So we may have been a bit overzealous in calling Pioneer, the previously teased Ubisoft sci-fi game, outright cancelled. It was originally believed that Pioneer would be released as a new IP by Ubisoft after the title was originally teased in Watch Dogs 2. A wrench was allegedly thrown into that plan earlier this month when team members working on the game alluded to it being cancelled on Twitter.
Well it seems to have been a case of people reading too much into public statements from said team members, because other Ubisoft staff have now revealed that the project wasn’t cancelled, just massively reworked.
The project that would eventually become Pioneer was thought out back in 2013, as a side-project for Ubisoft Montreal. The game was originally a small-scale game about space exploration. That idea quickly ballooned into what we saw as a teaser in Watch Dogs 2 in 2016. The short easter egg buried in that game led to wild speculation online about what it could be. Although it was clearly a teaser for some new game from Ubisoft.
Now, it seems that the original idea has shifted focus entirely. A team within Ubisoft is apparently working on taking those original assets and creating a multiplayer shooter of some kind, if internal sources are to be believed, as cited in a recent report from Kotaku. The goal seems to be to create a game that melds aspects of both the shooter and exploration genres, although that’s still largely speculation at this early stage. We’ll have to wait for more news to make more concrete judgments about what the game is.
So whatever Pioneer turns out to be, whether it be a shooter, exploration title, or something else entirely, we’ve still got months to go before we ever see even the slightest hint of a final product.
