Beta + Cancelled FPS Video Games

Enemy Front is a World War II First-Person Shooter released in 2014 for the PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 by CI Games (formerly City Interactive). The game put you in the shoes of Robert Hawkins, an American war correspondent, caught up across Europe with various Resistance fighters, fighting during real World War II historical events that were largely never transposed in video games, particularly First-Person Shooters, such as the Warsaw Uprising. It features open-ended levels allowing for the players to have their own playing style, similar to the Crysis serie.

But before being available as such, Enemy Front had a slightly different approach that was eventually ditched following a small chaotic development leading to redundancies, restructuration and cancellation of some CI Games projects.

Everything began in November 2011 with the announcement of the project by City Interactive, with Stuart Black, known for Black, as Creative Director, as we could read on Engadget:

Stuart Black’s “exciting new story-driven WWII shooter” will be called Enemy Front, publisher City Interactive announced today. The game will be powered by CryEngine 3 and will launch on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC with an expected 2012 release date.

The title got more coverage in the beginning of spring 2012, debuting with an interview of Black by Digital Spy where we could learn that he took inspiration of 60’s and 70’s World War II movies for the tone of the story, especially Where Eagles Dare, but also The Dirty Dozen:

We talk to Black about why he chose to work on this project, how Enemy Front takes its influences from classic war movies like Where Eagles Dare and its back-to-basics approach to multiplayer.
DS: Why choose this project and why choose City Interactive?
S.B.: “Well, City Interactive in particular, I was just really impressed with their attitude. When I left Codemasters and I was looking for another project to be attached to, I certainly didn’t want to do another modern-day shooter having worked on two. I was kind of, ‘I haven’t got any ideas to bring to the table for a modern-day thing’, so I was instantly attracted by the idea of a World War II game.
“As I said earlier, one of the first questions I always ask myself is: ‘Right, if I want to play this style of game, could I go out and buy it tomorrow?’ And when it comes to a quality World War II shooter, no I can’t.
“I’d have to go back to Brothers in Arms or World at War, but then World at War is very different because it’s a Pacific campaign and the Japanese fighting was very different, with the Banzai rushing and surprise ambush attacks, it’s not your typical Nazis in Europe.
DS: Is it the case that these games are a bit old now? Will you be introducing more modern elements?
S.B.: “We hopefully want to modernise it and take like a modern blockbuster kind of approach to it. And get out of that [Saving] Private Ryan rut. That being a front line grunt, with some sergeant constantly barking orders at you, saying, ‘Go here, take that machine gun, up that hill!’ You almost feel like a bit player in your own game.
“It’s like, ‘I ain’t the star’, this other guy, the guy that I’m following, he’s the f**king lead and I’m some secondary character. So we wanted to get you back to being the hero again in that way and to get out of that Normandy to Berlin run.
“Which you can understand why lots of games do it, because until then, most of the big battles, the Allies lost! Researching this and looking at all the historical battles it’s like, ‘OK, I can see why everybody starts at Dunkirk because until then there were no victories’, and who wants to take part in a game where you’re always on the losing side?
“So that combined with the idea, OK we want you to be the hero, we want to look back at the old ’70s war movies, that kind of man-on-a-mission flavour. Dirty Dozen, and in particular, Where Eagles Dare, that was a big influence. I was really surprised when I saw that movie at how well it stands up.
(…) So that kind of became our template. Getting back to that more action-orientated thing instead of that reverential approach to the war.
“Keep it authentic, authentic weapons, authentic locations, but get a bit more adventure spirit into the action, particularly in the story.”
DS: Was it a challenge having a realistic historic setting and having those adventure elements?
S.B.: ” We’ve taken some historical events, in Saint-Nazaire, France, there was a famous Commando raid on a naval base so we have that happening, you take part in that. But you’ve got your own objectives off to the side, leap-frogging or piggy-backing on this commando raid to do your own thing. There’s plenty of flexibility in that.”
DS: In the presentation, I believe a slide said it was ‘beat-based arcade action’; what do you mean by that?
S.B.: “What we mean that it is fairly linear, and it is split down into moments of specific action. What you played here was effectively the first beat of this game, with the beat being the action around the old house, right? There’s significant moments of action, a tank coming rolling in, bursting into a wall or whatever, that would be a particular beat of action.
“That’s what we mean by beats by that, it’s the pacing of the action. The peaks and troughs of it. As I said, it’s a demo we’ve got right now, it’s about keeping the intensity going. When we do our final there’ll be much more peaks and troughs.”
DS: And there will be opportunities for stealth?
S.B.: “You should always have the opportunity, in any given situation – well, not say any, but in the majority of given situations – it should be up to you how you approach that. If you want to take that quietly or want to lock and load and go in all guns blazing.
“Or say, ‘I’ve got a huge sack of smoke grenades here, I’ll just start tossing these around and get the planes in blowing the s**t out of this stuff’, and mix and match them, right?
DS: How are you approaching multiplayer?
S.B.: “We wanted to take a focussed approach to it, a team-based game. The closest equivalent would be Day of Defeat, that would be the shorthand way of describing it.
“It’s territory-based, the levels are sort of corridors. You’ve got the range territories up these corridors, two teams, eight a side we’re hoping. Each territory that you take has different equipment associated with it.
“What I can’t really do is go into a team-based game that doesn’t have that kind of stuff on it anymore, and just have this kind of pure skill-based game. So there will be different classes, your heavy guys, your scout guys, your typical grunt guy, engineery type guy and then different equipment.
“You all have starting equipment based on your class and there will be different movement speeds and characteristics of your classes. And then depending on which control point or territories you’ve taken over will unlock different equipment for you to use during that play session.”

The following month, numerous video previews were shared showing gameplay and the game was also present at E3 2012. Thus, Game Informer wrote a preview about the singleplayer and the multiplayer components:

(…) There are going to be 10 different enemy class types, with jobs spanning from typical armed opposition and medics running around the battlefield healing enemies you merely maimed, to enemies whose job it is to run off and call for back-up by blowing whistles or shooting off flares.
Another way Enemy Front focuses on gunplay is by offering three unique play styles that correspond to different types of shooters. You choose your style at the beginning of your game. Hope mode offers rechargeable health. Honor mode takes away rechargeable health but lets the player pick up and use health packs. Players also scavenge for health packs in Glory mode, which offers the purest cinematic experience by taking away your crosshairs and HUD.
In what is a surprising revelation for a first-person shooter with online multiplayer gameplay, the team at City Interactive is focusing one mode, and it’s not your standard deathmatch. The mode is called Conquest, and it’s a team based multiplayer mode where two teams work against one another to capture points in a corridor like level, as Black describes it. The corridor design of the stages, as opposed to the open environments typically seen in other online shooters, plays into the overall design of Enemy Front. Players are being fed into team versus team shootouts, as opposed to multiple miniature skirmishes happening all over the map. It’s all about playing tug-of-war with the front line of battle along the level.

With its presentation at E3, other websites wrote various previews. For instance, Gamerant wrote:

While still pre-alpha in construction, the demo shown at E3 followed the main character – referred to as ‘Alders’ – battling his way through a French village occupied by German forces. As an OSS Ranger dropped behind enemy lines, the players is not simply required to complete a straightforward objective as part of a larger offensive, but stumbles upon a conspiracy that will send him hurtling across Europe.
The game’s stages set within France, Poland and Germany may not exactly be untapped wells, but the studio’s commitment to CryENGINE 3 means that there will be some new features to experiment with. Enemy Front, like Black, will be placing an emphasis on the destructible environments and construction that the new engine makes possible. Enemy gunfire was shown to result in everything from splintered wood to pulverized masonry, so the moment-to-moment instances of spraying-and-praying do offer a satisfying amount of visual and audio feedback.
While the implausibility of the plot – sending a single soldier across Europe to do what an army cannot – may imply a suspension of disbelief in terms of danger and overwhelming odds, players won’t have to indulge themselves in invincibility. Occasionally the number of approaching enemies will mean that avoiding a skirmish is the best course of action. But, this being a game designed by Stuart Black, the game’s mechanics aren’t exactly beholden to a sense of realism.
A pistol with infinite ammo is set to keep the action moving forward, just one of many tropes of the genre set to appear. A proper English Commando and an alluring female French resistance fighter will be aiding Alders in his investigation, and those capable of dispatching German soldiers will be treated with a smart remark from Alders worthy of a wink to the camera.
The developers promise a wide range of period weaponry including lesser-known models of machine-guns and throwing knives, the use of vehicles in combat, and the ability to work with friendly forces as their missions align with that of Alders. Among the locations teased was the ‘Wolf’s Lair,’ Hitler’s base of operations on the Eastern Front, so expect the game’s campaign to depict a seriously grueling trek.
The basic gameplay of Enemy Front is not attempting to reinvent the shooter genre in any way, and while the footage shown was far from finished, the foundation seems strong. Artificial Intelligence behavior and hit detection all seemed to be well-tuned, and the design team’s decision to work all ammo and directional indicators into a single widget in the corner of the screen, thus leaving the rest of the screen free from obstruction, was a particularly nice touch.

On the other hand, French website Jeuxvideopc.com was far less impressed:

To be completely honest, we wonder why City Interactive unveiled its new title to the press. Not only does Enemy Front seriously smack of deja vu by offering us the role of an American hero whose goal is to sabotage the German lines all over Europe, but what we were able to see was perhaps one of the ugliest things seen at E3. When the developers told us that it was the Cry Engine 3 that was running their game, we had a hard time believing them. Not only are the environments absolutely sad, with a crying lack of life and vegetation, but the game also lag like a Doom 3 on a Pentium II. We were promised that the AI will be ultra-worked (it rushed at the player without thinking), that the environments will be destructible (it was only scripts) or that immersion will be the heart of the title (the player could withstand the bullets equivalent of the Battle of Stalingrad without dying), it was hard to believe them. Finally, only the explosions made in Cry Engine 3 and the correct modeling – nothing more – of the enemies were the only good points noted during this presentation. For the rest, it is a question of shooting stupid Germans with imprecise weapons and without punch and of taking cover while waiting to see heads sticking out. The maps may well be of a large size (to be honest, I did not understand the layout of the level) and the weapons (25 in number, all from the period) varied, we do not really see what City Interactive wants to accomplish.

However, after those presentations, Enemy Front went silent for months. City Interactive announced that they wouldn’t be present at Gamescom 2012, and during August 2012, the company went to a major restructuration that led the studio to rebrand as CI Games, cancel projects that wasn’t targeting the AAA market such as a Sniper: Ghost Warrior iOS game, delay numerous times Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2, and, finally, reboot Enemy Front. It was made official only in October of the same year, thanks to VG247:

According to Polish website Miastogier, citing an interview with City Interactive Chief Executive Officer Marek Tyminski, Black and the firm parted ways after his vision for Enemy Front was found to be “different from” the firm’s expectations.
As a result, the vision for Enemy Front, announced in November 2011 as a World War II first-person action-shooter, has changed direction.
“Following the first game shows, press releases, we decided to take into account the media attention and now we have made a number of quite significant changes in the game storyline and assumptions, including the main character,” Tyminski said.
“We’re currently working on these elements, among others, a very experienced person in the industry in the United States, Mark Bristol. Recently, [we] also decided to create an extensive multiplayer mode, in which our team in Romania is responsible for”.
A representative from City Interactive confirmed the changes made to Enemy Front with VG247, as well as Mark Bristol’s appointment and Black’s departure – which occured in August.
“We can confirm that Stuart Black is no longer working with City Interactive on the Enemy Front project,” Marshall Zwicker, the firms North American Vice President of sales and marketing told to VG247.
“Based on on early builds of the game and various internal and external feedback that we received, we decided to take a different approach to the gameplay, and the story and characters in the game than originally envisioned. We are now working with Mark Bristol, a very experienced cinematic director from the US and together with him we have been implementing what we feel are some really compelling changes.”

For his part, Black was rather hurt by this decision as we could read on Gamesindustry:

(…) Black was made redundant from his last project, WW2 shooter Enemy Front for City Interactive, just a few months ago.
“And I kind of felt, regardless of how they framed it as ‘we’re making you redundant because of strategic and financial reasons’ it’s inevitable, I would do the same, that people are going to think ‘he f***ed that up.’ The only reason you get rid of your Creative Director halfway through is because they f***ed up in some significant way,” he explained.
“So I kind of felt I looked really bad, my credibility is really going to take a hit from this when people start hearing about this and I just felt like I’ve got everything to prove. And it just comes down to making a game, so let’s just make a f***ing game.”
Last time anyone saw Black on the industry circuit was a press tour in May, where he was showing off his work on the City Interactive WW2 shooter Enemy Front. A game he thought was going well, and a game, he says, he was determined to finish. But just weeks after the press circuit he found himself suddenly and unexpectedly redundant.
“I don’t really have an answer for why, nobody ever really talked to me about any problems either with how I work, the quality of the work that was being done. It was kind of the opposite, everybody was really happy with the work.”
“The only thing that I can think is that when I was off doing my thing in the States telling people there’s going to be a Dirty Dozen, Where Eagles Dare kind of vibe to the game rather than the Saving Private Ryan reverential vibe, and actually they were going ‘no, we actually want Private Ryan.’
It’s clear that the redundancy hurt Black. He explained that he felt it was blow to his credibility and his reputation.

Despite announcing two different projects back then, it seems Stuart Black didn’t really work in the video game industry anymore after this.

Enemy Front was re-announced during the Gamescom 2013 with, alongside Mark Bristol, Raphael Van Lierop as Freelance Creative Director. The project retained some design ideas from Stuart Black’s version, but some weapons and levels were cut, other levels were totally modified, with also a different tone in the story, a different main character, and some features like the different enemy types were dropped. Enemy Front was finally released in June 2014 and was met with mixed to negative reviews by the press.

Enemy Front wasn’t the only victim of City Interactive’s 2012 August restructuration. Alongside the Sniper: Ghost Warrior iOS project by Vivid Games, the company had to axe their multiplayer Free to Play First-Person Shooter World of Mercenaries, and rebooted for the second time the game Alien Fear, which became Alien Rage.

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Others, PC / MAC

World of Mercenaries [PC – Cancelled]

Daniel Nicaise

21-09-2024

World of Mercenaries is a canceled military Free-to-Play multiplayer First-Person Shooter developed and published by City Interactive around 2011-2012, exclusively for the PC.

Not much is known about World of Mercenaries as information about it covered only 4 months. The game was officially announced in March 2012 by its developer, the Romanian subdivision of City Interactive, as we can read on MMOBomb:

Powered by Unreal Engine 3 and to be distributed digitally via Steam, World of Mercenaries is a skill based competitive FPS with stunning graphics, fluid controls, customizable weapons and focus on teamwork as a core element for player progression. Immerse in the life of a fearless mercenary!
“Our veteran team is comprised of some of the most devoted FPS fans in the world and we’re excited to use our knowledge and experience to fuse the best elements of previously released games in the genre with new and exciting advancements – be it in terms of graphics, controls or skill based game play.” says Bogdan Oprescu, Executive Producer for the title. “Our closed beta program will be an integral part of the development process for World of Mercenaries, as it is our goal to deliver a game made by, for and with FPS fans. We are shaping the future of competitive FPS, and are fully confident it will be achieved with the enthusiasm and help of our beta testers.”

World of Mercenaries was launched into closed beta in May 2012, and further details were shared:

City Interactive has announced the launch of the closed beta phase for World of Mercenaries. Beginning today, anyone with a beta key can redeem it through Steam and start playing it. The closed beta comes with two maps in two different modes. These two modes are described as a ‘classic’ and a ‘heavy team-oriented’ one. There are currently six different weapons and a dual health system to use.
Play your own way: get into fierce battles and mow down your enemies, back up your team members by blasting from afar; navigate skillfully and master the map; plan your own strategy and have your game evolve along with your style and each map’s unique terrain!
Purists will find a new battlefield for fame and glory; casual players will be more than just targets. World of Mercenaries is all about combat action and having fun!

However, after only 3 weeks of closed beta, City Interactive announced, on the now-defunct website of the game, that they putted the beta on-hold, in order to focus on the feedbacks by beta testers:

We would first like to thank all of you for applying to the game’s closed beta, for the interest and enthusiasm you have showed and that helped us go forward each day, and to our beta testers – for all the feedback you provided us with.
We are very grateful that such a great community has started to shape around World of Mercenaries, thanks to each and every one of you.
We are entering a phase where we need to process all this information, as well as work on taking the game to another level.
As such, we will be putting the closed beta on hold as of today.

This was officially the last time World of Mercenaries was mentioned. In August 2012, City Interactive went into a major restructuration which resulted from the cancellation of a Sniper: Ghost Warrior game on iOS, as well as a reboot of Alien Fear and Enemy Front, whose developments were chaotic. The company was rebranded as CI Games and made the decision to only focus on AAA games. During the Enemy Front reboot, it was announced that City Interactive Bucharest would be in charge of developing the game’s multiplayer mode:

(…) Recently, we also decided to create an extensive multiplayer mode, in which our team in Romania is responsible for.

It is more than likely that World of Mercenaries was canceled during this process. In March 2013, Polish website Gram.pl confirmed that the game was officially canceled by CI Games during the report on the activities of the company:

“On February 13, 2013, the Issuer’s Management Board informed that due to the verification of the commercial potential of the game World of Mercenaries, the City Interactive S.A. Management Board has decided to stop development work on this game. In connection with the above, an impairment was made on the value of unfinished development work on World of Mercenaries for an amount of PLN 5.7 million.

Former members staffs from CI Games Bucharest founded Big Blue Studios in 2018.

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Dreamcast, PC / MAC, Sega

Shrapnel: Urban Warfare 2025 [PC / Dreamcast – Cancelled]

U64 Staff & Contributors

16-12-2023

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Shrapnel: Urban Warfare 2025, formerly known as M.O.U.T. 2025, is a cancelled futuristic squad-based First-Person Shooter developed around 1999 to 2001 by Zombie Studios and published by Ripcord Games, for the PC and the Dreamcast. As the title suggest, it was set in 2025 where player took the role of a member of the Military Operations on Urban Terrain, a special military team whose missions are related to counter-terrorism.

The game was first revealed in November 1999 by IGN, which, at that time, indicated that it was similar to Tribes:

We also learned last night at a Ripcord sponsored press event that Ripcord will be working closely with Zombie on future games based on the Spec Ops concept. Lou Viveros, President of Ripcord, told us about at least two Spec Ops-based projects in the works. (…) Shrapnel, will be a futuristic squad-based shooter similar to Tribes.

More was shared in April 2000:

In Ripcord and Zombie’s Shrapnel: Urban Warfare 2025, you become a member of the elite M.O.U.T. Force, the swiftest and surest weapon in our nation’s growing arsenal against the terrorist threat. The title, which in some ways looks to resemble Red Storm‘s Rainbow Six is a first person shooter in which you carry out various missions against our largest foes.
As the 2025 of the title would suggest, Shrapnel takes place in the near future, although the developers seem keen on stressing the near part. What the game gets from this setting is a slightly sci-fi atmosphere, but the real area of interest is in weapons technology. Placing the game just a bit ahead of the times allows for players to be on the receiving end of a realistic arsenal of advanced weaponry. We’re talking stuff that hasn’t even seen the light of day outside of some loon’s weapon-testing ground, including some items that are best classified as “deceptively deadly.”
In speaking with the game’s producer, we learned of a few examples. Imagine if you will, a grenade, only smarter. These grenades can be programmed to travel a certain distance then spontaneously explode, without even striking the ground. So, say a young man named Mike is actively campaigning for an upcoming presidential election, and while touring through New York City, he smells something fishy in the air. He scans his surroundings inently, and spotting what he believes to be a grenade launcher, he leaps behind a car in order to take cover. But you, the gunman, came prepared with your smart grenades. You get a readout on the distance from the gun to the car – about 50 feet, program the following grenade to explode after sixty feet of travel, aim the grenade at the window, and let her rip. The grenade launches towards the car, breaks through both windows, and explodes in mid air right behind Mike (don’t worry – he was into some bad, bad things). The initial blast may not fully get him in full impact, but the shrapnel does the job.
You’re going to need them as you take to your various missions, all of which are set in realistic cities and feature realistic terrorist threats. The game’s design and AI are being handled by real life counter terrorism experts, the very same guys you design the anti-terrorism training grounds used to prep America’s finest, so we can probably expect a realistic, and therefore tough experience. Thankfully, in addition to the above mentioned futuristic weapons, the video we’ve included below of the game points to the inclusion of laser sighting and sniper modes available on call, and we’ve also learned that you’ll have equipment that can triangulate the location of you and your buddies based on sound.
Fighting terrorism is a team effort, you won’t be alone in Shrapnel. We don’t have much in the way of detail on the game’s team aspect, with Ripcord having only told that we can expect the game’s included online mode to allow for up to eight players simultaneous. That’s all we know at the moment, other than the game’s making use of the Lith-Tech FPS engine.

Further details could be read on Gamespot in December 2000:

Just as in Ripcord’s other Spec Ops games, MOUT’s focus is on realism. The game is uncompromisingly realistic when it comes to inflicting and taking damage. Enemies can be felled with one bullet to the head, and team members are just as easily killed. The game will make you exercise your whole team and take full advantage of your MOUT tactics.
The game will feature many futuristic weapons that, while based on current military prototypes and designs, are completely fictional. Still, the technology in the game sounds very cool. Each member of your team will be wearing a combat helmet fitted with a special HUD capable of triangulating enemy positions based on data from other team members’ helmets. A well-placed team member can alert you to activity behind walls and can even help spot immediate threats. Additionally, the game will feature upgradeable weapons, such as grenade launchers that can be refitted with prototype grenade rounds.
One of the more interesting aspects of MOUT 2025 is its online capabilities. In conjunction with Ripcord’s pledge to make games that take advantage of Sega’s gaming network, MOUT 2025 will be Internet multiplayer compatible, featuring up to eight-player cooperative and deathmatch play.
MOUT 2025 is scheduled for an October release.

Still on Gamespot, the following month, we could read this:

The game essentially has two modes of play: a single-player, mission-based mode and an online, “every man for himself” battle for up to eight players.
A very small section of one of the game’s levels, in a nighttime setting, was playable at the E3 show. This urban area was cluttered with trash cans, elevators, and alleys. In terms of weapons, there wasn’t much variety. Perhaps because the game was presented in a limited setting, the only weapons that were readily available were a straight machine gun and a short-range rocket launcher. Also, the only real power-up was an ammo recharge. According to a Ripcord representative, however, several new weapons and power-ups will be added to the finished product.

Sadly, in March 2001, Ripcord took the decision to cancel some Dreamcast titles, following the restructuration of SEGA after the console didn’t do well in terms of selling units:

Lately, it’s been more of the ugly news of third parties canceling their Dreamcast games and now, Ripcord Games might join that list soon.
“We have put a hold on the further development of our Dreamcast games,” stated John Peterson, Executive Vice President of Ripcord Games. “While we believe the Dreamcast is a great system, SEGA’s new business direction [into the software business] has made us re-evaluate our current state.” Mr. Peterson wouldn’t go so far as to state the Ripcord Games for the Dreamcast – Legend of the Blade Masters, Gorka Morka, and Shrapnel: Urban Warfare 2025 – were cancelled, but are pending publisher’s decision.

Ripcord Games definitely closed offices in April 2001, ruining the chances of Legend of the Blade Masters, Shrapnel: Urban Warfare 2025 and Gorkamorka being released, at least, on PC.

Article by Daniel Nicaise

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Playstation 2 (PS2), Sony

Aliens: Colonial Marines [PS2 – Cancelled]

yota

14-10-2023

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Aliens: Colonial Marines is a cancelled squad-based First-Person Shooter video game developed by Check Six Studios and published by Fox Interactive and Electronic Arts, exclusively for the Playstation 2, from 2000 to 2002. It was based on the eponymous movie franchise, and was going to take place between the second and third films, with a rescue team of colonial marines and a salvage team went on a search-and-rescue mission for the missing United States Colonial Marines ship, Sulaco. It is not related to the 2013 game of the same name.

The game was officially revealed in May 2001 by EA and showed at E3. You would play as Lt. Nakamuri who could command up to 4 marines (from a pool of 12), all of which had their own personalities and skills. IGN was able to see the game in action and wrote:

Aliens: Colonial Marines pits players in a brand new story that follows the second movie in the series, Aliens. In short, the game begins as your ship discovers a drifting marine space ship floating far too close to a powerful sun that’s pulling it in at a rapid pace. Your team boards the seemingly empty ship, and then you discover a team of rogue scavengers has taken over the ship, hoping to steal equipment, food and resources of any kind. You also discover that aliens are onboard, and killing off the scavengers. As you fight off aliens and find the pilot cabin, you must redirect the vessel before it crashes into the sun.
In one of the early scenes in the game, you confront the alien queen in her egg chamber. She is laying hundreds of alien eggs, and when she notices you, she breaks off from her birthing carapace, and begins chasing you through the ship.
It is a squad-based game in which players can determine the shape of their squad, by simply pressing a button. There are several different configurations, among them a few shaped in a square, a dome, and a triangle, and the squad walks with you and protects you from rogue alien attacks.
The game is remarkable similar to Alien Resurrection on the PlayStation in its pace and look. Players don’t zip around the game like a standard FPS. Instead, you walk around, paced and are constantly on the lookout for alien attacks, which run out of different corridors in front and behind you when you least expect it. Many aspects of the movies have been incorporated into this game, including set design and sound. As you walk through the corridors, knocked out humans, incased in alien goo are strung up along the walls, some dead, and some still living. You can actually save the live ones, who will then join your squad. They will stay with you throughout the game, unless you are unlucky, in which instance they bear little baby aliens from their chest. Then you’re in trouble. (…)
The game moves a slow framerate right now, but the controls were imminently better than in Alien Resurrection, with quick response and rapid turnaround times. I was glad to finally play a game that played like the movies, and that is also good. Now they just have to speed the game up to 60 fps, speed up and tune the controls and work story-based scripts into the game, hopefully like in Half-Life or Red Faction, and they’ll have a hit on their hands.

Initially scheduled for a release in Fall of 2001, the title was pushed back to a release somewhere in Spring of 2002 and then for November of the same year, before being put on-hold by EA in May 2002. It was officially cancelled in October 2002 with EA citing that “there were no plans to pick up its development in the future”. The project was far from complete but no reason were given about why it was cancelled back then. In October 2018, Wumpagem got an interview from former Game Director Joel Goodsell. He explained briefly that Aliens: Colonial Marines was cancelled for technical issues:

Check Six also had a contract for an Alien Colonial Marines game being worked on simultaneously with Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly. The game had some amazing lighting – on the order of what we see in Alien: Isolation or Dead Space – way ahead of its time. Unfortunately, performance and production issues killed that title.

It wasn’t until 2020-2021 that more lights were shared about the game thanks to a short investigating documentary by Youtuber Mr. FO1. AVPGalaxy repeated the words from developers Clancy John Imislund, Jamien McBride and Franck de Girolami:

I was a junior programmer for a short period of time on the project. When they were doing the concept, there were other kinds of brand new Xenomorphs and you would have to fight them in the game. Check Six was just too small of a company to make a game as big as Colonial Marines. Spyro: Enter the Dragon was basically funding the game. – Jamien McBride
I was a graphics artist at Check Six and did some work on Aliens and Spyro. I left after a couple of months because of how stressful the work schedule was. The codebase was very difficult to work in. – Franck de Girolami
Check Six got a deal with Maya and they were told to write a SDK for Maya so people can write games. When I started work, I was told to work on Aliens Colonial Marines instead of the SDK. I told the team at Check Six that it was terrible and broken and it needed to be documented so people could work on it. This caused some issues with Maya as four companies bought the SDK and returned it as it wasn’t documented. It was 70% done and the 70% that was, was terrible, slow, buggy and it crashed all the time.
One time, Check Six went to Fox with a DVD they’d burnt. It was a sequence showing the Queen and it worked perfectly prior to the visit. When they showed them the video, the Queen appeared but she was half faded. An explosion occurred which was faded because the shaders were buggy.
The last time they went to Fox, they burnt another DVD of the intro video which worked fine before that. When they showed Fox, the video plays and the game just crashes. You could make out a human character on the screen but the textures weren’t loading and it was about to have some dialogue when the video crashed. This was a surprise to Fox as they’d visited Check Six before and thought the game was looking great. It was at this point, Fox just cancelled the project altogether. – Clancy John Imislund

According to some developers, the game was broken into levels and was mission-based. There were three main acts in the game, and each one was made up of about seven levels. The first act took place on the USS Sulaco. It was hinted that the final act would take place on the aliens’ home planet. There were flamethrowers, pulse rifles with grenade-launcher attachments, and the shoulder-mounted smart gun. As for the aliens, alongside Facehuggers, Chestbursters, Warriors and Praetorians, new types were planned.

Although not related, it is worth mentionning that the second Aliens: Colonial Marines game, this time published by SEGA and initially made by Gearbox Software, also went into development hell as it was announced too soon, in December 2006. Gearbox worked briefly on it until the beginning of 2008 before being focus on the first Borderlands, which was itself modified from its initial form, before SEGA temporarly put on-hold the project in 2009 because of the economical crisis. The development was re-launched in the end of 2010 with TimeGate Studios as the main developer.

Article updated by Daniel Nicaise

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Images from the Gearbox Software prototype – circa 2008:

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2008 teaser from the Gearbox Software’s version

Others, PC / MAC

Damnation: Hell Breaks Loose [PC – Prototype]

monokoma

07-10-2023

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Damnation is a Far West steampunk Third-Person Shooter/Platformer action game developed by Blue Omega Entertainment, Liquid Development and Point of View, Inc., and published by Codemasters in May 2009, for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The game originally started as an Unreal Tournament 2004 mod, sometimes named Damnation: Hell Breaks Loose, and was entered into Epic Games first Make Something Unreal contest:

Return to the West that never was in this genre-blending total conversion for Unreal Tournament 2004. Equipped with an array of steam-powered weaponry, acrobatic skills, and mystic Spirit Powers only you stand against a ruthless, mechanized foe. A self-styled “steampunk fantasy-western,” Damnation stands apart, providing the gaming community with not only fresh, new gameplay, but an untapped world to explore as well. Damnation is a new breed of gaming experience. As a first/3rd person action/adventure title, Damnation’s gameplay is unprecedented. Combining the immersion and precision-gunplay of a traditional first-person shooter like Call of Duty with the navigational puzzle design of 3rd-person adventure titles like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Damnation is a new paradigm in genre-blending gameplay.

In September 2005, the team wrote a postmortem on BeyondUnreal about what was going to be their next plan about the project:

We sit here, now, in the newly formed office of Blue Omega Entertainment and look forward to starting full production of the retail version of Damnation in just over a month. The lessons we learned from the prototype have strongly shaped the structure of this new development studio. Since our Grand Finals submission, we have completely stopped development of the mod. We have spent the last four months doing nothing but preproduction. We have meticulously planned out our design docs, production pipelines, and schedule. Everything that went wrong with the prototype has been addressed and reworked from the ground up.
Most prototypes aren’t as fully realized as Damnation: Hell Breaks Loose. We didn’t necessarily need to put as much effort and time as we did into creating polished art assets just to test out the game design. Given the chance to do it over, I don’t think we would change that though. Taking the art production pipeline as far as we did on the prototype showed us where all the holes were. It taught us what we could outsource and what absolutely had to stay in-house. We were able to make mistakes that on the full game could have cost us millions, but on the mod were only annoyances.
In the end, even though we didn’t win the license, we feel that the prototype was a success. We were able to test out our game design and get tons of great feedback from the mod community. We now know that we are more than capable of taking the Damnation concept to completion and we feel confident that it will be a great game. In fact, the lessons we learned about valuing quality over quantity ensure that whether the final game matches our current vision or not, it will be fun. We believe that that focus alone is enough to make it a success.

Blue Omega tried to pitch their Unreal Mod to develop it into a commercial game and when they found a publisher interested in the project, the team worked hard to expand Damnation into a full title for the then next gen consoles. But the development of this new version didn’t go as planned: officially revealed in March 2008 for a release planned in December of the same year, the title was pushed back in 2009 for a release in May. Damnation received unfavorable reviews by the press.

In January 2013, VentureBeat investigated with former Lead Game Designer Jacob Minkoff what went wrong during the development:

Damnation was intended to be something very special. The game germinated from a hybrid first/third-person action game entered into the first Make Something Unreal competition in 2004. While it didn’t win, production continued with a full retail release as the ultimate goal. Aspirations were high among the team, and its plans for the game were lofty.
Blue Omega was aiming high with Damnation. It wanted to create huge battlefields that player and adversary alike could traverse any way they saw fit. It was seeking to create both organic locations and enemies, throw the player into the mix, and watch the emergent gameplay spiral out of control in the most fantastic of ways. Things eventually did spiral, though no one, especially the player, benefited in the least.
“Damnation was a product of a green team that didn’t really know what they were doing. It was my first professional game development project; the same was true of many members of the core team.”
The eagerness of the team also led them to overlook the huge challenge set by the new console hardware they were developing for. “We were on the cusp of a new generation, and we learned lessons that have since become common knowledge in game development,” said Minkoff.
In trying to expand upon Damnation so dramatically while working with new hardware, Blue Omega tried to accomplish too much too soon. “Making a sprawling — theoretically — triple-A game on console and PC was simply too much for us to handle,” said Minkoff.
This problem was only exacerbated by the decision to outsource large portions of the game and maintain an uncommonly small in-house team. The strategy was originally intended to afford this core team the greatest level of flexibility and allow it to adapt throughout development. As Minkoff revealed, this simply was not the case in practice.
“Outsourcing was a problem,” he said. “You need the time, experience, and budget to turn on a dime — to throw out what you’ve made and try something else quickly, and within constraints. We did not have the resources or knowledge to do that at Blue Omega.”
This inflexibility, caused by inexperience and outsourcing, led to the game’s woefully protracted development cycle. Few games command four years to make, and when they do finally see release, it’s usually justified with high levels of polish and production value. This was the opposite for Damnation. The longer it stayed in development, the more out of touch and less impressive it became. Level architecture, A.I., textures, animations, movement, physics, audio mixing, sound effects, dialogue, cutscenes, acting, weapons, and general common sense all had their merits eroded over the years it took Damnation to gestate.
“In the end, you usually run out of time or money,” said Minkoff. “With Damnation, we ran out of both. One of the primary reasons why you see so much architectural reuse is because it was cheaper to pay for a retexture than all new geometry. It also took less time to do so, giving us more hope of us meeting our release date.”
It could have been a great game had the team been more experienced, focused, and time-efficient. Minkoff sees the silver lining: “Many games never ship at all because the investment to make the game simply pass console certification would be prohibitive. That it shipped at all is a triumph for Damnation’s team.”
His positivity likely emanates from where Damnation took him next and where he was able to take its fundamental concepts. After the game’s completion, Minkoff moved to Naughty Dog and designed some of the most memorable sections of the Uncharted sequels. There, he was finally able to realize his ambitions for Damnation thanks to an experienced team and appropriate resources.
That the similar yet vastly superior first Uncharted game was in development at the same time as Damnation and saw release two years earlier to critical acclaim is an irony that is not lost on Minkoff. Instead of wallowing in the past, however, he is looking toward the future and building upon his first game’s auspicious past.
“Everyone has to learn somewhere,” he said. “I learned on Damnation.”

More recently, someone claiming to be a close source from the developers wrote under a video by Youtuber Matt McMuscles:

I work for the guys who came up with and had it made. They hired a company to do the coding and worked with a publisher to get it out on the various platforms. It was coming along with issues, as the developer wasn’t listening to my boss, and then the publisher decided that they were tired of waiting and forced them to release it when it was half done. The original concept of the game was awesome, and would have been amazing if they actually made what he paid for. An alternate history of the US where the South won the Civil War, with the tension and conflicts that arise from having an enemy directly border you. With steampunk elements. It sounded really cool.

The retail version retains some of the mod’s gameplay such as the acrobatic moves and spirit vision.

The original Damnation 2004 mod can still be downloaded here.

Article updated by Daniel Nicaise

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