Sony Santa Monica's mysterious PlayStation 4 exclusive sci-fi title was cancelled many moons ago, but have you ever wondered what it looked like? Up until recently all we had to go on was a codename – Darkside – and a sneaky tease hidden inside God of War Ascension, but now some concepts have been uncovered on artist Erik San Juan's website. It looks kinda… Weird.
While we're not going to replicate all of the images here, some show humanoid-type creatures riding atop unicorn-esque bisons – or something. Honestly, it looks nutty as hell, and it's unclear how many of these concepts actually made their way into the game that the developer was making. Given that there's not really much cohesion between the pics, we're going to assume a lot of this was experimentation.
This project was in production for a long time, and the platform holder allegedly sunk over $100 million into it before deciding to cut its losses. We'll probably never know the full extent of what the game was supposed to be, but surface similarities to Destiny and Horizon: Zero Dawn have been cited as reasons why it may have been canned.
That and it honestly looks kinda crud, we suppose.
[source eriksanjuanart.com, via nerdleaks.com]
Comments 16
That's quite a lot of money for game that just ended up being canned. Seeing those estimates they've probably been working on something big or they were just negligent with money, either way this project will probably be lost to obscurity.
This is why acid is bad, kids.
Stupid decision. Just as bad as MS with Scalebound.
I would have prefered this to more God of War, but I can see it absolutely makes business sense to make a sequel to game that still sells well and for which the last game in the series was well received, than to take a risk on a new IP.
If judging a whole game from one piece of artwork like I am here, then I think it's a good thing this was cancelled!
@Bad-MuthaAdebisi
The damage a mediocre or even bad game can do to a brand is ultimately more important for these companies than the 100 million. In the end Destiny alone probably ended up making Sony the cost of canning that game back, so if the game was just 'Destiny's retarted little brother' it's for the best it didn't see the light of day.
This doesn't mean that wasting 100 million is something that simply is "part of the business"; the project should've been terminated in an earlier stage. These sort of projects and throwing money down an endless well is emblematic of the old PlayStation and Sony in general, behavior that has its roots in the 80s and 90s where there was just money to burn in Japan. Sony closed down or sold a lot of studios since the end of the PS3 era and although this means that we won't see as much crazy, expirimental stuff as we're used to, we do get a company that's highly profitable in return that every blue moon makes a crazy game or peripheral instead of multiple a year.
@Boerewors Sony makes plenty of games that probably barely break even, they're selling hardware and software sells hardware, its an investment and now its just a big red 100 million loss
@Bad-MuthaAdebisi
It isn't about the money, it's about reputation. It's better to flush 100 million down the drain, than to put your weight behind a game that bombs. We've seen with the launch of the One what a company's reputation can mean in this industry, something Sony also had to learn the hard way.
Sony's 1st parties have been wasting money for years, but those times are long gone. I know quite a few stories about Sony and MS's internal development teams and how money never was an issue for them; a successful lean and mean studio could be bought and transform into a complacent money- drain in a few years because Sony wasn't keeping them on a tight leash.
This hands- off approach led to some of the best games we've seen so far, but it also facilitated laziness and burning through Sony's money.
£100 mill before cutting losses! Christ. No wonder we get DlC and microtransactions. Mental.
@Boerewors Reputation is irrelevant, people buy games regardless of if they're crap or not and Sony make plenty of games that bomb. Nobody thinks Japan Studio are the worst thing ever or that Sony made a huge mistake with The Last Guardian, it's apparently pretty good and bombed. Doesn't matter.
@Bad-MuthaAdebisi I agree that both reputation and quality shouldn't always be the deciding factor but from what I heard on the from insiders (take a pinch of salt obviously) was that the game was missing every major deadline and QA test. If true then it would have cost Sony probably more then double $100m just to get the game in a decent state before taking in marketing costs. At which point it might have effected Sony's chances of funding other games as well. So probably a decision was made to cut their losses then have another Last Guardian on their hands.
$100 million?! Jeez, you'd think they'd at least have a trailer at that point? (maybe they do and it just wasn't released) Looks a lot like Horizon and Destiny
100 million?!? What a waste.
Couldn't they at least have made a download game out of that?
Even if it wasn't panning out as AAA, you'd think they'd still want to recoup something.
Looks cool to me
@Bad-MuthaAdebisi Just put in another 100m to get a alpha. I would not have to let it go to 100m before cancelling it. I hope you never get to run a company it will be bankrupt in november time with these idea's......
Looks pretty interesting. I also see those vampire things in the background.
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