Project Ragtag

In early 2013, Disney had acquired Lucasfilm and shut down its game development studio LucasArts. Electronic Arts (EA) made an exclusive deal to help develop lucrative Star Wars games through three of its studios, including Visceral. Visceral was working on Jamaica, a pirate-themed project at that time. EA cancelled the Jamaica project in favor of a Star Wars game. The studio opted to pitch a third-person action game that maintained the spirit of Jamaica, having players play as "space scoundrels" in an open-world-style Star Wars universe, and code-named this project as Yuma.

Battlefield Hardline became a company-wide priority for the studio as its development became troubled in 2014. The switch to a different engine, style of gameplay, and narrative caused Yuma's production to stall. During the last year of development for Hardline, Amy Hennig, the writer for the first three Uncharted games from Naughty Dog, was brought into EA for Visceral as a creative director for a future Star Wars project. Hennig did not want to make a non-linear experience like Yuma was originally intended to be but instead opted to create a linear narrative game.

Journalists saw the closure of Visceral as a sign of the waning interest in publishers in making games that are strictly single player, as many of Visceral's games had been. In light of these concerns, EA's CEO Andrew Wilson stated that the reason for Visceral's closure wasn't a single-play versus multiplayer game issue, but instead one based on listening to player feedback and following marketplace trends. The company felt that the current design of Ragtag was not fitting these changes and that the closure of Visceral and reassignment to another studio was because "we needed to pivot the design". EA's CFO Blake Jorgensen further said that their company found the game was too linear for what they felt consumers were looking for and towards EA's goal of pushing the game "to the next level".

At the time of Visceral's closure, the studio was down to about 80 staff after losing several over the years, which Jorgensen said was a "sub-scale nature" that required them to assign EA's Vancouver and Montreal studios to help, and that the closure was primarily a business, cost-saving measure. Kotaku's Jason Schreier reported on end of the game's development at Visceral in October 2017.