In a recent announcement on EA’s official website, the publisher reported that it would be “ramping down and closing” Visercal Games, the studio behind the creation of the Dead Space series, Battlefield: Hardline and Dante’s Inferno. The announcement added that EA would be “shifting as many of the team [from Visceral Studios] as possible to other projects and teams.”
In the same announcement, it was also revealed that the Star Wars game that Visercal Studios had been developing (previously talked about at PAX West) would be undergoing a change in design. The game has thus far been developed as a “story-based, linear adventure game,” but from this point forward will be developed as a “broader experience that allows for more variety and player agency.” To implement this change, the game will now be developed by several groups from EA’s internal ‘EA Worldwide Studios,’ though in particular led by the team at EA Vancouver. The game was set to release sometime during the 2019 fiscal year (somewhere between April 2018 and March 2019), but EA would be “looking at a new timeframe” in which to release the game.
The announcement did not elaborate on whether Amy Hennig (previously one of the directors of the Uncharted series who had joined Visceral Games in 2014) would be among the team members who would be moved into other projects. There is a chance that she will remain involved in the above unnamed Star Wars game as she was before the announcement, but it is currently unclear.
Visceral Studios was founded in 1998; its closure marks the studio’s total run as nineteen years.