Embracer Cancels Highly Anticipated Red Faction: Guerrilla Sequel
- Gaming News Magazine
- June 22, 2024
- 10:37 am
- No Comments
According to a new story from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the Embracer Group just scrapped a sequel to Red Faction: Guerrilla, a third-person shooter game from 2009.
The game was not being developed by Volition, the original creator of Red Faction, which was shut down last year due to poor sales of the Saints Row reboot. Instead, it was created by Fishlabs, the Hamburg-based studio behind 2021’s space combat game Chorus.
Interestingly, prior to the Red Faction proposal, Fishlabs offered a new Lord of the Rings game to fellow Embracer Group colleagues at Middle-earth Enterprises. However, they never received a good reaction, so the team went on to the next pitch: a new Red Faction game set about a hundred years after the events of Guerrilla, with a more terraformed and colorful Mars. A female protagonist would have spearheaded the underground workers’ revolution. An internal source informed RPS: We were trying to figure out what Guerrilla did right and what Armageddon did wrong, and how we might combine the two and move on.
While the team’s initial intention was to focus on what worked well with Guerrilla (mostly the excellent devastation offered by the GeoMod engine), they also intended to include some deep sim aspects, vehicle customization, and even dynamic conversation.
Plaion’s first reaction to the pitch was positive, however in late November, an internal vote at the publishing company chose to abandon the Red Faction project. Fishlabs was also forced to lay off approximately 50 people as a result. According to the source, the German studio currently functions mostly as a support team, assisting other Embracer Group studios in the development of games. It’s unknown whether Fishlabs will ever get another chance to make their own game, and if so, when.