After EA shut down Visceral Games last year, it was unclear exactly what lead creative Amy Hennig was doing.
Her studio was working on a new Star Wars game, under the codename ‘Ragtag.’ EA moved Development on the game, which was said to be troubled, to EA Vancouver.
In an interview with Eurogamer, at this year’s Gamelab conference, Hennig explained the situation:
“I have not worked at EA since January, technically, legally. Yes. This is the problem, it was hard enough for them, but people were immediately asking them ‘is Amy working with you?’ and the answer was ‘well, we’re in negotiations…’ like, hmm. It was, sort of the soft pedal answer.
I haven’t been in, but look – I get along with all those people, I consider even the guys on the exec team friends. But it made it awkward because it was like, ‘I never got the chance to announce that I’m not at EA so I need to just pull off that band-aid at some point – but also had nothing to announce. It makes it sound like I just went home! But I’m doing all this stuff, working on all kinds of things.”
Hennig then spoke about what projects she has in the pipeline, and about setting up her own independent studio:
“I’m working independently and staying independent. I just started my own small little independent studio and am consulting with some people. I’m hoping to bring some people on board, I would love to have a little company of about six to eight people, 15 at the most, and do some more projects, do some VR stuff – I’m consulting with some VR companies and doing a ton of research because I haven’t played a lot to immerse myself in it.”
Finally, Hennig also mentioned the fate of Ragtag, briefly touching on what EA Vancouver is working on:
“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.”
