AAA Open-World Game Canceled After Being in Development for 7 Years

The gaming industry has seen a rise in the number of high-profile games that have been canceled lately. Some of them have been only rumored, while others were formally announced years before they had the plug pulled. Some of them have been fresh concepts, while others have been expansions of established IP.

The most frustrating of these scenarios are often the original games that could have become something unique in the gaming space if they had been given the chance to reach players. That’s exactly the fate of a game only known as P11, which Edios Montreal had been working on for 7 years before it was canceled. It’s a heartbreaking turn for the company, especially because the game was reportedly almost ready to ship.

Eidos Were Planning To Release Their Newest Game This Year Before It Was Canceled

Eidos Montreal spent millions of dollars on a game that no one will ever get to play. Dubbed P11 internally, Eidos Montreal’s next game was reportedly an open-world action-adventure game where players took on the role of River and their giant moose companion as they combated nefarious spirits. Work began on the project in 2019, although the potential release of the title was delayed by shifts in the game engines used for development. This also caused the development budget to severely increase over time. However, reports indicate that the game was actually nearing completion and had cleared major development milestones.

The game was even tentatively set to launch sometime in 2026. However, it appears that the decision makers behind Eidos Montreal and their parent company Embracer changed their minds. Despite being nearly complete, P11 has been formally canceled. As a result of that cancellation, over 100 employees were terminated from the company. This is on top of studio head David Anfossi leaving the company after 19 years. This isn’t the only recent example of that kind of thing happening in the modern games industry, with a similar fate befalling a mysterious game being developed at TiMi Montréal.

Why Game Cancellations Like This Hurt The Industry

As with any creative industry in a capitalist system, there are going to be big and bold productions that simply never manage to cross the finish line. Projects being canceled are a simple reality of the creative system, where the cost/reward ratio can seem to change on a daily basis. However, there’s a difference between a game being shuttered after a brief period of development and a game being shut down right before it was ready to launch, as it represents an active decision to not move forward versus simply giving up on a project.

The cost of P11 means it had an uphill battle to become profitable, but there was still a very real chance it could have achieved that goal. Eidos had previously found big success with Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, suggesting they had the skills to deliver on large-scale adventure games that played with genre. The idea of seeing them take on a more fantastical direction was an exciting one, especially if it could blend the cinematic scope of Guardians of the Galaxy while retaining the inventive depth of Deus Ex.

However, due to this cancellation, gamers will never get the chance to form their own opinion about the project. All the time, energy, and money that went into the project are more or less lost to time as a result of this decision. The ensuing layoffs are also especially frustrating for the developers, especially because all their hard work seemed so close to being finished and released. Launching the game would have come with further costs, but the game still deserved a chance to see the light of day and win over players. Even just as a player, it’s sad to hear that a game never got the chance to actually connect with gamers and that an established studio has become just the latest gaming company to be hit by layoffs.