Rogue One Co-Writer Says EA “Catastrophically Mismanaged” Star Wars License
Paolo Sirio
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story co-writer Gary Whitta has offered an interesting comment about EA’s management of the Star Wars license.
During a podcast with Kinda Funny Games, Whitta had no kind words for Electronic Arts, blaming how they’ve handled the IP thus far.
“I would just take the license away from EA because it’s been catastrophically mismanaged” as it has been “an embarrassment” until now, Whitta said.
He added that “if I was an EA shareholder, I’d be f-cking furious at the way (…) it has been catastrophically mismanaged. If I were Disney, I’d be fucking furious.”
The publisher has only launched two titles since the acquisition of the license, with both being Battlefront first-person shooter games by DICE.
The first Battlefront was multiplayer-only, while the second ended up being remembered more for its abuse of microtransactions than for its qualities.
Whitta also took a few seconds to talk about the canceled Visceral Games Star Wars action adventure game.
“I saw a bunch of that game, and it looked terrific. It would have been Star Wars Uncharted,” he said, further articulating:
“[Ragtag] basically would have been Star Wars Uncharted…My understanding of what they were saying all the way through was, ‘But we don’t want to make Star Wars Uncharted.’ Well maybe don’t hire the narrative director from the Uncharted games to make it for you then!
Like, figure out what it is you actually want. So they cancel that, they throw their resources into this other, more ambitious game, and then they cancel that!”
We can’t say that doesn’t make sense.
As for the future, more Star Wars games are coming. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is in the making at Titanfall developer Respawn Entertainment, and is an action game in the third person by the director of God of War III.
Then, another smaller action game is reportedly being built at EA Vancouver and should be around in a couple of years. The same team recently had a Star Wars open world title cancelled.
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