Criterion's extreme sports IP cancelled so team can focus on supporting EA Star Wars games

GoPro-inspired game would have featured ATVs, jetskis, wingsuits and helicopters.

Criterion Cancelled Game — Concept art from Criterion's now-cancelled game. EA

EA has confirmed that the new IP Criterion Games announced two years ago during EA's E3 2014 press conference, has been cancelled. The unnamed project – an extreme sports title featuring off-road vehicles, helicopters and wingsuits – hasn't been seen or heard of since the announcement.

Speaking to GameSpot, an EA representative confirmed that the beloved developers behind racing series Burnout would instead be focusing on supporting the many Star Wars projects EA has in the works.

"While they've moved on from the previous project they've spoken about and aren't pursuing it, they are continuing to build new ideas and experiment with new IP for EA, in addition to continuing to collaborate with other EA studios," the spokesperson said.

In recent years Criterion has aided in the development of Visceral's Battlefield Hardline and DICE's Star Wars Battlefront, helping with the vehicular portions of those games. It was now supporting the development of Star Wars Battlefront: X-Wing VR Mission, a game heading to Sony's PlayStation VR headset.

The cancelled Criterion project was introduced at E3 with a strange developer diary (embedded below) that offered a look behind the scenes at concept art and very early gameplay footage, but was also focused on Criterion's development practice and office layout. Discussing the game, it was revealed that it would have been a first-person game influenced by GoPro footage often shot by extreme sports fanatics and published online.

It seems as though Criterion is stuck in some kind of creative purgatory, but hopefully, eventually, it'll have done enough to finally work on a game of its own again. And hopefully that game marks the return of Burnout. The last game Criterion developed itself was 2012's Need For Speed: Most Wanted.