SEGA has prepared its “biggest budget ever” so that the creators of the Total War series and the excellent Alien Isolation could develop new IP. However, as we know , Hyenas was canceled because the game was supposed to face a “total lack of direction”.
Creative Assembly’s online cooperative and competitive PvPvE shooter will not debut, but it turns out that Hyenas was not a modest project developed by a smaller team. The editors of VGC and Volound confirmed a lot of details about the production – journalists contacted the developers, who confirmed that the creators did not really have one direction for the game’s development.
The team responsible for Hyenas never created a single, solid vision for the project, and along the way, the developers changed the engine and did not want to implement any plot elements for production, which ultimately was to sink the game, which received negative reviews in internal tests. The title was supposed to “blend into the background” of other shooters and never reach a wide audience.
The situation is interesting because although Hyenas was announced as a premium title, in the meantime this idea was completely abandoned and the proposal was to be released on the market as a free-2-play shooter with microtransactions.
For years, developers were unable to create an appropriate concept and constantly changed the basic elements of the game – one example is the complete abandonment of previously developed character designs. Ultimately, the characters were “unmemorable” and “unrecognizable.”
Even Neill Blomkamp was involved in the project – the director appeared in the studio, imposed his vision, and at that time received a lot of “internet humor”, which was well received by some developers.
[Blomkamp] also had the idea to put in a lot of internet humor and stuff. He even made an atmospheric video to show what he was thinking, and honestly, after that “what are we doing here” period, it was a real boost to have some DIRECTION (the project so often felt completely rudderless).
Volound claims that Hyenas was given the “biggest budget in Sega’s history”, which resulted in a steady stream of Japanese from the corporate headquarters coming to the UK – something that had never happened with other projects.
The game’s development was to cost over $70 million – for about $70 million, Shenmue from 1999 was created, which is currently the most expensive production in Sega’s history.
One source said that SEGA actually did the right thing by abandoning the project because the company would have lost even more money. Hyenas’ problem was management’s inability to develop a single idea for the rest of the studio to produce.
Source: VGC