Bethesda has announced that Prey 2 has officially been cancelled. Not just lightly cancelled, not just moderately cancelled... but hard cancelled. If this were a movie Prey 2 would have been Cancelled Hard: With A Vengeance.
CNET managed to get in word with Besthesda's vice president, Pete Hines, at PAX Australia. The event allowed Hines to open up a bit about the progress – or lack thereof – for the first-person shooter.
According to Hines...
"It was game we believed in, but we never felt that it got to where it needed to be - we never saw a path to success if we finished it," … "It wasn't up to our quality standard and we decided to cancel it. It's no longer in development. That wasn't an easy decision, but it's one that won't surprise many folks given that we hadn't been talking about it.
It is true that the game hasn't been in the spotlight for a long time. There was a lot of speculation about it since earlier in 2013, but it was just speculation. The game had stopped its development for as far back as November, 2011. That's three years ago that the team had been working on Prey 2.
When that report released in April of 2012, it followed on Bethesda claiming that the game had not been cancelled.
However, Hines confirms that the developers really have been absent from the development scene on Prey 2, noting...
"Human Head Studios is no longer working on [it]. It's a franchise we still believe we can do something with -- we just need to see what that something is."
That's a very interesting way of going about it. They're essentially saying that the game has potential (or at least the franchise) but the product that they had at the time of canceling it was not up to par.
It's not something that's hard to imagine because the game would have required a lot of dedication from the team to live up to the very impressive cinematic trailer (which you can view below).
What's interesting is that if the E3, 2011 trailer was such a hit, why did development on the game cease in November?
Apparently Bethesda saw what the developers were doing and opted not to pursue it further. I'm kind of curious exactly what the game looked and played like, though? I mean, we have a very high-octane cinematic trailer and – according to Hines' words on the matter – a disappointing end result, it kind of makes you question if it was too generic, too ambitious or too... something? “Not up to quality standard” could mean a number of things, but we at least know that Human Head Studios wasn't quite seeing eye to eye to what Bethesda had in mind.
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