In some sad news, it appears that Ubisoft’s in-development space epic Pioneer has been quietly cancelled. The title was never officially confirmed by Ubisoft, but by all accounts it was a game that was being worked on. Unfortunately, that seems to no longer be the case. This comes from former Ubisoft director Alex Hutchinson, who simply wrote “RIP Pioneer.”
RIP Pioneer. https://t.co/YP8LK1s6fX
— Alex Hutchinson (@BangBangClick) January 15, 2019
The existence of Pioneer (which was project’s codename) was first discovered within 2016’s Watch Dogs 2. In a mission that’s the very definition of meta, you were tasked with sneaking inside of Ubisoft’s offices in San Francisco and steal a teaser for an unannounced video game. It later turned out that the project was, in fact, real, though even then it was revealed the project was facing development problems.
Now, Hutchinson is no longer at Ubisoft, so it’s unknown when exactly this cancellation took place. It’s worth noting that games get cancelled without being announced all of the time, but this case was certainly a curious one. A project that was never officially confirmed, yet one that was public knowledge all the same. Apparently, Pioneer was in much better shape when the teaser was added to Watch Dogs 2. It seems that an formal announcement was planned for 2017, but of course, that never happened.
Ubisoft later came out with a different space-themed game, Starlink: Battle for Atlas, but that was always completely separate from Pioneer. It’s unknown what exactly what wrong with Pioneer, and we’ll likely never know. However, it is still sad to see games get the plug pulled on them.
