I’m usually not one for racing games, but when you put an over-the-top emphasis on crashes and mayhem, I just can’t resist. None of us can, which is why we were particularly excited about about a new IP Criterion teased back at E3 2014. This was going to be a new, first-person, multi-vehicle action game. This game was going to have it all: cars, helicopters, ATVs. jet skis, wing-suits… all within an open-world playground. At the end of the announcement trailer one of the devs remarked that “This is going to be the biggest game Criterion’s ever made.”
Sadly, that project has been abandoned. In a statement, an EA spokesperson told Eurogamer that “While Criterion has moved on from the previous project they’ve spoken about and aren’t pursuing it specifically, they are continuing to build new ideas and experiment with new IP for EA.” It would appear that Criterion’s talent has been redirected, and is now being poured into the Star Wars Battlefront VR game, among other things. Personally, I would have loved to see its previous project come to fruition, but EA can write much bigger checks than I can, so there you have it.