Everyone's favorite publisher and the sole rights-holder of Star Wars licensed video games, EA, is rumored to have canceled a Star Wars: Battlefront spin-off game in 2019. This should come as no surprise to anyone who's been paying attention to the publisher's questionable treatment of the most sought after licensing deal in the industry, yet it's just as disappointing as ever.
To EA's credit, the publisher did allow cancellation-happy stranglehold on its studios.
Kotaku's Jason Schreier, a leading industry insider, now reports that one more Star Wars game was tossed on the pile while no one was looking in 2019. Given the moniker "Viking" during development (much like its ill-fated brethren, Ragtag and Orca), this most recently canned project was going to be a spin-off of the Star Wars: Battlefront series according to "six people familiar with EA's inner workings." These individuals spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals from EA, and their corroborating stories paint the picture of a fledgling game that ed hands between numerous shuttered EA studios, a tale neatly summarized in a tweet by Schreier.
Ironically, Viking turns out to have been the reason why the hard-working developers, but virtually anyone besides EA seems like a better choice for the Star Wars license at this point.
Whether or not Disney reevaluates its relationship with EA, this pattern of egregious cancellations outnumbering released successes should worry anyone looking forward to the alleged reboot of the Knights of the Old Republic franchise. For now, Respawn is still cooking up a Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order sequel, while EA Motive works on an unknown project. Still, it seems Star Wars: Battlefront II will be the last gamers see of the multiplayer series for quite some time.
Source: Kotaku, Jason Schreier/Twitter
