We reported a few weeks ago that, based on some tweets by former and current Ubisoft employees, it seemed like Pioneer, their science fiction project, was dead. Pioneer was meant to be a science fiction game with an emphasis on non violent exploration, and it had first been teased in Watch Dogs 2 back in 2016. Apparently its demise had come after a rocky development.

However, now, based on a report by Kotaku, it seems that Pioneer may still be kicking around—albeit in a dramatically changed form. Kotaku reports that Pioneer has morphed into a co-op alien shooter, and that it may even tie into the Rainbow Six series somehow. Which seems extremely unlikely on a conceptual level, but at the same time, Ubisoft has reportedly been trying to have a less grounded Rainbow Six game for ages now. This would certainly be one way to achieve that.

Now, a few things—this is still a rumor, and even if it is true, there is no guarantee the game in question actually gets released. A whole lot of games get pretty far in development but then go nowhere (a recent example would be Metroid Prime 4, which is basically being re-developed from scratch after initial development for it seems to not have gone anywhere). So don’t necessarily hold your breath for Pioneer. Though if it is real, I will hope that it does get revealed in some form soon.

Ubisoft has been working on a brand new science fiction IP, codenamed Pioneer, for a few years now. The game was even famously teased in Watch Dogs 2. However, it seems like whatever it was will never come to pass, because it sounds like multiple sources from within Ubisoft are confirming that the project is dead.

These sources include Alex Hutchinson, the former director at Ubisoft Montreal, Jonathan Cooper, former Ubisoft dirtector, and Pascal Blanché, who is still at Ubisoft, all of whom have tweeted about the project’s demise. It’s unclear what exactly caused the death of the project, though allegedly, the game has been in trouble for a few years now, so it’s not a surprise that Ubisoft decided to can the whole thing entirely.

It’s hard to discuss what we have lost, and what might have been, since we literally have no information on what the game was meant to be to any degree whatsoever. That said, hopefully the people working on the project didn’t take its loss too hard, and have moved on to working on something better and more exciting now.

https://twitter.com/bangbangclick/status/1084992152826986496?s=21

It was a good ride.

— Pascal Blanché (@pascalblanche) January 15, 2019