With the speed at which news comes out in the gaming industry we sometimes miss important or news worthy things. Some of these things we want to talk about in a way that is both easy for you guys and allows us to get all the facts together as some of these stories develop quickly. Sometimes we also just cover topics that we find interesting and want to discuss.

Amy Hennig admits to not working for EA since January

Artwork source: kotaku.com

If you don’t recall, back in October a studio of EA Visceral, best known for the Dead Space series, was closed.  At the time they were working on a new Star Wars game, a single player game with an “Uncharted” type feel to it, with, funnily enough, Amy Hennig (director of the first three Uncharted games) in charge.  There have explanations and counter-explanations as to why the studio was closed, most citing the ‘EA wants games as a service and single player games cannot provide that’ (with Visceral being mostly a single player, story driven studio) as well as the studio being on the brink of closure for many years.

According to Eurogamer.com, Amy Hennig has said “I have not worked at EA since January, technically, legally.”  Some insights into the Star Wars game which is being worked on by another studio, originally codenamed Ragtag, she has said “The Vancouver studio is working on something pretty different” and is “on the shelf.”  She goes on to mention “The Vancouver studio is working on something pretty different. It’s really not… Y’know, once you go more open world it’s such a different game to the one we were making. Everybody loved what we were doing and I’d love to see us resurrect that somehow, but it’s complicated.”

Ozzy’s Thoughts:  There have been plenty of former employers from Visceral that have said what we’ve all heard above, EA can’t monetize (make it a service) a single player game, we’ve heard the studio always on the chopping block for years, and it seems we may never get an official answer from EA of why it was really closed.  All and all it doesn’t matter now, the studio is dead along with a great series, Dead Space.  I was actually quite interested in playing this Star Wars single player game, it sounded cool and since it seemed to be standalone in the universe, I didn’t have to watch all the movies or TV shows to know what was going on.

But getting some, even if it’s just a sliver of inside information from someone about what they’re working on now, well to me all that I hear is what we’ve said all along.  All I can think is “We were working on a great single player game and EA wanted to monetize it but couldn’t, so they shut it down and are turning into something else.”  What that “something else” is well…if they don’t turn it directly into something like Battlefront 3 and instead keep (somewhat) of the single player aspect, it might turn into Dead Space 3’s “pay to not scavenge” bullshit.  While I loved the Dead Space 3 (as well as the whole series) that whole monetization was very, well it stank of EA trying to get any and all money out of a customer as possible.  So I have a slight feeling there going that route, wich

Visceral closing was the “death of single player?”  For EA, yes.  For the rest of us, no.  Simple, you don’t like what EA is doing, stop buying it no matter how shiny it looks.