WarDevil Message Board

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.

#projectkane Wardevil, a game five years in development that was reportedly cancelled last month, is for some reason now being brought back from the dead and given a new name. More »

#disturbanceintheworkforce Wardevil was one of the first current-generation games to ever be shown off. That was back in 2005. Back when it could still be called an upcoming game. Now? We can call it a cancelled game. More »

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."

Long in development game finally goes under.

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.

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.