Prey 2’s been in on/off development since 2011 but now Bethesda’s vice president, Pete Hines, confirms the game is firmly in the off position. They cancelled it.
That’s a damn shame because Prey 2 was looking fantastic from the trailer footage released a couple of years ago and the premise of the thing was compelling, too. You played a US Marshall who’d been abducted from Earth and was now working as a bounty hunter on an alien world.
Prey 2 announced itself loudly and proudly at E3 2012 with this trailer:
Pete Hines confirmed to CNET at PAX Australia that Prey 2 had been cancelled in one of the most stilted, roundabout interviews I’ve ever read:
“It was a game we believed in, but we never felt that it got to where it needed to be – we never saw a path to success if we finished it. It wasn’t up to our quality standard and we decided to cancel it. It’s no longer in development. That wasn’t an easy decision, but it’s one that won’t surprise many folks given that we hadn’t been talking about it. Human Head Studios is no longer working on it. It’s a franchise we still believe we can do something with — we just need to see what that something is.”
Has the vice president been replaced by an alien imposter who can only talk in short sentences and restate the same point multiple times over? Quite possibly. Unfortunately, as far as we know, CNET didn’t take a skin or blood sample from the VP to do the necessary tests. If this is the case we could be in trouble, what if it this alien intrusion goes all the way to the top? Yes, to the President…of Bethesda, Todd Vaughn.
Somebody get on the line to XCOM!