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Rumor: Sony Santa Monica failed game was codenamed "Darkside"

DieH@rd

Banned
This deserves its own thread.

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Back in February of 2014 mere months after PS4 launched, Sony Santa Monica has hit with big layoffs and restructuring of the entire studio. 2nd team that was led by the GoW3 director Stig Asmussen was disbanded, many devs were laid off [Stig also left to join Respawn Entertainment] and rest were transferred to the core team that worked on several GoW games in the past. The exact nature of the failed project was never unveiled, with some hints pointing to the highly ambitious open world game that had some ties to the structure of Destiny.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-02-26-god-of-war-developer-sony-santa-monica-suffers-layoffs
http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/02/25/layoffs-hit-god-of-war-studio-sony-santa-monica
http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/03...-layoffs-asometimes-a-project-needs-a-reboota


Our own Shinobi just posted a update on the project, with many joucy details that were previously unknown:
Darkside was definitely an interesting concept. RPG mechanics, customization, vehicles, post apocalyptic open world...things just didn't come together, milestone reviews failed. Trying to get that action-melee combat working with guns wasn't easy.

All this sounds very interesting. Hopefully in the future we will get more insight into this famous failed project.
 

Dinda

Member
Yeah let's cancel this super interesting game and let's keep making God of Wars instead....thanks.

Edit,
before more people reply to that, it's not that they should continue on a game that is beyond saving. But it is just sad to see such a talented studio never releasing a different game (doesn't help that i think God of War is trash). Other studios have also failed projects. I just would like to see what Santa Monica could do outside of God of War.
 

Boke1879

Member
ha. Damn


Really though they must be sitting on a few million dollars worth of assets. I imagine those will come out in other games in some form.

Yea the studio helps out on tons of other projects so I'd be shocked if those assets and tools aren't getting used in some capacity.
 
The part where they supposedly failed milestones or the part where the combat wasn't coming together?

People are usually hung up on what if's rather than what is. From what I read of that Shinobi post, it was sounding an awful lot like Devil's Turd mixed in with some Mad Max if its any lucky.

Glad it got cancelled if they couldn't figure it out and not waste more time and budget that could be used elsewhere. Also given how crap The Order: 1886 was, you'd have to imagine it must have been really awful for them to just outright cancel it for not meeting its project milestones.

Best wishes.
 

chadskin

Member
Yeah let's cancel this super interesting game and let's keep making God of Wars instead....thanks.

Better than letting everyone go, no?

I assume they'll get back to the game, or at least some ideas of the game, in the future. In the meantime, though, gotta make money.
 

alr1ght

bish gets all the credit :)
Another open world bloatfest with RPG mechanics. Well I can't say I'm too broken up about this.
 

Boke1879

Member
Yeah let's cancel this super interesting game and let's keep making God of Wars instead....thanks.

Yea of course they'll make a game in an established franchise that is guaranteed to sell well.

Do you think they should have kept sinking money into a project that kept failing milestones and combat wasn't even figured out?

It sounded interesting. Clearly when they put it into practice they didn't know what they wanted to do.
 

Dinda

Member
Yeah let's keep pouring more money into this game that clearly isn't coming together because the 2 sentence pitch still sounds sorta cool.

The game could probably not be saved, who knows. Still means that Santa Monica has, outside of Kinetic or how that was called on PS2, never made another game other than God of War.
 

Y2Kev

TLG Fan Caretaker Est. 2009
lol wow sony u suk canceling game 2-3 years in the making that "isn't coming together" to make more multimillion selling 90+ rated god of wars omg kratos is SUCH a bad character I am going to go write in my uguu diary
 
Yeah let's cancel this super interesting game and let's keep making God of Wars instead....thanks.

From a purely business standpoint it does make sense. Why spend money on a project that will guarantee no success and failed milestone reviews compared to a franchise that proved it's success in the past.
 
To be honest, I'm more surprised at the fact that Sony kept the project going on for that long and never pulled the plug earlier. ~4 years in the making with millions of dollars waste only for it to be cancelled? Something must have been very wrong and it's sad to see things not pan out. I mean they could have cancelled it earlier to save a lot of staff and costs, but I guess hindsight's a wonderful thing. Sony must have put a lot of faith into Stig after GoW III, that's for sure.
 

Siege.exe

Member
They'll get their chance again sooner or later, better to get the team back to what they know rather than dumping more resources into to something that wasn't working out.
 

Loudninja

Member
The game could probably not be saved, who knows. Still means that Santa Monica has, outside of Kinetic or how that was called on PS2, never made another game other than God of War.
SSM is one of their most important devs not only do they help with alot of smaller game but they have one if the biggest franchises for PS.
 

Walpurgis

Banned
Hopefully they can salvage the remains like how Blizzard turned Titan's corpse into Overwatch. Just having all that stuff wasted is sad.
 
Yeah, Pete Dodd said this and other things in 2014.

People keep saying this; since when did people know that the name was Darkside? Yeah we knew briefly what it was about and that it was cancelled, but I'm pretty sure we never knew the name. A link to a post would perhaps be helpful instead of the constant "we already knew about this etc"...

[EDIT] Just seen the post. Thanks Kev.
 
lol wow sony u suk canceling game 2-3 years in the making that "isn't coming together" to make more multimillion selling 90+ rated god of wars omg kratos is SUCH a bad character I am going to go write in my uguu diary
Between this and the yas my Queen shit in the Benghazi thread, what happened to you exactly? It's like you've been on the internet way too long and its infected your brain. I say this out of love.
 

v1lla21

Member
Hopefully the good stuff from that cancelled project trickles into some of their other games. Hope to see and hear more about it.
 
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