Remedy Entertainment, the studio behind games such as Control and Alan Wake, just announced that they have cancelled a co-op multiplayer game that they were working on. This game, codename Kestrel, is being shelved in order to focus on already established franchises in Remedy's portfolio.
Not much at all was known about Kestrel. All that we knew was that it was going to be "a premium game" and it would have "a strong cooperative multiplayer component." Kestrel was being worked on by Remedy and the Chinese publisher Tencent and was only in the earliest stages of development before being canned. Kestrel was originally codenamed Vanguard and was initially going to be a free-to-play multiplayer title.
Remedy notes that other projects currently in development at the company are all still proceeding as planned. These projects include the remakes of Max Payne and Max Payne 2, Control 2, and a multiplayer spin-off based on the Control universe called Condor.
Resources that were going into Kestrel are now being moved to other projects at Remedy.
“Codename Kestrel showed early promise, but the project was still in its early concept stage. Our other projects have advanced well and are moving to the next stages of development, and increasing focus on them provides us with benefits. We can reallocate talented Kestrel developers to these other game projects, and many of our support functions get additional focus on their operations. This is yet another means to ensure that our game projects continue advancing well. I want to thank our Kestrel development team. Though we decided to discontinue the project for wider Remedy benefits, our team has done good work and provided us with valuable learnings. I also want to thank Tencent for their partnership so far. They have been very professional and supportive,” says Remedy’s CEO Tero Virtala.
