Visceral's Ragtag Could Have Been the Best Star Wars Game Ever
Zach Mumbach shared some new information about Project Ragtag, a canceled game set in the Star Wars universe. The former Visceral Games employee mentioned the game's content, which in his opinion could have been the best Star Wars game ever made.
- Zach Mumbach, former developer ay Visceral Games, mentioned the canceled Star Wars game in an interview with MinnMaxShow channel;
- The creator revealed that at the moment of studio's closing, the developers had a large piece of gameplay ready. The team was finishing work on many levels, as well as on the escape sequence from an AT-ST. Visceral Games also had a "well defined" character of a villain, whose role the players would take;
- Mumbach also mentioned problems with Electronic Arts policy, including the development of Battlefield: Hardline.
Star Wars stories fans have been enjoying a pretty successful game from Respawn Entertainment for less than a year. However, this success and the alleged reconcillation of Electronic Arts with single player games is hardly enough for players to forget about another, canceled adventure set in a galaxy far far away. We're talking about Project Ragtag, or the action adventure game co-created by Amy Hennig. The fate of this would-be game was recently discussed by Zach Mumbach, a former employee of the now defunct Visceral Games. The creator is currently working on Airborne Kingdom in a new studio, but has found some time to talk to the editors of MinnMaxShow. You can find the entire interview here. Journalists have also posted an excerpt about Project Ragtag - you can watch it below.
We don't know much about the game known as Project Ragtag. We received the only "gameplay" in mid-2016, just over a year before the closure of Visceral Games. This does not mean, however, that the project was in pieces. On the contrary, the fragment shown to the players is only a fraction of the gameplay footage prepared by the developers. Zach Mumbach says that when the studio was disbanded, the team was finishing work on several levels and a certain dynamic sequence. It is a fragment in which the main character escapes from the AT-ST walker. Speaking of which, the player's character - a villain described as "a mix of Robin Hood and Marvel's Star Lord" - was also "well defined". The whole thing was to look like Uncharted in the world of Star Wars, according to previous leaks.
It doesn't mean that everything was going smooth. Mumbach has a big grudge against Electronic Arts, which apparently lacked consistency. The publisher took the studio known for its successful single player game (Dead Space) and ordered it to make an online shooter. This was another part of the Battlefield series - Hardline:
"The sequence of events was like - hey, we have a studio with their own engine who make really high quality single-player games - the Dead Space series - and we're going to take that studio, move them to Frostbite and have them make a Battlefield game'. OK, I'm fine with that. I stayed there and worked on that."
However, while Mumbach accepted the new direction of the studio, many of Visceral Games veterans were not amused by the publisher's policy. As a result, many of the narrative and single player gaming specialists gave up their jobs. Some of them found employment at Crystal Dynamics, where they develop Marvel's Avengers. In their place Visceral hired people with experience in creating network FPS games. However, there was a little problem. After finishing work on Hardline, EA ordered the studio to start working on another game. The problem was that it was supposed to be a title that focused on single player mode - right after many specialists in this type of games left Visceral.
Despite this, Visceral Games has started to work. Mumbach did not fail to applaud Amy Hennig's efforts and her decisions regarding the plot and the characters. However, it soon became clear that the team's vision did not match the publisher's plans:
"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 effing 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."
Of course, Mumbach's assurances about how great the title would have been, we must take them with a grain of salt. However, in the light of his information, it is not entirely clear why it was decided to disband the studio. It was probably influenced by Electronic Arts' new policy, which Mumbach bitterly mentioned. Just over a month after the closure of Visceral Games, the publisher openly stated that the company is cutting its ties with linear games, justifying this by changing the tastes of players. Today, after the release and success of The Fallen Order, this sounds like a bad joke. Zach Mumbach summarized the matter briefly:
"At the time, when we got shut down [...] they even sent out a press release that was like 'no one cares about single-player any more'. I just wish they'd figured that out two years ago."
