The recent news about Hellraid being put “on hold” had a lot of gamers fearing the worst for the game. Well, Techland's CEO Pawel Marchewka explained what they actually meant by “on hold” and that the medieval, first-person, hack-and-slash dungeon crawler Hellraid isn't cancelled.
Eurogamer managed to get in touch with Marchewka recently at the Digital Dragons games conference over in Poland, where Marchewka mentioned...
Once we deliver everything we want [for Dying Light], probably by the - I don't know - end of the third quarter this year, we will then maybe start to send some new [Hellraid] materials or informations or thinking about what's the release date, something like that. There is nothing concrete about this timing.But putting on hold means we want some of the resources to concentrate on Dying Light, and once they do what needs to be done we will come back to Hellraid.Right now we want to concentrate on Dying Light. We wanted to be fair with the fans so we wanted to send a clear message, especially as a lot of the people were expecting new things coming from Hellraid at E3 and Gamescom. We decided to take the pressure away.
That makes a heck of a lot of sense. Of course, some gamers did originally take it that the game was practically cancelled when Techland made the post on Facebook talking about Hellraid needing to go back to the drawing board and that the game was on hold until they finished working on Dying Light.
This sort of thing has happened before with plenty of games that end up being put on hold, like Prey 2, Highlander and The Outsider to name a few, and then they just end up poof... vaporware. Most gamers understand that budgets for games put “on hold” usually start to dry up and the game either has to shape up or slip out. Of course, some people wrongly assumed that Hellraid was done for but it's not too surprising that those conclusions would be jumped to based on the history of games failing to move out of the phase of being put “on hold”.
Techland's Marchewka insists that Hellraid is just being refined. The game was labeled as being “too much” and having one too many directions going on at once. So they have to refine the project down to something more manageable. According to Marchewka...
Dying Light - every one of our games - had this problem, […] We always wanted to create something bigger than we should. Then we cut it in half and still it's bigger than it should [be]![Hellraid's] definitely not dead. It's just we want to make sure the needs from our Dying Light players are satisfied as quickly as possible and we needed some resources for that.
Well it really does sound like the game isn't dead... just put on hold in the most literal sense of the meaning.
The first-person dungeon crawling title featured players going through, killing a lot of undead baddies and mythical creatures and evolving their character in a class-less structure. Hellraid was/is more like a fast paced version of Dark Souls with relentless fights pushing the player to react quickly, decisively and skillfully. We'll keep you posted on any further updates regarding the game.
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