YouTuber Volound, known for his content on Total War games, anonymously interviewed some Creative Assembly developers about the canceled online shooter Hyena. The information was also confirmed by the publication’s sources VGC.
As it turned out from the blogger’s conversations with CA employees, Hyena became SEGA’s most expensive game, ahead of the first Shenmue (1999), which cost the company $70 million.
One of the developers said that the cancellation Hyena influenced by many factors – a complete lack of a clear creative vision, a passive attitude of project managers, a change in engine to Unreal Engine, cautious design and an oversaturated market
Hyena (codename Project Keaton) were given the green light after Alien: Isolation and Halo Wars 2 – both were well received, but they sold poorly; Creative Assembly bosses wanted to make a popular console game inspired by Destiny, Escape from Tarkov and PUBG
First concept Hyena taking into account the designated games, it was proposed back in 2017 – then CA bosses said that development would take 5 years
In the initial stages Hyena combined elements of Han Solo and the Firefly series – “lovable rascals” try to survive in a destroyed world controlled by high society
At first they wanted to use the Alien: Isolation engine for development, but abandoned it in favor of the Unreal Engine due to complex tools – this led to the fact that part of the team was temporarily transferred to Total War
In 2019-2020, Neill Blomkamp (“District 9”) worked on the game, who turned out to be a big fan of Alien: Isolation – in particular, he advised Creative Assembly on the overall direction Hyena
The idea that in the world Hyena the hero is stolen by various media of the past (discs, toys, music, video games, etc.), which belongs to Blomkamp – the same goes for humor and memes
The developers say that the period of working with Blomkamp was the most enjoyable, because at that moment Hyena there was a clear vision and the project felt “manageable”, but ultimately Creative Assembly and Blomkamp parted ways
After numerous alpha tests, SEGA was unhappy with the progress Hyena — in the last months before cancellation, the development was monitored by company employees who came straight from Japan
I forgot to mention that Hyena was SEGA’s most expensive game ever. Towards the end, the UK office was more or less constantly staffed by people from SEGA Japan, something that had NEVER happened in my time at CA. They came from time to time and looked at the game, but, as I said earlier, as a rule, they did not interfere with the development.
Anonymous developer
Before cancellation Hyena nevertheless, they decided to switch to a shareware distribution model, although initially they were going to sell it for the full price tag – it was one of those “super games” from SEGA, for the development of which they wanted to spend 900 million dollars
Many developers said in conversations that they were not angry about the cancellation Hyena, because otherwise SEGA would have lost a lot more money. They’re more upset about the layoffs at Creative Assembly, which even affected those who didn’t work on the game.
Hyena was announced in the summer of 2022.
