The Significance of the Visceral Games Studio Closure part 2
Originally published November 2017Welcome back to my three-part rambling series about the recent closure of Visceral Games. Last time, we went over the parent company, Electronic Arts, and how they've earned their reputation over the years for situations like this one. Today, we'll be discussing the big accomplishments of Visceral Games, the last project they were working on, and how that may have helped add to the company's demise.
The Legacy of Visceral Games
While the closure of Visceral Games has sparked this discussion and my desire to examine the event, the truth is, I'm not the biggest fan of Visceral's work. I thought the first two Dead Space games were cool, but I never played them to completion. I played their action game Dante's Inferno when it first came out and felt pretty indifferent about it—the archived review of it is on DagonDogs.com as well. And that's about all I can immediately recall them doing on their own as a studio. I know that at some point, it seemed like Visceral was already gearing up for the chopping block when they started helping out on other EA projects. I believe the studio was called in to help finish the production of a Battlefield game at some point, which is not a good sign when you work for EA and you used to do your own projects. Rare as it might be, Kotaku actually did some reporting on the downfall of Visceral's final game and how it wasn't much of a surprise to anyone there, either.
A lot of people point to Dead Space 3 being a big turning point. Dead Space 1 was a simple survival-horror, third-person shooter that took inspiration from Event Horizon, Hellraiser, Alien, and John Carpenter-style body horror. All these things I liked and, while I found Dead Space to be a little tedious at times, I thought it did a commendable job popularizing horror games again after the genre had started to deflate for a brief time before Amnesia blew it up. Dead Space 2 continued the horror, but threw in a lot more action, mimicking how Aliens built an exciting sequel to the original Alien. I distinctly recall Dead Space 2 having one of the best openings to a horror game and seemed worthy of the praise it was getting that year. Dead Space 3, however, was quite reviled by Dead Space fans and considered mostly forgettable.
Image: Electronic Arts
What happened to the franchise that made the studio? A lot of passive fans and people who don't get easily upset about the things that happen in the games industry say that Dead Space 3 was just not interesting or scary. It became too action-oriented. There was also a cooperative mode that many thought was tacked on. This was during the period in which particular executives at EA said that they weren't going to release any games that didn't have multiplayer because multiplayer was something that kept bringing people back to a game. Normally, it's the quality of the game that will do that, but in their minds, it made perfect sense to add cooperative modes to games like Dead Space and Mass Effect—two franchises that had originally been solo experiences. Mass Effect was a little more acceptable, since you always had team members in a party, but Dead Space was a horror game, where the loneliness adds to the tension. As a result, Dead Space 3 lost a lot of the charm that made the first two games interesting. A major argument on the internet, however, suggests the reason Dead Space 3 was terrible was because of its micro-transactions, which we'll get into in the next post.
Regardless of the reason, Dead Space 3 was a lot like Mass Effect 3 in how it was received by the general public. After that, I only heard that Visceral was helping out on other projects until big news came out of EA shortly after Disney bought Star Wars. EA had secured itself as the sole publisher of Star Wars branded games and had several projects in the works with varying styles of gameplay. There was Star Wars Battlefront, more content for The Old Republic MMO that was still going, and a new single-player, story-focused, action-adventure game that Visceral Games was developing. So, determined to make a brand new Star Wars experience with an in-depth story, EA had hired Amy Hennig, one of the most notable game directors of the industry who is responsible for some of the best stories in games—whom I mentioned in my story in video games posts—to lead the project. She likely was a big price tag to add to the project, but even I was curious to see what would come out with her at the helm and Visceral making a game that was in their wheelhouse.
Image: Electronic Arts
But Star Wars Battlefront came and went, with the sequel already on the way. Multiple Star Wars movies had come out since the initial announcement of Disney's takeover, and there was still next to nothing known about the Visceral game. Finally, a few weeks ago, EA put out this press release detailing the end of the studio and the "pivoting" of the project.
Our Visceral studio has been developing an action-adventure title set in the Star Wars universe. In its current form, it was shaping up to be a story-based, linear adventure game. Throughout the development process, we have been testing the game concept with players, listening to the feedback about what and how they want to play, and closely tracking fundamental shifts in the marketplace. It has become clear that to deliver an experience that players will want to come back to and enjoy for a long time to come, we needed to pivot the design.
Image: Electronic Arts
A lot of the details and language used in this release seem to point to EA being their usual selves and trying to shift the design of something in a direction that is more popular or current. It's very likely that Visceral was making a Star Wars game similar to the Uncharted series, a series that Hennig had worked on as well, but EA didn't see how a single-player game with a single price tag was going to make up the costs or bring in the bucks like the big golden goose they always want. Now, it sounds like Visceral's last project will be stitched up, finalized, and put out to the public to regain some of the money spent on the project. So I wouldn't expect it anytime soon, or expect it to be any good.
It's a shame that the game will probably end up being a Frankenstein's-monster of a project in the end because it sounded interesting, ambitious, and unconventional. Visceral earned their reputation with these types of games. However, in an industry in which projects like this are becoming astronomically more expensive to produce, this style of game is already too archaic to make up the costs. Some people at the top of the hierarchy probably saw Visceral as a dinosaur, incapable of evolving to the new markets, and decided that they needed to cut their costs immediately. It's a shame because Visceral was not that old of a studio and, while I may not have been their biggest fan, I still wanted studios like theirs to be around for decades to come. But the future looks bleak in this regard.
Come back next week for my final post on the Visceral Games closure and why I think this is significant as the harbinger of the single-player apocalypse.
See the original press release here.
See Kotaku's story here.
Read the previous entry in this rambling series here.
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