Ладно, зато есть и хорошие новости. Очень рад за парней.

These ideas were incredibly ambitious. “Picture the Death Star, and they all have jobs,” said a person who worked on the game. “One Stormtrooper was on a command unit, moving boxes around. Some guys would be droids. It was supposed to be set up so it was all real, and it felt like they had jobs to do. We wanted to tap into emotions, so you could mess with Stormtroopers’ emotions. Go into a room, turn the lights off. He goes back in and turns them back on. Then you turn them off again. At a certain point he starts getting spooked, acting irrationally, and bringing friends in.”

One of the big issues was where they lived. Expenses in San Francisco were so high, between salaries and rent and costs of living, that by one source’s estimate each employee could cost over $16,000 a month. (That number, which includes salary and other expenses, dwarfs the widely accepted average estimate of $10,000 a month.) Compared to EA’s studios in cities like Vancouver, Montreal, and Austin—all of which offered tax benefits to video game companies—Visceral was way too pricey to maintain a staff as large as they needed. “Visceral was the most expensive studio that EA had,” said one person who worked there. “Even during Dead Space 3 and then Hardline, we would always joke, ‘I don’t understand why [EA] still has a studio here.’ Financially, it made no sense.”

How much Star Wars should there be? With Ragtag, Hennig and crew were planning on making a gritty game about scoundrels and criminals. They had Lucasfilm’s blessing to tell a story about new characters, with no Sith or midichlorians or members of the Skywalker clan. But when EA’s executives thought of Star Wars, they thought of robed Jedi using powers of the Force, not mob families.

Two former Visceral staff recall EA looking at Ragtag and asking where Chewbacca was. “EA would get obsessed with market research and start asking people what’s important to them about Star Wars,” said a former staff member. “You’d get, ‘Oh, the Force, lightsabers, the usual Jedi continuum.’ They’re hyper focused on that stuff, and it’d be a topic of conversation in every pitch meeting.”

What, exactly, was the game they were making? Several Visceral employees recalled getting constant questions from EA executives like Jade Raymond about what Ragtag’s big innovation was. The thought was that in order to compete with the likes of Uncharted 4, Visceral’s game needed to have a strong hook. To many on the team, that premise seemed absurd. They were starting from scratch on a brand new game, the first game like this that most of them had made, and EA wanted them to compete with Naughty Dog? Visceral hadn’t even made their own version of Uncharted 1, yet their game was supposed to be better than Uncharted 4?

According to one source, EA was pressuring Visceral to hit a 90 or higher on Metacritic

Hennig also wasn’t used to working with a corporation like Electronic Arts. Despite being owned by electronics giant Sony, Naughty Dog had been able to operate autonomously, in large part because they were widely perceived as the corporation’s prestige video game studio. Uncharted’s sales revenue wasn’t as important as its ability to help sell Sony PlayStations. At EA, however, things were different. “She was giving these massive presentations on the story, themes,” said one person who worked on Ragtag. “EA executives are like, ‘FIFA Ultimate Team makes a billion dollars a year.’ Where’s your version of that?”