We've heard plenty of speculation about the fate of Prey 2, since a series of unfortunate circumstances befell the project. Today we've gotten a new piece of official word from Human Head, and it's what you might call less than encouraging. According to designer Nathan Cheever, the game "hasn't been officially canceled, only in limbo."
Human Head Studios appears to be going through a fairly dramatic personnel shift, as reports indicate that the company has lost a significant amount of vital staff this year. The staff has either laid off or lost 13 members, which in a studio that boasted 50-70 at its peak is a pretty wide swath.
Read more: COO, development director, lead programmers among departures »
Human Head Studios has been dropping hints of a Rune revival. Now that Prey 2 is likely pulled from the studio's slate, the company is being a little more overt about its hopes to bring back the franchise.
"I can't reveal what we've got planned, but we fully intend to bring digital viking mayhem into the here-and-now," Human Head co-founder Ted Halsted said.
News that Prey 2 had not been cancelled, but rather delayed, was relieving to fans of the original. However, why has there been such secrecy surrounding the project over the last several months?
According to a Shacknews source who asked not to be identified, Human Head was not happy with the terms of its contract with ZeniMax, and deliberately stopped work on the game in November so it could try to negotiate a more favorable deal. While doing that, many on the development team were laid off, with the hope they would be rehired if the contract issue was resolved favorably. The process seemed to be gathering some positive momentum until January when ZeniMax's responses all but stopped, causing some of the laid-off Prey 2 team to wonder if the game would ever see the light of day.
Update: Human Head stopped working on Prey 2 in November, source says. (Story)
No new information had been available on Human Head's Prey 2 sequel for several months now, leading to plenty of speculation that the game had been cancelled. But publisher Bethesda has finally put those rumors to rest, saying the game is still in development.
Update: 2:36 p.m. with no comment from Bethesda.
When Shacknews' Ozzie Mejia previewed Human Head Studio's Prey 2 back at E3 last year, he came away impressed with the new direction the series seemed to be taking. Open-world bounty hunting is an intriguing concept, to say the least. That's why it's disheartening that a rumor has surfaced indicating that the game might never see the light of day.
When developer Human Head took the wraps off Prey 2 earlier this year it revealed many changes. One of the biggest of these was the apparent abandonment of Tommy, the native American protagonist the player controlled in the first game. And though the designers confirmed we'd still see him in the new game in our E3 Prey 2 preview, he'd been replaced as the main character in Prey 2 by Killian Samuels. He's a lawman who's become a bounty hunter on the planet Exodus, halfway across the galaxy from Earth. But where does that leave Tommy?
We'd heard little of Prey 2 since it was confirmed back in May 2008, until today's announcement from publisher Bethesda Softworks that it'll be released for PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in 2012.
Creator Human Head Studios is developing the sequel to its gravity-flipping, mind-boggling shooter upon an unspecified version of the id Tech engine. One can only hope that it'll be the Rage-powering id Tech 5, giving us gruesome and disturbing organic architecture rendered in greater detail than ever. The original Prey used id Tech 4, the Doom 3Read more »
"I am going to go with 2) on this one. My guess is they miscalculated the release of ..."
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