Prey 2 development stopped, not cancelled

The first person shooter (FPS) game Prey was released in 2006 after a very troubled development cycle. The game came out eleven years after being announced in 1997. The game was highly acclaimed mainly for some of the major innovations it brought along to the cookie-cutter FPS genre. Its sequel, Prey 2, was announced for a 2012 release. But recently, Pete Hines told IGN Benelux that development on the sequel has been stopped.

“I can be very clear about this. At one point, we looked at Prey 2 and decided that in its current state, with all the money, time, and resources we put into it, it didn’t meet our expectations. So we decided to pull the plug from our end,” Hines told IGN Benelux. “It was a tough business decision, but at that point it was the right one. It’s never a good thing to have to make those choices. It’s a shame, but it comes with the territory”.

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Development for Prey 2 has been halted

According to the interview, the game was believed to be cancelled. However, according to a report by OnlySP, Hines later tweeted that just the development on the game has only stopped but the game hasn’t been cancelled. “To clarify, I didn’t say Prey 2 was canx. Gave an interview in English, translated to Dutch, translated back to English. #LostInTranslation”

The game was removed from Bethesda’s website a few days ago. Bethesda told the gaming industry that it wanted to prioritise its upcoming games such as Dishonored and The Elder Scrolls Online. The interview and the tweet are now official confirmation of the game’s development halting.

The first game, Prey, had come out with four major breakthroughs in its otherwise cookie-cutter FPS gameplay. The first was the portal system, which allowed the players to create rifts in space between any two points of a level. This idea was executed a year before Portal would come out in The Orange Box. The second breakthrough was wall walking, where gravity walkways and gravity switches allowed players to walk on walls and ceilings. The third was spirit walking, where the character’s spirit would leave his body and sneak up on enemies and walk through force fields, among other things. The fourth major breakthrough was death walking, where dying didn’t set the player back. Dying instead caused the player to go into a minigame afterlife where the player shot spiritual eagles to determine how much health they would have when they returned to the real world.

The game was generally praised for its major innovations that spiced up otherwise generic FPS gameplay, though the game had its fair share of criticism.