According to sources from people involved in the project shared with Kotaku, Electronic Arts has decided to cancel the project of open world Star Wars. The game was first revealed at the same time the Visceral Games were closed in 2017. EA Vancouver, a major studio primarily responsible for supporting the release of the FIFA and Battlefront series, has been working on perfecting this open-world Star Wars game since October 2017, when EA decided to wipe out the manufacturer. It is produced in Dead Space, Visceral Games series.

At the time, Visceral was also implementing a separate Star Wars project codenamed Ragtag and belonged to the linear action adventure genre, which was directed by Amy Hennig of Uncharted. EA Vancouver is the company that played a supporting role for the project and when EA closed Visceral Games on October 17, 2017, Vancouver officially took over. But instead of continuing what they had, they completely restarted this Star Wars project, keeping only a few certain assets and turning it into an open world game.

According to Kotaku’s source, this project is codenamed Orca and is still at an early stage of development. It revolves around playing a scoundrel or bounty hunter, allowing exploring many planets in the open world and interacting with different factions in the Star Wars universe.

However, EA executives realize this project is taking too long and they need something that can launch faster. As a result, they canceled Orca to support a smaller scale “Star Wars” project, which in return will be released by the end of 2020. This is also the time that the industry predicts. The next console will be released.

Fortunately, Kotaku’s source also said that the publisher did not fire anyone during this transition. Currently, we are at a time of cutting costs across the industry, especially with major publishers including EA and Activision. Some stakeholders also hope that Orca can be restarted after the end of this new project.