Pray Tell: Whatever Happened To Prey 2?

It's terribly sad that all we seem to hear of Human Head's ambitious, semi-free form, Blade Runner-inspired shooter Prey 2 is the occasional murky rumour and contradiction about its troubled status. Not so long ago word abounded that it had been taken down the bottom of the garden and shot by Bethesda, which after slightly too long a wait was then officially disputed. We've just heard the exact same song and dance again, which I shall report purely because we don't know owt else about Prey 2's state of play.

In a new interview with IGN's Dutch arm, Bethesda's Pete Hines was quoted as saying, albeit through the medium of translation, "At one point, we looked at Prey 2 and decided that in its current state, with all the money, time, and resources we put into it, it didn’t meet our expectations. So we decided to pull the plug from our end."

Following the inevitably furore, he then took to the Twitters to dispute this, claiming that "To clarify, I didn’t say Prey 2 was canx [sic]. Gave an interview in English, translated to Dutch, translated back to English (…) simply reiterated what we’ve said previously, which is that it’s not coming out this year.”

So there you go: we still don't really know what the real state of play is, but I just wanted to leave this story here in case you picked up the "pull the plug" quote from elsewhere but didn't seen the subsequent denial.

I hope the game makes it, but it definitely was biting off an awful lot for what was, despite lofty ambitions, the sequel to a so-so shooter that not a whole lot of people played. I can see how that would make a high budget a hard sell for a publisher, and I would idly speculate that Bethesda feels a little burned about apparently ambitious shooters after Rage wasn't a smash hit. Prey 2's more flexible playstyle is a different kettle of fish entirely despite superficial similarities, and I hope whatever's going on doesn't entail the game's dangly bits getting cut off and neutering it into a straight shooter.