(or: I hate it when I’m right)

Damnit. Damn it all to hell. I’ve just spent the last few hours playing a game for review, and what do I come back to?

Breaking News: Gods and Heroes Canceled

Perpetual Entertainment has indefinitely delayed (essentially canceled) Gods and Heroes. The company will continue work on their development platform and Star Trek Online, and continue its operations in the same San Francisco studio under the same management. Gods and Heroes: Rome Rising, though, is no more.

Our source tells us that the majority of the Gods and Heroes development team has been let go as part of the move, which comes only a few weeks after they had downsized and pushed back the release date. The Star Trek Online team, those who worked on the Perpetual Platform (which was recently licensed to BioWare) and a small number of people from the Gods and Heroes team will be remain with the company.

I … I don’t even have the words. This hits my brainpan on so many levels.

First and foremost, my best wishes for the developers and artists, programmers and community folks who have been put out by this. I am well aware of how hard you folks work on these things, and I can’t imagine what it feels like to get news like this.

I also want to convey just how shocking this is to me. When I was down in Austin, hanging around the actual industry, they were talking about Gods and Heroes. Specifically, they were talking about the manual. They were deciding what to put on the outside of the manual, and what the inside would look like. I hope it goes without saying: they don’t tackle that kind of crap until very near the end. I’ve also played the game and, again, it seemed almost done. Despite my frustrations (conveyed earlier this year) about animations and gameplay ‘feel’, I honestly felt they were just a few months away from getting things in gear.

This also makes me sad in a different way. I know I’m not the only person that remembers Mythica. I wrote about the title after it was canceled, mourning its loss, and I realized all in a rush that it’s been some three years since those events. Obviously a lot of things have changed since February of 2004. But this is still an industry in which years of work, thousands and thousands of man-hours, can be flushed with little to no warning. I’m reasonably certain the Gods and Heroes news came as something of a shock; RPG Vault posted a new screenshot today.

As a last note, I’m embarrassed to say that I appear to have kinda called this. :(

2007’s Losers: Star Wars Galaxies, Gods and Heroes, Vanguard, Dark Age of Camelot

I can honestly say I wish I’d been wrong about this one.

Update: I’ve seen a lot of people referring to G&H as a ‘piece of shit’,  and I object to that. I had a lot of potential; it just needed a little more time. There was a lot of fun there to be had … just not probably my kind of fun. I like the snark and the mean as much as anybody, but I have a hard time dismissing outright the sweat and hard work of a large group of folks like that as ’shit’.