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Rumor: Ignition lays off UK employees, cancels WarDevil again
Ignition Games' transition to a pure publishing operation continues, Develop reports, with layoffs at the company's London studio following those last week in Austin. Anonymous sources told the site that the London team was told of the layoffs on Friday. As Develop puts it, "redundancies have been issued across the entire London development outfit." This once again brings work on WarDevil to a halt. The game was canceled last year following an earlier round of layoffs in Ignition's UK operation. Development started again later that year under the name Project Kane. Develop was unable to confirm this, but heard reports that Ignition was willing to let the project continue if an external developer signed on to complete it. This accompanies rumors that Ignition's Japan studio will close following completion of its latest project -- which, as far as we can tell, would be any work involved with the localization of El Shaddai.
WarDevil not canceled after all, will now live on as 'Project Kane'
Ignition has decided against canceling WarDevil, a game that has been in development at the publisher's London studio for five years now, despite earlier reports to the contrary. Instead, the game will live on under the title "Project Kane" -- a title to which we've heard references before. WarDevil and Project Kane are now combined into one project at the London studio, with a projected launch date of Q4 2011. The London studio was to be shuttered back in September, but Ignition changed its mind the next month. The studio lives on and will continue developing the game under its new title. Ignition was also forced to shutter its Florida office this month, which was knee-deep in development of a sci-fi FPS called Reich.
WarDevil canceled after five years
After five years in development, Ignition's ambitious action game WarDevil has been canceled, according to Develop. The final nail in the game's coffin follows last month's reported closure of Ignition's London studio (formerly Digi-Guys) where the long-suffering game was being crafted. (As it happens, Ignition now says the London studio will soldier on as the hub of a refocused digital development operation, but that's neither here nor there.) So, who could have ever guessed this would happen? Why, you, dear reader. Here, let's look at our past WarDevil headlines and see if we couldn't have CSI'ed this thing out. Ignition shutting down London studio, fate of WarDevil under evaluation (This is kind of an obvious one. Let's dig deeper.) WarDevil resurfaces in bizarre (original) Xbox demonstration ("Resurfaces" is what we call a "danger word." Also: This story was from a year ago.) Relax! WarDevil isn't cancelled (Justin from August of 2009 feels really bad about leading you astray here.) WarDevil returns in first new trailer in two years ("Returns" isn't as bad as "resurfaces," except when you add the phrase "after two years.") WarDevil: Enigma screens drop out of the sky (This story from 2007 is notable only because someone somewhere realized that the unintentionally hilarious subtitle would have to be removed.) Our hearts, of course, go out to those hurt by the cancellation, but we'd like to think the reaction of those closest to the game was less "How could this happen?" and more "Oh, well, naturally."
Ignition shutting down London studio, fate of WarDevil under evaluation
Ignition Entertainment is in the process of shutting down its west London development studio, reports GamesIndustry.biz. The closure will result in an unspecified number of layoffs, and stalls the progress of WarDevil and another project, uh, Project Kane. The studio is expected to officially close on October 31. Formerly known as Digi-Guys, the Ignition London studio, located in Ealing, has been toiling over various incarnations of WarDevil for years. A "WarDevil: Unleash the Beast Within" demo was first shown at TGS ... 2005. The last update on the game dates back to roughly a year ago, when Edge magazine toured the studio and saw two tech demos (one on the original Xbox!). According to Ignition group chairman Hassan Sadiq, the mysterious WarDevil and the even more mysterious Project Kane just passed new, six-month proof-of-concept phases, and "the board and studio management are currently evaluating [...] whether the required quality will be achieved by completing internally or with an external partner." Ignitiion, which was acquired by Indian media conglomerate UTV in 2007, will continue to operate its corporate headquarters out of London, with a focus on publishing; though Sadiq assured that projects underway at Ignition's other studios in Austin, Gainesville (Fla.), Beijing and Tokyo (where the intriguing action game El Shaddai is in development) are "ramping up." The company's most recent release was Zombie Studios' Blacklight: Tango Down, a downloadable mutliplayer FPS.
WarDevil resurfaces in bizarre (original) Xbox demonstration
After five years in the making and hardly any time taken out for interviews or status updates, you'd imagine Digi-Guys' WarDevil would be just about wrapped up and ready to grab some GOTY awards, right? Not so much, as Edge discovered during a studio tour. Although Digi-Guys does have some very cool technology to show off, that may eventually result in a game. To prove the effectiveness of the developer's mysterious texture technology, Digi-Guys gave Edge a demonstration of the game engine as it was in 2005 -- running on an Xbox. The first one. "So what you'd expect to see even in modern games – textures that turn to porridge if you look too close – doesn't happen here," Edge notes. "Then there's motion blur, of the kind seen in Jurassic Park rather than the harsh, sometimes nauseating vector blur used in modern games. Add to that many of the light and particle effects you'd expect to see today, and a healthy layer of anti-aliasing." Another demo on more recent hardware is similarly impressive, showing high detail in skin and clothing as the camera zooms in. Evidently, this version of WarDevil was actually playable behind closed doors at Tokyo Game Show -- and not, like the Xbox demo, in a placeholder rail shooter mode. And that is progress.
Relax! WarDevil isn't cancelled
We know you've been on pins and needles, desperate for any new information on WarDevil, a Digi-Guys game that was supposed to be multiplatform before the 360 version got canned. If we seem a little sketchy on the whole thing, it's with good reason: we haven't heard a peep about the game since May of 2008.Now, IGN's reporting that it's not as dead as one might assume given the title's history: Ignition's promoting the game on its website again and revealing that the 360 version of the game will appear alongside its PS3 counterpart.Now, umm ... what kind of game is it, exactly?
WarDevil returns in first new trailer in two years
Remember WarDevil? Don't blame yourself if you don't -- the last anyone saw of this PS3 exclusive was in E3 2006. Now, this game from the dudes at Digi-Guys has a brand new trailer. It's mysterious, and doesn't reveal much, but it reminds us that this game is still in development. We want to know more about this title, but don't be surprised if we have to wait until this year's E3 to find out anything of substance.
Mercury Meltdown pub expands, promises new next-gen IP
As much as we have grown tired of having games developed for this generation of consoles referred to as "next-gen entertainment," that ire is evidently not shared by all. Ignition Entertainment, publisher of Mercury Meltdown and the adolescent undead romp Teenage Zombies, today announced the opening of not one, but two new studios committed to so-called next-gen game development. The new studios will operate out of both Tokyo and Florida, and according to Ignition will focus on creating "new IP specifically for the next generation formats," but which formats exactly remain a mystery. In fact, no details about upcoming projects from either Ignition Tokyo or Florida have been announced, though in looking at the company's subsidiary Digi-Guys, which has been working on WarDevil since well before the launch of the Xbox 360, it's clear that these studios are not in a hurry.
WarDevil: Enigma screens drop out of the sky
There sure are a lot of screenshots floating around today. This time we get a few glimpses at the very, erm, gray, WarDevil: Enigma. The screenshots are impressive, yeah, but there's a lot of drab going on. For the uninitiated, WarDevil: Enigma centers around this guy who's pretty hardcore. He wears tight, futurisitic suits and enjoys vaguely futuristic firearms and a nifty blade that pops out of his forearm (we're assuming the suit plays some role in that process). Other than that, it's anybody's guess how closely this follows the 360 WarDevil game. Futuristic, fighting robots, explosions. That's our estimation. In any case, feel free to check out the trinity of screenshots.
Get your WarDevil terminology straight
WarDevil is a tricky, er, devil. See, the "WarDevil Project" is the next-gen development from Digi-Guys, a game studio in the UK. The game even has an engine built for it, dubbed "RTE1080". This engine has the ability to run a game at full 1080p at 60 frames per second. Clear as hell, smooth as hell... hell's looking good. Anyway, some of you may remember a technical demo from E3 2006 called "WarDevil: Enigma" -- this is going to be used to introduce characters and is the version that will be used at shows, like E3 and TGS. Not sure what this means... are they creating two versions of the game? One that they can use at shows, using specifically created demo maps and then the other version is the "true" game? Hmm.There was also something called "WarDevil Unleash the Beast Within" shown at the Tokyo Game Show back in 2005. That's going to be a companion to the "Enigma" showings, along with a feature film. Geez. Whatever this mysterious WarDevil turns out to be, it's got a lot of crap backing it up. Best of all for now, it's a PS3 exclusive. We'll keep you up to date as details pop up.
