Cancelled shooter Hyenas was reportedly Sega's most expensive game ever

rockpapershotgun.com:

Creative Assembly’s Hyenas - the recently cancelled extraction shooter about space Robin Hoods - was supposedly publisher Sega’s biggest budget game ever. New details about the game’s development claim that a lack of direction, slow progress, and an engine change turned the once hopeful “Super Game” into the canned FPS that it sadly is today.

That’s according to a report from Total War-centric YouTuber Volound, citing anonymous sources that were corroborated by VGC. The report suggest Hyenas was originally greenlit after the lukewarm commercial performance of Alien: Isolation and strategy spin-off Halo Wars 2. Creative Assembly’s higher-ups reportedly wanted something more obviously sellable, and thus pointed to popular games such as Destiny, Escape From Tarkov, and PUBG as inspiration.

Hyenas is said to have been one of Sega’s much-discussed super games, which were described as mega-expensive blockbusters that the publisher hoped would rake in mega-bucks. Last year, the publisher described the initiative as a game that “can draw together a large community, involving not only players but also streamers who stream the game and viewers who watch their videos.” Mixing parts from every other blockbuster shooter would seem like one way to achieve that goal, but alas. “Towards the end, there were people from Sega Japan more or less permanently at the UK office,” one anonymous source told Volound, “this has never happened the whole time I’ve worked at [Creative Assembly].”

Another anonymous source told Volound: “In the early days, Hyenas aimed for a ‘lovable rogues’ vibe, surviving in a messed-up world controlled by the elite, channelling Han Solo with a bit of Firefly for good measure.” The game apparently had a “gritty