Electronic Arts has reportedly ditched the Star Wars game that was in the works over at its Vancouver outfit.

That's according to Kotaku, who reports that the project - codenamed Orca - was canned because the publishing giant needed a Star Wars game to be out sooner than Orca would have been. Apparently, another, smaller, Star Wars title is set to launch in late 2020.

Though Kotaku reckons this might be to tie-in with the release of the next wave of consoles, it's also possible that EA needs to produce Star Wars games at a certain pace in order to keep the IP, much like Sony did with Marvel's Spider-man property. The last Star Wars game from EA was, of course, Star Wars Battlefront II. And we all know how that went.

There are reportedly no jobs lost during this process.

Project Orca would have seen users playing as a "scoundrel or bounty hunter" across several open-world planets.

Work on this project started in October 2017 when EA closed Visceral Games who was also working on a Star Wars title, codenamed Ragtag directed by Uncharted developer Amy Hennig.

The publishing giant axed this project, and the studio responsible, due to shits in the games landscape. At the time it was postulated that this meant EA wanted a more service-based project as opposed to a more traditional single-player release. When the studio's closure was announced, PCGamesInsider.biz expressed reservations about this business model.

Orca was a different beast to Ragtag, with Vancouver benefiting from some of the art assets from that title. But the project as a whole was apparently rebooted to be an open-world title.

Vancouver's is not the only Star Wars game in the works over at EA. Titanfall makers Respawn are working on a title called Jedi: Fallen Order, rather shoddily announced at the publisher's conference at E3 2018. Meanwhile, Jade Raymond's studio Motive is working on a Star Wars game, too. The development vet left the company in late 2018

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