Last week, Sega revealed that it was cancelling Creative Assembly’s HYENAS, hero-based extraction shooter slated for this year. Such was the impact of the cancellation that the developer said it may face layoffs.
However, it seems development faced more than its share of issues. YouTuber Volund spoke to anonymous former developers who revealed a lack of direction, with much of the leadership “asleep at the wheel.” An alleged engine change “part way” through the process and “not committing to do anything adventurous” despite entering a saturated market. VGC corroborated all this with its sources.
It gets even worse – former developers also revealed to the site that this was reportedly the biggest budget for a Sega game (which Volund also heard). Such was the alleged importance of the project, that “towards the end, there were people from Sega Japan more or less permanently at the UK office,” according to a developer.
“This has NEVER happened the whole time I’ve worked at Creative Assembly,” the developer said. “They occasionally visited and checked how a game was looking, but as I said previously, generally hands-off.”
Creative Assembly’s layoffs also allegedly involved cutting those from departments that weren’t involved with the shooter, with frustration towards leadership. VGC reached out to Sega for an official comment, so we’ll see what it has to say in the future (if anything) about the same.