Rumor: Climax Hobbles Silent Hill Origins
News Via Kotaku
Late last week Climax LA sacked half of their employees in a move GameSpot called a "tweak", but at least one insider says was really just an attempt to salvage the disastrous development of Silent Hill Origins for the PSP and keep it under Climax's umbrella. The project has been transferred to Climax's Solent studio in the UK.
While the 16 employees who were laid off were given ample warning that another shoe was about to drop last week, the problem with development of the game apparently started back in December when work on the game first started.
Early on management in charge of the game's development made a bad call that lead to the team not getting their hands on a working engine until June of this year, according to a mole.
The same managers were reluctant to hire new employees despite that poor planning and employee treatment were causing the company to "hemorrhage" employees, including the lead designer and lead artist, according to the insider.
Because of those setbacks, the mole says, the game had been cut extensively to try and meet the increasingly unrealistic deadlines. Origins, once envisioned as a robust PSP game that would take eight hours to complete, has been shriveled down to a handful of much smaller levels and three to four hours of gameplay, the mole says.
Many of these difficulties were hidden from publisher Konami by management until a few weeks ago, when they were finally told the truth. Konami was understandably disappointed because the project would miss fiscal 2006 entirely as a result of the needed delays, and employees were told there were "no assurances" that the Origins project would continue. Last Wednesday, employees were told there would be lay-offs and given envelopes with an appointment time. In those appointments they were told whether or not they would have a job by the company's CFO, which most had never met.
The laid-off employees, some of which had only started a week prior, were each given a week's severance. Some of those who remain will help transition the now hobbled version of Origins to Climax's Solent studio in the UK, where expectations are the game will continue to suffer, the source said.
The rest will then wrap up their development of Steel Horizons and the studio will likely be effectively shuttered, leaving only a shell office for meetings with LA-based publishers, according to the mole.
While the company told GameSpot that there was a third project in the concept phase, the mole says none of the employees were aware of it and that even current staffing couldn't develop a new game
