People Can Fly's Ambitious Game Revised; Project Dagger Delayed
Project Dagger and Bulletstorm VR from People Can Fly will be released later than announced. The studio's ambitious new game needs to „redefine development direction,” among other things, due to talks being held with Square Enix about studio's another project.
Great action adventure game (or action RPG according to earlier reports) from the creators of Bulletstorm may not be released as planned. People Can has announced the suspension of plans to release Project Dagger in 2025-2026.
As a reminder: this is about a game that was originally going to be released with support from Take-Two Interactive, but will eventually be published by PCF as an independent game (and is definitely isn's a retro-FPS with the same title).
The project was handed over to an experienced 10-person team to "redefine the direction of the game's development and prepare a pre-production version." The Polish developer revealed this information in a recent investor report, and, as it informs, two factors influenced the decision.
- The first was the evaluation of the current status of the project after reaching a "key milestone." That's where the need to "redefine" the direction of the game's development came from - the team is to address the comments and guidance that the studio has obtained from the outside.
- The second reason given was PCF's ongoing talks with Square Enix, which were announced in company's previous report a week ago. At the time, it was explained that it was "highly likely that in the future the implementation of Project Gemini [developed under the aegis of SE - editor's note] will not be continued by the Group [PCF - editor's note] on the current commercial basis," and announced a reference to this issue in subsequent reports.
- However, the most recent one limits itself to citing the impact of these talks on the "development plans of projects" carried out by PCF as the second reason for the decision to reduce the team of Project Dagger. There was also no reference to the issue of unpaid royalties for Outriders from Square Enix.
The current developers of Project Dagger, who were not on the new team, have been sent to work on three other People Can Fly games in development, which we have known about for some time: Maverick (RPG developed for Microsoft), Bifrost and Victoria (these are also code names). Still nothing concrete has been revealed about any of these productions.
In addition to the aforementioned titles, PCF is still working on Red and the second, after Green Hell, VR port. The latter project was recently delayed. Bulletstorm VR will hit the market on January 18, 2024 (via X).
Perhaps we will learn more about the Polish studio's plans in a new quarterly report. Also this scored a delay, but is expected to be published later today.
