Next-Gen Star Wars Battlefront Spin-Off Reportedly Cancelled by EA

A Star Wars Battlefront spin-off was reportedly in development at EA, and poised to release alongside the PS5 and Xbox Series X this coming fall, but it has been cancelled before even being announced. The report comes way of Kotaku that last spring EA cancelled a spin-off of Star Wars Battlefront, making it the third Star Wars game the publisher has canned since 2017. According to the report, which cites numerous sources, the project was code-named "Viking" and was planned to hit this year. However, apparently it was becoming increasingly obvious the game was not going to be able to hit this window, and so EA decided to cut its losses and throw away the project.

The report goes into detail about how the project was actually born out of previously canned Star Wars games, which perhaps explains why it was going to give Star Wars Battlefront the "open-world elements" nobody asked for. The game began development at EA Vancouver, but Criterion -- the developer of Need for Speed -- was eventually brought on to be the lead team behind it. And this is apparently when the game started to spin out of control with "too many cooks" involved.

Now, it's unclear why EA wouldn't simply expand the timeline for the game's development and release it in 2021, but clearly it ignored the sunk costs and thought it wasn't worth investing anymore in. This in turn seems to suggest the project was never that convincing in the first place, but this isn't noted in the report itself. And unfortunately, no further details on the project are divulged, at least nothing salient. All we know is that it was a Star Wars Battlefront spin-off that would introduce open-world elements to the game. In other words, it sounds like it may have been a hybrid of your common open-world looter-shooter and Star Wars Battlefront.

What the report does divulge is that there's currently two Star Wars games in development at EA. One of these is a sequel to Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order 2. The other is the already confirmed project at EA Motive, which Kotaku describes as "smaller" and "unusual."