The team behind Dishonored has nothing to do with the struggling Prey 2, despite recent rumors and speculation. Although many people has held out hope that Arkane had picked up where Human Head left off on the open-world project, Bethesda has just confirmed to Rock Paper Shotgun that the game is still on hold due to quality issues.
“No,” Bethesda’s Pete Hines said at QuakeCon when asked about Prey 2 landing at Arkane. “All of that stuff, I have no idea where it came from. The Human Head Prey 2 thing is the Human Head Prey 2 thing. Arkane is over here, and they’re doing their thing, and that’s for them to work on. We’ll be ready to talk about what they’re working on when it gets closer to release.”
What does that mean for the future of the once-promising title? Hines still believes in what can be done with Prey 2, but if he put it in a box and shipped it out now, no one would be satisfied.
“Yes, we could ship it and put it in a box and be done with it, but it won’t meet anybody’s expectations. Not ours, not yours, not the consumer’s. It’d just be like, ‘What happened to this?’ Well, that’s what we would like to know,” he continued. “It’s not fun to make a call to pull back the reins on something like that and say it’s not coming out this year. It’s certainly not an easy decision, especially after you spent years and millions and millions of dollars creating it.”
Bethesda has pushed games for quality reasons before, so don’t think that this is the absolute end for a game that made a strong first impression. However, don’t expect to see much more from the project in the near future.