Gameloft have officially cancelled their promising looking FPS game, March of Heroes. It was three months ago that we showed you a gameplay video of the title in action, and the game looked pretty far in development then, so it does come as a bit of a surprise that the game has been given its marching orders.
In a post on their Facebook and Twitter pages, Gameloft don’t really give a reason, but the Unreal Engine is mentioned leading to speculation that they had trouble getting to grips with the tech.
We think the game has been cancelled for two reasons:
1. Gameloft already have a lot of FPS franchises, and there was always the possibility that this was going to cannibalize sales of their upcoming Modern Combat 3, and dilute the impact of other Gameloft titles. Maybe they had hoped to have this one out the door months before MC3 arrived.
2. Despite the use of the Unreal Engine, the game didn’t look that much better than other big Gameloft games that didn’t use the Epic tech. This, combined with delays and maybe dev team not getting along with the Unreal Engine as quickly as they had hoped may have meant that the cost of finishing the project didn’t meet with Gamelofts sales expectations.
This is all guesswork of course, but if you were looking forward to the game, don’t despair, as there is no doubt that level designs and ideas will show up in later games at some point.
We actually think it is pretty decent of Gameloft to let fans know instead of letting them hang on forever.