Former Visceral Games veteran Zach Mumbach shed light on the canceled Star Wars Ragtag game led by Amy Hennig, revealing that its protagonist would be a mix between Robin Hood and Star Lord.
Chatting with MinnMaxShow in a video, visible below, Mumbach, who had worked at Visceral Games for many years before taking part in the Ragtag project, revealed that many elements of the discarded sci-fi title were ready, including parts involving a pursuit with the AT-ST.
“The timing was weird. The sequence of events was like – ‘hey, we have a studio with their own engine who make really high quality single-player games – the Dead Space series – and we’re going to take that studio, move them to Frostbite and have them make a Battlefield game’. OK, I’m fine with that. I stayed there and worked on that,” Mumbach said.
“But we had a lot of people at the studio who were experts on narrative and single-player games and those people left. And that’s fine – some of them went to Crystal Dynamics and worked on the Avengers game. That kind of stuff happens. Then we went and hired a bunch of multiplayer first-person shooter experts to help us with Hardline. Cool. So to ship Hardline and go ‘hey you guys are now going to make a single-player third-person [game]…’ That’s the thing which is hard for me to get over.”
“And I’m thinking, this is effing Amy Hennig, we have the chance to make the greatest Star Wars game ever made and a possible Game of the Year contender. This isn’t an Army of Two game.”
Mumbach went on to describe some of the features that have been developed over the two years of work, which extend far beyond the brief teaser image of the main character.
“We just had a lot of gameplay people never got to see,” Mumbach continued. “We had levels, they weren’t done but they were close. We had one set-piece which was basically done – we were putting the final touches on it right when the studio was shut down,” he continued. “[It was] this crazy AT-ST moment which was really cool. You were on foot running from it and it was trying to hunt you down but you were more agile, slipping through these alleyways, barelling through and crashing and using all the destruction of Frostbite… You would have been like ‘oh that’s like Star Wars Uncharted’.”
