EA canceled Star Wars: Battlefront spin-off for next-gen consoles
Publisher Electronic Arts canceled a spin-off of Star Wars: Battlefront last year. The game with open world elements should have been released at the end of 2020, along with the new PlayStation and Xbox consoles. When that proved to be impossible, the development was stopped.
The game was codenamed Viking and was scrapped in the spring last year, while Visceral Games has been working on it since 2015. That’s what six people familiar with EA’s plans tell Kotaku. The employees tell their story anonymously, because they are not allowed to talk about canceled projects.
The game was a spin-off of the Star Wars: Battlefront shooters. The game would have open world elements. Criterion should have helped Visceral Games develop. Criterion is best known for the Burnout series, but has mainly helped develop other EA games in recent years, including Star Wars: Battlefront, Battlefront II and Battlefield V.
EA had planned to release the game in the fall of 2020, around the release of the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X. When it turned out that that timeline was not feasible, the Viking project was canceled according to the sources.
As far as we know, it is the third Star Wars game that EA has scrapped in recent years. Visceral Games worked for Viking on Ragtag, led by Uncharted creator Amy Hennig. In 2018, it turned out that this narrative single-player game has been scrapped.
At the beginning of last year, information came out about Orca. The code name of a Star Wars open world game. Its development was discontinued in favor of a smaller game that would come out earlier. That now turns out to be about Viking, the game that has now also been deleted.
EA has had an exclusive license to make Star Wars games for PC and consoles since 2013. According to Kotaku sources, there are currently two more Star Wars games in development. Respawn is said to be making a successor to Jedi Fallen Order, while EA Motive is working on a “smaller, more unusual” project.
Star Wars: Battlefront II