Gameplay footage from Star Wars: Magellan, the third-person action-RPG that Echtra Games was building before Zynga shut the studio down in June 2025, surfaced online this weekend. It comes from a former Echtra developer, roughly a year after the project was officially cancelled, and it’s the first real look anyone outside the studio has had at what four-plus years of work on it actually looked like in motion. Reported by Eurogamer and covered in more detail by TheGamer and GamesRadar+.
What Magellan was
Echtra — founded by Diablo co-creator Max Schaefer, best known before this for Torchlight III — had been building Magellan since early 2021, in Unreal Engine 5, targeting PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. It was a multiplayer looter-shooter ARPG with two starting classes: a Jedi (codenamed Cleric, using a lightsaber and Force powers) and a Mandalorian (codenamed Triggerman, blaster and jetpack), with more weapons and Force abilities to unlock as loot. Levels were built vertically, with hub areas players could explore between missions, and an “NPC bond system” meant to tie relationships with non-playable characters into how the story played out. Zynga acquired Echtra in 2021 and closed it four years later without the studio ever shipping a single game.
That’s the part worth sitting with before getting to the footage: this wasn’t a six-month prototype. It’s the better part of half a decade of a full studio’s output, gone before a single public build existed.
What four years of unreleased environment work looks like
The reporting on the leaked clips describes hub environments meant to be explored outside combat — the kind of space that in a live production gets revisited dozens of times across a project: greybox, first pass, lighting pass, narrative dressing, then months of polish once the game’s target platforms and performance budget are actually locked. None of that late-stage work happens on a level that’s going to ship in six months. It happens on a level a team believes it has years to get right, because until closure day, that’s exactly what Magellan’s team had.
This is the detail that doesn’t make it into most of the coverage, because it’s not a dramatic detail — it’s a production detail. A live-service ARPG with vertical hub levels and a loot-and-progression loop needs an enormous amount of environment infrastructure just to function: modular kits built to support random loot placement, lighting rigs that hold up across dozens of mission variants, LOD and streaming budgets tuned for the largest space in the game, not the smallest. That’s infrastructure work, and it’s exactly the kind of work that produces nothing anyone outside the studio ever sees if the project dies before a marketing beat requires a trailer. Echtra apparently never got far enough to need one.
Where it actually goes
Zynga has said nothing public about what happens to Magellan’s assets, and there’s no reason to expect it will — engine content built under a Lucasfilm license reverts to Lucasfilm’s control on cancellation, and licensed IP work essentially never gets salvaged into something else, unlike an original IP a studio can sometimes shop around after a closure. The environments in that footage are Star Wars locations that will not appear in any future Star Wars game rebuilt from this pass, because a rebuild starts over. What’s left is what leaked: unpolished handheld footage of somebody’s years of level and lighting work, seen once, by an audience it was never made for.
It’s worth remembering the shape of that loss the next time a big licensed project gets cancelled and the headline is just a number of jobs. The jobs are the real story. But so is the specific, unglamorous fact that a hub level’s lighting pass doesn’t survive a studio closure any better than the studio itself does.