Late last week, Bethesda rolled out a redesign for their website and in the process removed all traces of Prey 2, leaving many fans to wonder if the title was still in development. Bethesda has since issued a statement on the missing game, reconfirming the good news that it has not been canceled. The bad news is that it sounds as if Bethesda has placed it on the furthest part of the back burner.
A Bethesda spokesperson told IGN yesterday:
“Since we had already announced it wasn’t coming out this year and we don’t have anything new to say on the game at this time, we simply didn’t think it’d be appropriate to include it on the new site launch… We chose instead to focus on the upcoming titles we are talking about.”
A sequel to 2006’s Prey, Prey 2 was first revealed back in March 2011 and was originally scheduled to launch sometime in 2012 for the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC. This last March rumors circulated that the game had been canceled, which Bethesda later denied. However, they did admit that development had not “progressed satisfactorily“, which forced them to push the game out of their 2012 lineup.
This latest statement from Bethesda still leaves us without a release window for Prey 2, or any additional details on why the game’s development is considered “unsatisfactory”. It also makes it seem as if the game might miss 2013 as well, because the website contains a listing for The Elder Scrolls Online, which is scheduled to be released next year.
Without anything official to go on, we can only speculate as to why Prey 2 has been pushed completely off the radar. Based on our impressions of the title at E3 2011, my best guess is that Bethesda suddenly realized that the sequel was lacking the yonic doors found in the original Prey, and they needed the extra development time to correct the oversight.
Source: Joystiq