Visceral Games, the studio behind Dead Space and Battlefield Hardline and which was most recently working on a still-unannounced Star Wars game, has been closed down. The team had been working on a Star Wars action adventure game, headed up by Amy Hennig who had directed the first three Uncharted games at Naughty Dog, but this game will now be overhauled and developed at another studio.

“Our Visceral studio has been developing an action-adventure title set in the Star Wars universe”, said Patrick Soderlund, executive VP of EA worldwide studios, in a post on EA’s website. The game’s linear story based adventure concepts and designs will be shifted towards a different kind of experience that is said to be “broader” and “leaning into the capabilities of the Frostbite engine”.

The studio was now working on a Star Wars project led by Amy Hennig. The games we want to play and spend time with, the experiences we want to have in those games, and the way we play…all those things are continually changing.

EA is promising that most of Visceral’s team will be absorbed into other EA studios, but it’s not immediately clear if that means some might be out of jobs entirely.

Bringing new Star Wars games to life for every passionate fan out there is what drives us as creators.

While Söderlund doesn’t say it explicitly, that sounds like a shift towards an open world design, even if we’ll have to wait and see.

Moreover, EA confimed that certain aspects of the title will be changed in order “to give players a Star Wars adventure of greater depth and breadth to explore”.

The Star Wars title was originally expected to release during EA’s 2019 fiscal year, but that is no longer the case. But this still marks the end for Visceral as we know it.

In a perhaps very shocking move by the publisher, Electronic Arts has announced that they have shut down Visceral Games, the studio responsible for some of the company’s bigger hits over the past few years. That project won’t be lead by Amy Hennig though, as Jason Schreier reports on Kotaku.