Here at Ars Technica, we're contemplating our own Rogue One-style heist adventure in the near future. In our case, instead of sending rebel troops to die in search of the Death Star's plans, we're thinking about ordering a few clumsy nerds to steal the Rolodex and contact list of Kotaku's Jason Schreier.

I mean, not really, but the Star Wars metaphor is apt today, as the reporter published a massive story on Friday that explains what went down behind the scenes before EA pulled a "close a studio and cancel a game" double-whammy last week. In his report, Schreier cites "nearly a dozen" anonymous sources from the worlds of EA and its former subsidiary Visceral Games.

The lengthy report expands on Schreier's own claims last week that Visceral's closure came for reasons that weren't apparent in the official EA announcement. Instead, its closure, and the shutdown of a game project codenamed Ragtag, boiled down to a general stink over a costly and badly organized production period, not to mention the awkward shoehorning of EA's Frostbite graphics engine (which EA had mandated the studio to use). "Like BioWare on Dragon Age and Mass Effect, Visceral found itself trying to make a third-person game on an engine built for first-person shooters," Schreier writes, and, based on Andromeda's woes, it's not hard to imagine the havoc that he says resulted.

Ironically, the project began life when LucasArts closed down in 2013, and a crew of its former staffers flocked to Visceral with designs on rebooting their canceled Star Wars 1313 project. Schreier explains that Visceral picked those staffers up to work on internal projects instead, including an eventually canceled open-world pirate game, before EA picked up the rights to Star Wars video games one month later. That changed everything and set Visceral's Star Wars plans into motion. As it turns out, according to Schreier, EA had asked Visceral to scrap its existing pirate game and transform it into an open-world "space scoundrel" game.

Schreier spells out an unsurprising tale of head-butting that eventually emerged between Visceral's developers and publishers. Among the issues: Ragtag would focus on an entirely new crew of "scoundrels and criminals," with a lofty premise that players would swap between characters to pull off crazy missions, and LucasArts had given Visceral the go-ahead to create new non-Jedi characters in the original-trilogy timeline. But EA brass was concerned about the game's lack of familiar faces. "Two former Visceral staff recall EA looking at Ragtag and asking where Chewbacca was," Schreier writes.

The report goes on to detail exactly how the game's director, Amy Hennig (formerly of the Uncharted series), landed in a far-from-ideal leadership environment, with sources both criticizing and forgiving her inability to lead the project (which she had steered away from open-world combat and toward a linear, Uncharted-style project). Ragtag's eventual merge with EA Vancouver didn't help matters, which came as Visceral staffers saw declining trust in the project from EA brass and began looking for jobs elsewhere. EA Vancouver is now the lead studio working on a project that will possibly pick up Ragtag's scraps.

Of serious doubt is whether Hennig could reacquire the Star Wars game plot she'd developed to, for example, put out a book version. It sounds pretty killer: "Set between the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, Ragtag would focus on the impact of Alderaan’s destruction and tell a story about criminal families, scoundrels, and action-packed heists," Schreier writes, and he reports that all of his sources "unanimously" described the plot's development and build-out as "awesome." She declined to respond to Schreier's request for comment as any comments had to be approved by EA, and it remains unclear what, if anything, she'll continue making for EA.

EA issued a statement from executive Patrick Söderlund to Kotaku instead of answering Schreier's many pointed questions. It reads in part: "This truly isn’t about the death of single-player games—I love single-player, by the way—or story and character-driven games. Storytelling has always been part of who we are, and single-player games will of course continue. This also isn’t about needing a game that monetizes in a certain way. Those are both important topics, but that’s not what this is. At the end of the day, this was a creative decision."

For plenty more context and reporting, head to Kotaku to read the whole thing.