Former Visceral Games veteran Zach Mumbach has shed light on the cancelled Star Wars Ragtag project headed by Amy Hennig, revealing its protagonist would have been a combination of Robin Hood and Star Lord among other tidbits.
Producer Reveals Cancelled Star Wars Ragtag Details
Chatting with MinnMaxShow, Mumbach, who had worked at Visceral Games for many years prior to hopping on the Star Wars Ragtag project, revealed that many elements of the scrapped sci-fi title were in place, including set pieces involving an AT-ST chase.
The timing was weird. 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.
But we had a lot of people at the studio who were experts on narrative and single-player games and those people left. And that’s fine – some of them went to Crystal Dynamics and worked on the Avengers game. That kind of stuff happens. Then we went and hired a bunch of multiplayer first-person shooter experts to help us with Hardline. Cool. So to ship Hardline and go ‘hey you guys are now going to make a single-player third-person [game]…’ That’s the thing which is hard for me to get over.
Who’s making this plan? There is no plan, obviously. We were experts at this [genre of] 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 went on to describe some of the features that were completed during the two years of development, which extend well beyond the brief teaser image of the main character.
We just had a lot of gameplay people never got to see,” Mumbach continued. “We had levels, they weren’t done but they were close. We had one set-piece which was basically done – we were putting the final touches on it right when the studio was shut down.
[It was] this crazy AT-ST moment which was really cool. You were on foot running from it and it was trying to hunt you down but you were more agile, slipping through these alleyways, barelling through and crashing and using all the destruction of Frostbite… You would have been like ‘oh that’s like Star Wars Uncharted’.
[Source – MinnMaxShow via Eurogamer]