’s a chance that some of it may be salvaged for the upcoming Jedi Fallen Order, but Hennig won’t be involved, which is a shame. Although she’s currently taking a break, Hennig sounds like she has a great vision for the future of Star Wars video games, and we’re currently at a point where fans need a ray of hope soon. Maybe things will break in such a way that EA has to improvise and bring in Hennig to finish a different Star Wars title but, until then, we just have to fantasize about what could have been.
More: Why EA’s Open-World Star Wars Game Was Canceled (Again)
Source: IGN
