Zach Mumbach, a former Electronic Arts developer who served as producer for Amy Hennig’s Star Wars project (codenamed Ragtag), recently appeared on the MinnMax Show to shed some light on the canned title.
According to Mumbach, Ragtag became a victim of poor management planning (or lack thereof) and questionable decisions right at the start, and had EA given it a real chance, it would have been a Game-of-the-Year contender and possibly “the best Star Wars game ever made.”
EA pegged the Dead Space studio to work on a Battlefield game, as a result of which a lot of talented developers who specialized in single-player experiences left the company. The publisher then hired multiplayer specialists to work on Hardline, following which the studio was immediately tasked with making a single-player game again.
“Who’s making this plan? There is no plan, obviously,” said Mumbach. “We were experts at this game two years ago and then we re-made our studio, and it was hard. And we pulled it off. And then it was like, ‘go back to what you guys did before,’ and we were like, ‘well those guys who were good at what we did before left.'”
Mumbach appreciated Hennig’s composure and professionalism throughout it all, even when her vision didn’t align with EA’s.
We had this leadership team come in from Vancouver and, not knocking them, they were in the same position I was in Army of Two. They were like ‘we need to ship this thing, let’s go, cut this, cut this, cut this.’ And I’m thinking, this is f’ing Amy Hennig, we have the chance to make the greatest Star Wars game ever made and a possible Game of the Year contender. This isn’t an Army of Two game.
I think we would have made the best Star Wars game ever made. The story and the setup and the characters set up for success but what we had to execute was going to take a while.
At the time of Ragtag‘s cancellation and Visceral’s closure, EA was convinced that single-player games weren’t a profitable proposition for the games industry anymore. The company later went on to release Respawn’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order – a successful single-player game.
[Source: MinnMax Show via Eurogamer]
