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

by

Man, it’s been kinda depressing lately seeing so many games get canceled. It’s not just games we barely heard about, either – some of these were announced years ago! And it’s happening across the board, with totally new ideas and expansions to games we already love just getting scrapped. It’s a real bummer as a gamer to see projects you were excited about just disappear.

It’s especially disappointing when promising games never get a chance to shine. That’s what happened with P11, a game Edios Montreal worked on for seven years before it was unfortunately canceled. It’s a tough situation for the team, particularly since reports suggest the game was nearly finished and ready to be released.

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

As a big fan of Eidos Montreal, it’s really heartbreaking to hear about P11, a game they poured millions into that we’ll likely never experience. From what I understand, it was going to be an open-world adventure where you played as a character named River, alongside their moose companion, fighting off evil spirits! They started working on it back in 2019, but kept running into issues with the game engine, which kept pushing back the release date and driving up the cost. It’s especially frustrating because reports say the game was actually almost finished and had passed a lot of the major development hurdles. It’s a real shame all that work might just disappear.

I was really excited about P11, and it was originally supposed to come out around 2026. But unfortunately, things have changed at Eidos Montreal and Embracer Group, and they’ve decided to cancel the game, even though it was almost finished. It’s really sad because over 100 people lost their jobs because of this. To make matters worse, David Anfossi, the studio head who’d been with the company for 19 years, has also left. It’s just the latest in a string of similar disappointments in the gaming world – a mysterious project at TiMi Montréal also got canceled recently, which is just really disheartening to see.

Why Game Cancellations Like This Hurt The Industry

It’s common for ambitious projects in creative fields to get canceled, especially when costs and potential profits are constantly shifting. But there’s a big difference between stopping a game early in development and canceling it right before release. A late cancellation is an active choice not to proceed, while an early stop often just means a project didn’t work out.

Developing P11 was expensive, making it difficult to turn a profit, though it wasn’t impossible. Eidos had proven they could create successful, large-scale adventure games – like Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy – that combined different genres. The possibility of them creating a fantastical game with the epic storytelling of Guardians of the Galaxy and the clever gameplay of Deus Ex was really appealing.

The cancellation means gamers will never experience the game and share their thoughts on it. All the effort and resources spent on development have essentially been wasted. It’s particularly disappointing for the developers who were so close to finishing and releasing their work. While launching the game would have cost more money, it deserved a chance to reach players. As a gamer myself, it’s sad to see another promising game cancelled and another studio impacted by layoffs.

Read More

2026-04-02 00:18