Canceled shooter Hyenas reportedly suffered from a lack of direction and was “Sega’s biggest budget game ever”

Sega announced last week that Creative Assembly's looter shooter Hyenas, as well as several other unannounced projects, had been canceled to cut costs in Europe. Anonymous project developers have now spoken out about the project's cancellation and what led to the decision.

The details:

• Volound, a Total War YouTuber, has released a new video containing claims from numerous anonymous developers involved with Hyenas, claiming that a lack of direction, an engine change, and a lack of innovation contributed to the game's early demise. “So what went wrong? Total lack of direction, many of the leadership asleep at the wheel but they never seem to lose their jobs. An engine change, part way through the process,” one developer wrote. “Attempting to break into a saturated market, and not committing to do anything adventurous with the game.”
• Management at Creative Assembly was said to have drawn inspiration for the game from Destiny, Escape from Tarkov, and PUBG, which was pitched as a PvPvE title with a "lovable rogues vibe." It was also rumored that it was going to be built with Alien: Isolation's Cathode engine until the team ran into issues with its tools and decided to switch to Unreal Engine. As a result, a portion of the development team was shifted to work on Total War.
• It has also been suggested that Hyenas was one of the publisher's "super game" titles, which were intended to be high-budget releases with significant profit potential from live-service sales. Former developers who spoke with VGC stated that the shooter had the highest budget since Shenmue, which was said to have cost upwards of $70 million to develop back in 1999. One former developer also claimed that Sega executives frequently visited the studio to check on progress, which was "rare" to see.

More gaming news:

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• Batman: Arkham Trilogy for the Switch has been pushed back from October to December as its developer Turn Me Up Games needs more time to "bring players the best possible experience" on the system.