A corpse has surfaced on the choppy waters of manshoot lagoon. Ignition’s multi-million dollar sci-fi Nazi-infused FPS, Reich, was cancelled last week. Ignition’s London studio was shut down back in September, and then the game was permanenty lost when the bigger Florida studio closed its doors last week. According to GI.biz‘s insider source, “A slice of the game revealed a [review] rating of 5.0 instead of the desired rating of 8.5.”
But those years of work and millions of dollars haven’t all gone to waste, because Ignition has released not one, not two, but FIVE videos of Reich. You can watch them below.
The first is just a cutscene, but the rest are more interesting. There are some curious and occasionally incomprehensible experiments with physics going on here.
This last one is the one you want to watch, I suspect. It’s got a zepplin’in.
Poor space-Nazis. I think if I’d been working on this game I would have spent the entire development cycle being sad that a Neo-Nazi is already a thing. And then I suppose I would have been even more sad when I got laid off.
11/11/2010 at 16:29 Novotny says:
*Adopts Bernard from ‘Yes Minister’ face*
Actually, lagoons are normally quite still. To get choppy waters, you need to have waves, which you simply don’t have in classic lagoons.
*runs away*
11/11/2010 at 16:33 Quintin Smith says:
Manshoot lagoon is choppy because everybody is in it, having fun. Come to think of it, I’m not sure there’s any water under all those men.
11/11/2010 at 16:47 The Innocent says:
Wow. That actually looks like it could have polished into something interesting. As someone who played games like Quake II with no_clip permanently on so I could fly around and feel godlike, that second video had some real allure. Totally goofy-looking, but awesome at the same time.
11/11/2010 at 16:48 MrThingy says:
I have no idea what’s going on in these videos, particularly the last one… but by Jove it looks THRILLING!
11/11/2010 at 16:57 Flobulon says:
Love the Monty Burns hands in the second video.
Interesting technology though.
11/11/2010 at 16:58 Jambo says:
I wish i understood half of what was going on in those videos, but who cares this looks like huge amounts of fun! Is it cancelled for good or is someone else going to pick it up?
11/11/2010 at 16:58 Jake says:
So it looks like you play a lunatic magician with a hatred of architecture while some poor nazis try and stop you. Am I the only one who just wanted him to stop making such a mess?
11/11/2010 at 17:00 areyoutherebog? says:
There aren’t enough games with zeppelins in them.
11/11/2010 at 19:31 Lachlan says:
I was impressed by the looming doom-ship…then saddened when all it could muster was a few weedy booms that just knocked the dust about.
I played Freespace, dammit! I want to feel helpless as a a capital ship the size of Pittsburgh messes up the scenery, even if it would have be scripted to the eyeballs not to see me shredded in the first salvo. I hope more developers follow up on this. I haven’t been awed by something mighty overhead in an FPS since…well, ever.
Oh wait, the circling behemoth in an obscure Tron-like Battlezone clone released about two years ago. That was fun.
12/11/2010 at 15:49 BAshment says:
tanks universal?
also take that lincoln.
11/11/2010 at 17:03 duncanthrax says:
Ze Reich will still win!
11/11/2010 at 17:07 Justin Keverne says:
That actually looks quite a bit better than I was expecting.
11/11/2010 at 17:10 Ateius says:
-1,000 points for absolutely atrocious dialogue (and that’s not counting the penalty for “sounding like a grade school drama student”, which I suspect is because it’s developer-voiced)
+1 million points for “I AM THE GOD OF PHYSICS” gameplay. I would have liked that.
11/11/2010 at 17:16 Capt Fatbeard says:
Nothing says futuristic neo nazi’s other than death metal music
11/11/2010 at 23:45 destx says:
I hate to be that guy but that particular Ministry song definitely isn’t death metal.
11/11/2010 at 17:16 Josh says:
Things I thought while watching the first 2 videos:
1.) I really hate that logo. It just makes me think of a knockoff Quake.
2.) Why spend all the time and money to create a engine from scratch when they could have taken an engine and customize it. I’m not seeing anything that couldn’t be done without using any of the other engines out there *shrugs*
11/11/2010 at 17:34 Wilson says:
@Josh – What about all the physics stuff? We obviously don’t know what kind of systems those videos were on, but if they could get physics like that working in game, I think that would be a pretty big thing. Are there engines around that can do that at the moment?
11/11/2010 at 18:01 bob_d says:
It actually is built on top of Unreal 3. Licensing an engine can easily turn into a nightmare, though, as you might discover that the primary gameplay features don’t “play nice” with the existing game engine, requiring lengthy and expensive reworking of the engine code to make it work. That’s something that often gets overlooked (until it’s too late) when licensing engines.
12/11/2010 at 01:14 LordCiego says:
You cant hate the logo when its the same one of an awesome game with the same name link to en.wikipedia.org
11/11/2010 at 17:17 YogSo says:
I had not heard of this before, but after watching the 5 videos I guess it can be compared to “the offspring of B.J. Blazkowicz and the Singularity guy throwing a party at Geo-Mod’s house after playing too much Doom 3”. And what’s with the “squared” Quake logo?
Maybe it would have been fun to play, but after the awful bit of exposition at the start of the second video I really don’t think we are missing too much… The destructible architecture looks awesome, though (but I haven’t played the last Red Faction, so I don’t know how it compares to that).
On the other hand, I have the feeling that a lot of ID fans would rather prefer this to Rage if they had to choose between the two.
11/11/2010 at 17:50 DrGonzo says:
The dialogue was pretty awful, but this looks like its trying to be Painkiller more than Half Life 2. I’ve never seen anything quite like that before, I would have loved to play it personally. The destructible scenery may not have been quite as realistic as Red Faction, but it sure did look more fun.
12/11/2010 at 13:31 Kefren says:
It’s actually a Quach logo.
11/11/2010 at 17:38 jeremypeel says:
Ok, I’ve only watched the second video. But that doesn’t look like cancelling material to me.
Cheesy, sure, but pestle-and-mortaring bad guys with bits of pillars looks like fun. Where did they get that ‘5.0 score’ from? Do devs have internal critics now?
11/11/2010 at 18:04 PleasingFungus says:
Big publishers will occasionally bring in game reviewers (as in, from games websites and such), swear them to dreadful secrecy, and have them review in-development games as though they were done.
It’s all very odd.
11/11/2010 at 17:40 Graham says:
Watching the player slo-mo destroy the Lincoln Memorial IS pretty sweet.
11/11/2010 at 17:42 Theory says:
Blimey. Eat that, Red Faction.
11/11/2010 at 17:50 Ace says:
This game reminds me a lot of the Xbox 360 game Too Human. It seems to have the same futuristic/cyber medieval setting, and I even get the same odd feeling of “heaviness” from the characters in the videos.
11/11/2010 at 18:11 Ace says:
Maybe I spoke too soon. This was just my reaction after watching the first video. I am not so sure after watching the others now.
11/11/2010 at 17:56 bikkebakke says:
that game actually looked… AWESOME
why are they cancelling?!
Can’t someone pick up their leftovers and finish it :(
11/11/2010 at 18:41 stahlwerk says:
The publisher basically said “Es reicht.”.
Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week.
11/11/2010 at 22:55 Spacewalk says:
Maybe it wasn’t made of the reich stuff.
11/11/2010 at 23:02 bob_d says:
“Can’t someone pick up their leftovers and finish it”
Unlikely. It can be really expensive to do that even after you buy the rights. I’ve worked on a team that was brought in to finish a game after the original owners went bust; some of the original investors didn’t want to lose their money and decided to continue the work. I’ve heard of other expensive, almost entirely finished games (MMOs, mostly) that have had that happen; I have yet to hear a good result coming out of the situation. Problem was, it takes forever to learn how everything works; there isn’t necessarily any documentation, you usually don’t even manage to get all the original files and code, you don’t know what got finished, what’s broken, how to use the (undocumented) tools and production pipeline they set up, etc.
In this case, the game wasn’t that expensive (relatively speaking), wasn’t content complete, and was based on a licensed engine (unreal), which would probably have to be licensed again (as would all the other middle-ware that was used). Unless the original makers suddenly find a few tens of millions of dollars under a seat cushion to continue development with, this game is most likely dead.
12/11/2010 at 07:50 geldonyetich says:
From what I gather, the reason why they’re canceling was because financial difficulties lead to them closing the Florida studio that made Reich. It is possible, however, that work will continue on Reich at a different studio, or that the product will be sold to somebody else to finish.
11/11/2010 at 19:02 jthmmdom says:
Red Faction., realistic? pfaw
11/11/2010 at 19:07 Navagon says:
It looks pretty cool. Like the latter stages of Necrovision combined with a PhysX demo.
11/11/2010 at 19:11 Horatius says:
I don’t think Hugo Boss would have approved of the future Reich Samurai Cylon attire. Not tasteful at all… oh wait…
11/11/2010 at 19:25 noobnob says:
How very very crazy. Did this use a newer version of the Havok physics engine or something?
12/11/2010 at 01:23 Navagon says:
Given the lack of spindledance, I guess not.
11/11/2010 at 19:32 Lord_Mordja says:
It’s a shame cancelled games don’t release what they have and let the community mess around with it, because this looked really, really fun.
It’ll never happen.
11/11/2010 at 19:48 ZIGS says:
Well fuck me sideways, I want to play this right.fucking.now!
11/11/2010 at 19:58 Gabbo says:
2nd video: Violence as a means to end violence, and then proceed to bring the building down around you with super powers and ridiculously overpowered weapons. Yes, that will get your philosophical point across… And who doesn’t like hearing ‘Shield of Faith’ used every now and again?
The physics engine looks like it could be used for interesting gameplay though, so it has that.
12/11/2010 at 00:05 Mister Yuck says:
I caught that too. Between her “we’re just using violence to set up our utopia” and her “we’re the next step of human evolution” she sounded exactly like, well, a Nazi… Hopefully the devs were going to run with that and not make the protagonists genocidal utopians, but the ham-fisted dialogue makes me doubt the writers have that much subtlety.
12/11/2010 at 05:44 redsquares says:
and the whole ‘next step in evolution’… that was pretty weird.
12/11/2010 at 06:55 OriginalStunner says:
hmm Maybe I’ll watch em
11/11/2010 at 21:05 Tei says:
So is Quake1 meets Bioshock, meets Singularity, meets Tron.
It seems a unique game, but the shotting look bad… maybe because In a game where you can launch whole buildings to other people, who cares about tiny lead pieces?
11/11/2010 at 21:50 Pleonasm says:
“Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play-test?”
11/11/2010 at 22:02 superman says:
Looks like Red Faction on crack. This is what Necrovision should have been.
12/11/2010 at 01:47 Navagon says:
This game had probably ten times the budget of Necrovision. If you’re going to use a 2004 engine in a game then Painkiller’s is not at the top of the list unless you’re pretty much broke (by industry standards).
11/11/2010 at 22:21 disperse says:
Awesome Jesus Jones reference in the caption.
My train of thought while watching the last trailer:
“Cool, Zepplins, why doesn’t he just blow them out of the sky with his rocket launcher?”
“It’s such as shame that they spent so much time on the engine and assets and weren’t any more creative than ‘space Nazis’.”
“Oh, the Lincoln Memorial, that’s such a cool addition, it’s hidden down here so the Space Nazis can’t destroy it.”
“Cool, Ministry.”
“Wait, why is the player destroying the Lincoln Memorial?”
11/11/2010 at 22:22 DevilSShadoW says:
so you get to play a game that doesn’t require you to input cheat in order to be godlike? Sign me up!
11/11/2010 at 22:45 Telke says:
Blimey. Obviously it wasn’t finished, the voices + I think you can see a bit of screentearing during some of the more explosive scenes, but it looks as though it would’ve been enjoyably insane to play.
11/11/2010 at 23:35 Eddy9000 says:
They probably thought it would be finished by Christmas…
12/11/2010 at 00:00 kalay says:
It looks like they could at least have got a fun budget arena destruction high-score game out of that fairly easily – Red Faction Guerilla has something similar but it doesn’t really have the same I AM AN ANGRY GOD feel.
12/11/2010 at 00:05 fuggles says:
This actually looks great fun, especially the fourth video where you seem to abuse nazis with the ships from Elite. I’d rather play this than CodBlops, looks far more amusing!
12/11/2010 at 04:04 Kevbo says:
I agree this looks sweet and am now sad that I can’t play as the god of gravity. Hope this idea inspires other devs to try something similar since it just looks different and fun.
12/11/2010 at 06:56 BeamSplashX says:
It’s not reich, what they did to this game. It might’ve been very reichable had it come out.
12/11/2010 at 07:58 skyturnedred says:
This game needs to happen.
12/11/2010 at 10:23 filiptom says:
That’s some of the worst voiceacting I’ve ever seen, and the recoul is ridiculous. But the graphics, and the destructable crap, and the physics manipulation whatever. That’s awesome.
12/11/2010 at 10:55 megaman says:
Destruction for the sake of destruction. The player looks so massively overpowering the enemies (and their architecture) that I’m wondering how long the fun would last.
But during that time it would be insanely pleasing to wreck all the places the developers painstakingly constructed for us to destroy :P
12/11/2010 at 12:57 skyturnedred says:
This game would be awesome in small doses between playing other games, just have a few minutes of fun destroying everything with…everything.
12/11/2010 at 13:15 Quake says:
What are these songs in 3rd 4th and 5th “gameplay” videos? Titles/bands anyone?
13/11/2010 at 16:31 Araxiel says:
I just orgasmn’d…5 times. This game seems to be made out of total epic awesomeness.
And I was really surprised by the quality of the German in the last video. It was spoken by someone that actualy knows german and pronounces it right.