Developer shuts down, 50 people lose their jobs
Microsoft announced a reboot of a 10-year-old Xbox cult-classic,Phantom Dust, at its E3 conference last year. This raised a lot of “huh?” and a lot of “uh, ok” (from me included) but people who played the original were excited as hell.
Well, the independent studio making the reboot in partnership with Microsoft, Darkside Games, had to be shut down last month after MicrosoftcancelledDarkside’s version ofPhantom Dust, costing 50 people their jobs.
Microsoft is still working on aPhantom Dustreboot, though. Weird. It’s still unclear if Microsoft is continuing from where Darkside left off, which would be shady, or starting the reboot from scratch.
What Darkside came up with, this“near-final” footageleaked to Kotaku, looks alright, to the studio’s credit. Not as good as that recently leaked footage of thecanceledSoul Reaversequel, but not cancellation-bad.
According to the anonymous source, thePhantom Dustreboot began as a multiplayer game and Microsoft would ask for a single-player component later. Just two months ago creative director Ken Lobb talked about how it would be a30 hour JRPG.
“Originally the edict was to go 70% original game, 30% new,” the source said, “Over time that turned into ‘remakePhantom Dust,’ so that was our goal for the last half of development. We were going to update and streamline a very dated game (especially their menu system and horribly paced single player), but otherwise it was going to be a reboot/remake. I’d say we were probably trending towards an 85% remake, 15% new.”
