After the cancellation of their extraction shooter game Hyenas, Sega is shifting the focus of Creative Assembly back to their strength, which is offline games in the RTS (Real-Time Strategy) genre.
As noted in their quarter 2 financial result briefing, Sega’s boss, Haruki Satomi, revealed that the company is making several internal changes, one being centered around the Total War and Alien Isolation developers, Creative Assembly. Recently, the team was in charge of developing an online extraction shooter. It was an odd decision that puzzled many, as their previous work was mainly those in the single-player genre. It eventually was canceled, despite being a way into development, with playable public builds in the form of betas available.
This, of course, sparked some speculation, with many concerned about the future of Creative Assembly. Thankfully, Sega hasn’t given up on them, and in fact, is allowing them to return to what they were best known for doing, and that’s making great offline games, most notably RTS games with the Total War franchise.
“Each studio has its own strengths and weaknesses, but the favorable winds of the early COVID-19 period, coupled with the strong performance of each title, led us to adopt a strategy of accelerating more, even in areas where those studios have not tried yet for further growth. However, some studios did well and some did not, so we have decided to focus again on strength of each studio.
To put it simply, Creative Assembly was good at offline games in the RTS genre, but they took on the challenge of developing HYENAS, an online game in the FPS genre. However, although the game itself was good, we decided to cancel the development of HYENAS because we did not think it would reach a quality that would satisfy our users when we considered whether we could really operate this as a competitive online game for a long period of time.”
Though the studio is best known for Total War, a franchise that has been beating strong for over 23 years, lest we not forget that the studio did manage to pull off one of the best video game adaptations for the Alien IP with Alien Isolation. Fingers crossed that this is something that Sega may revisit, as fans (including me) have been clamoring for a sequel since 2014.