Every few months, the gaming graveyard coughs up another “what if” and this one stings a little. Gameplay footage from a canceled Star Wars action RPG called Star Wars: Magellan has surfaced online, uploaded by an anonymous former developer as part of a portfolio reel. The footage gives the clearest look yet at a game that never got a name reveal, never got a trailer, and never got a release — dying alongside its studio before anyone outside the project even knew it existed as a Star Wars title.
Here’s a full breakdown of what Magellan actually was, who made it, why it got killed, and where it fits in the long, painful history of Star Wars games that didn’t make it.
What Was Star Wars: Magellan?
Magellan was an action RPG in development at Echtra Games, the San Francisco-based studio best known for Torchlight 3. The project was built in Unreal Engine 5 and was being developed for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S. Development happened in collaboration with NaturalMotion, another Zynga subsidiary that previously had experience with the Star Wars IP through Star Wars: Hunters.
The game’s internal codename “Magellan” was only confirmed by the recently surfaced footage. Publicly, Echtra had only ever been described as working on an unannounced cross-platform action RPG with multiplayer support. Nobody outside the studio knew this was a Star Wars game until after the studio was already dead.
Classes — The Hunted Jedi and The Exiled Mandalorian
The footage confirms two playable classes at whatever development stage was captured on video:
- The Hunted Jedi — a Jedi operating outside the mainstream of the Order, presumably hunted by the Empire or another faction, with access to lightsabers and Force powers
- The Exiled Mandalorian — a Mandalorian warrior cast out from their culture, bringing blasters, Mandalorian weaponry, and presumably a distinct combat style focused on ranged and gadget-based play
Both classes had different weapon sets and abilities, pointing toward the kind of distinct playstyle differentiation you’d expect from a full RPG rather than just cosmetic class variations. The footage shows combat sequences against waves of droids and Stormtroopers, giving a feel for how both sides of the gameplay worked in practice.
Gameplay Systems — NPC Bonds, Force Powers, and Multiplayer Co-op
Magellan wasn’t just positioning itself as a combat-heavy brawler. A few deeper systems were reportedly in development alongside the core action RPG foundation.
NPC Bond System
The most interesting design feature confirmed is an NPC Bond system — a mechanic that let players build relationships with non-player characters over the course of the game. The system was described as similar to Persona’s Social Link system, where investing time and story moments into specific characters opens new dialogue, abilities, or story branches. In the context of Star Wars, this could have gone in some genuinely compelling directions — building trust with a Rebel cell, earning loyalty from a crew, or deepening connections with other survivors depending on which class you chose.
Combat and Powers
The footage shows a standard Star Wars action RPG toolkit — lightsabers, blasters, and Force powers, with different combat sequences showcasing how the abilities played out in fights against multiple enemy types simultaneously. Droid waves, Stormtrooper squads, and other unidentified enemies all appear in the gameplay clips.
Multiplayer Co-op Story
Magellan was built around a co-op multiplayer focus, with the entire story campaign designed to be completed with friends. This wasn’t a tacked-on feature — the cross-platform multiplayer aspect was central to the game’s pitch from the beginning, which fits with what Zynga originally said when it acquired Echtra: that the studio’s cross-platform tools were a major part of the deal.
Who Was Echtra Games?
Echtra Games was founded in 2016 by Max Schaefer, a co-founder of Blizzard North — the studio behind Diablo and Diablo II — and later a co-founder of Runic Games, which made the original Torchlight titles. Schaefer had serious ARPG pedigree. Echtra’s leadership team also included veterans from Blizzard, EA, Disney, and Undead Labs.
After spending time under Perfect World Entertainment working on what eventually became Torchlight 3, Echtra was acquired by Zynga in March 2021. The Torchlight IP stayed with Perfect World. Echtra started fresh on a new unannounced project — which we now know was Magellan — in collaboration with Zynga’s NaturalMotion studio.
Four years later, Zynga shut Echtra down in June 2025. The studio had released exactly zero games under Zynga ownership. Around 61 employees lost their jobs. In its statement, Zynga called it a “strategic realignment of the company’s resources and priorities” — the same language studios have used to close dozens of teams across the industry over the last few years. No game was ever revealed. No release date was ever set. Magellan simply stopped existing alongside the studio that built it.
Zynga itself is owned by Take-Two Interactive, the publisher behind GTA, Red Dead Redemption, and Borderlands — so the decision to close Echtra ultimately traces back to a strategic call somewhere in Take-Two’s broader restructuring of its portfolio priorities.
Where Magellan Fits in the Graveyard of Canceled Star Wars Games
Star Wars has one of the most painful histories of canceled games of any franchise in entertainment. Magellan joins a long list that includes:
- Star Wars 1313 — the dark, gritty Boba Fett underworld game that LucasArts was building before Disney’s acquisition shut down the studio entirely in 2013
- Project Ragtag — Amy Hennig’s Uncharted-style Star Wars heist game at Visceral Games, canceled when EA shut Visceral down in 2017
- Star Wars: KOTOR Remake — the Aspyr-developed remake of Knights of the Old Republic, which was pulled from Aspyr’s hands, handed to Saber Interactive, and has since gone completely dark
- Star Wars: First Assault — a multiplayer shooter LucasArts was developing that was killed when Disney acquired Lucasfilm
What’s notable about Magellan specifically is that it never even got a public announcement. Most of the canceled Star Wars games above at least had trailers, press releases, or E3 demos. Magellan existed entirely in the dark, and only surfaced at all because a former developer uploaded portfolio work after the studio was gone. Without that, it would have stayed buried permanently.
What Star Wars Games Are Actually Happening
For all the canceled games, the franchise is in a decent place on the active development side right now. Star Wars Zero Company — a tactical RPG developed with involvement from the writer behind the Jedi games — is currently in the works. Star Wars: Galactic Racer is also coming October 6, 2026, marking the franchise’s return to racing games for the first time since Star Wars Racer Revenge in 2002.
On the film side, Star Wars: Starfighter is in production through Lucasfilm and 21 Laps Entertainment, directed by Stranger Things executive producer Shawn Levy with a 2027 target. The Mandalorian and Grogu feature film has already hit theaters, continuing the franchise’s momentum on the screen side after The Mandalorian’s run from 2019 to 2023.
The Jedi series — Fallen Order in 2019 and Survivor in 2023 — established that there’s a real audience for single-player story-driven Star Wars games. Whether anything picks up the torch for a third installment featuring Cal Kestis hasn’t been officially confirmed, though it remains one of the more discussed open questions in Star Wars gaming.
Magellan had real ambitions. A co-op RPG with class-specific playstyles, NPC relationship systems, and a full story campaign set in the Star Wars universe — developed by people with Diablo and Torchlight DNA — could have been something worth playing. It didn’t get the chance, and now it lives in the same amber as 1313 and Ragtag: a game that sounds better the less we know about it, frozen at the most optimistic possible version of what it could have been.
Looking for more gaming news this week? The Fortnite Chapter 7 Season 4 Override trailer just dropped with the biggest gaming collab season in Fortnite history, the Modern Warfare 4 beta kicks off August 21 with campaign, multiplayer and Warzone all in one shot, and IllFonic’s Halloween: The Game just sorted out its New Zealand classification situation ahead of its September 8 launch. And if you need a controller refresh for any of it, GameStop’s broken controller trade-in deal is still running this month.
