Electronic Arts hasn't entirely been on the good side of gamers these days with some of the decisions the company has been making, especially with canceling Amy Hennig's highly anticipated Star Wars game and closing down Visceral Games, the beloved studio that was once known for making the horror franchise, Dead Space. The game was supposed to be similar to the other canceled Star Wars project, 1313. However, the game that Hennig was working on isn't entirely dead, though. There are remnants of what Hennig and the team were working on and it was recently revealed just how much of the game's DNA will be retained for EA's re-imagining of the project as an open-world game.
Game Informer managed to get in word with Motive Studios general manager, Jade Raymond, at this year's E3 and asked about what parts of Star Wars: Ragtag (the game's codename) are still being utilized in the upcoming game. According to Raymond, the shift over to an open-world wasn't difficult because EA Vancouver and teams from the now-defunct Black Box Games had already been part of the core development team helping Visceral, and so they were able to salvage some of what they were already working on to squeeze it into EA's new open-world vision for Star Wars: Ragtag...
I don't know how much we're saying about that stuff, but the goal is ... We have three terabytes of Star Wars artwork, which is crazy, and there is a lot of really good work there. When we announced we were moving the game, the idea was pivoting more into player agency but still keeping a lot of the stuff that was great about it. There was a lot of really cool stuff like tons of assets and really cool characters that had been created. So, there's the goal of making sure we use all that.
Three terabytes worth of work is a sizable chunk of data. That rounds out to more than 3,000 gigabytes worth of assets. Technically what this means is that given the size of the assets, it's likely that the high-poly assets are already finished, so this would mean that half of the hard part is already finished. It would simply require the team to scale down the assets so that they're game ready, which would require making mid and low-poly versions for optimization purposes.
Raymond doesn't say if the assets were fully rigged and animated, but if they aren't then that could definitely take some time getting those assets up to fully functional form. If they are already rigged and animated then it's just a matter of cleaning them up in preparation for runtime.
And while Amy Hennig may have departed from EA as the creative director on the project, Raymond explained to Game Informer that there are a lot of experienced developers who worked on other open-world projects such as Sleeping Dogs and Prototype who are spearheading some of the design elements on whatever the new open-world Star Wars game is going to be.
Based on the vague descriptions and info rolled out by Raymond, it sounds like the game might be on the line of Grand Theft Auto but in a Star Wars setting. I don't know if people would have too much of a problem with that, but it all depends on how the game is designed and what it plays like that will determine whether or not it will become a big success.
