Eidos Montréal’s recently announced Guardians of the Galaxy will be a strictly single-player affair when it releases on consoles and PC later this year, but new details provided by a former member of the development team appear to suggest that wasn’t always the case.
As pointed out by the website SegmentNext, the LinkedIn profile for Simon Larouche – now employed by Guerilla Games and collaborating on an unannounced project – notes that they briefly worked for Eidos between 2017 and 2018 in the role of Online Gameplay Director for GotG. The listing specifically references that a multiplayer component was ultimately canceled before ever seeing the light of day, though reveals little else besides.
Spilling the beans on a former employer’s decision to wholesale scrap your contributions to a title isn’t exactly something discussed in a résumé, of course, though the revelation certainly raises several questions, chiefly why it was even canned in the first place.
While it’s unlikely that a full postmortem will ever be offered, one possible explanation could be that final judgment came from the top as a result of another superhero adventure’s lackluster performance. Despite the huge amount of hype preceding its arrival, Crystal Dynamics’ live service Marvel’s Avengers failed to capture the audience it or Square Enix (publisher of both) had hoped. The latter has since outlined plans to recoup losses associated with the project via the sale of cosmetics and other microtransactions but suffice it to say that the Japanese company will be wary of having history repeat itself.
As for Guardians of the Galaxy, the space-faring adventure featuring an unlikely band of heroes comes to Xbox, PlayStation, Switch and PC on October 26th.
