There's a chance you've heard about
Pioneer, Ubisoft Montreal’s mysterious space exploration video game that was teased in 2016's
Watch_Dogs 2. Since then, we've learned that the studio was reportedly retooling the project, then rebooted it, and finally canceled it last year. According to Kotaku's Jason Schreier, that's not really the case, as
Pioneer is alive – it's just not what it used to be.
Two weeks ago, Alex Hutchinson, the director of
Assassin's Creed III, Far Cry 4, and
Pioneer,
announced on Twitter that the game is dead, suggesting that his
Journey to the Savage Planet will serve as a spiritual successor to the problematic title. Although Schreier did confirm that
Pioneer is still in the works, Hutchinson wasn't wrong writing "
RIP Pioneer," as the game's new build is apparently more similar to Ubisoft's
Rainbow Six: Siege than the non-violent space-explorer it was originally envisioned.
Three people familiar with goings-on at Ubisoft explained that the old version of the game is dead, but “
Pioneer’s half-undead brother is here.” One spokesperson also revealed that the initial round of development started in 2013 right after the launch of
ACIII. “
We wanted to be as new as possible: new forms of navigation, new ways of gaining objectives, no overt violence,” said a person who worked on
Pioneer. “
The scale of the newness made it very hard to coalesce into a finished game,” they added.
The main reason why Ubisoft teased the game in
WD2 was the fact that
Pioneer used to be something unexpected. "
We needed something to leak that would be more fun than [Tom Clancy's The] Division or Assassin’s Creed DLC,” said a
WD2 dev. “
And not a big announcement, like the next Assassin’s Creed. So the footage of [Pioneer] covered the right amount of ‘What the hell is this?’”
In the fall of 2016, Ubisoft removed Hutchinson and other leads from
Pioneer and reportedly rebooted it with new creative leadership after long periods of fruitless development. Some of them ultimately joined EA Motive to work on
Star Wars: Battlefront II's single-player campaign mode, while Hutchinson decided to establish his own studio – Typhoon – and started working on
Journey to the Savage Planet.
In the meantime, Ubisoft rebooted
Pioneer once again, "
transforming it into a co-op multiplayer alien shooter that uses some of Pioneer’s old features." According to Schreier’s sources, the development team is now building the game using Anvil Engine, the technology that powers
Rainbow Six: Siege and all major
Assassin's Creed games. It looks like the project is alive, despite at least two reboots and countless changes, and Ubisoft may finally announce
Pioneer 3.0. during their E3 2019 conference.