Bad news for those of you anticipating the release of World War II action thriller The Saboteur – Pandemic’s Tom French has confirmed that the game is "not even alpha yet," meaning it won’t be hitting store shelves anytime soon.
Discussing the ambitious project with VG247, French revealed, “There’s still definitely a lot of work to do,” adding, “We’re not even alpha yet. There’s little quirks and kinks, but we still have plenty of time to work that kind of crap out.”
While magazines and websites alike have the game pencilled in for release this year, French was keen to point out a solid date has yet to be nailed down:
“We haven’t said an exact date yet,” he said. “We are getting closer, and we are getting closer to locking down that date. We want to make sure we hit the right window. We don’t want to get lost, and hopefully we’ll find the right window and the right place in time to get this game out.”
“It’s a pretty ambitious project and there’s a lot of content there to explore and we’re really proud of it. We just want to make it come out at the right time and give it the level of polish we want to deliver it at too.”
He also conceded that the team likely announced the game too early (April 2007) given how much development had taken place at the time.
“We definitely started talking about it a bit too soon,” said French. “We only had a small section of the world even built at that point. We had all these big ideas and aspirations, and it was time to prove it, really. We just went quiet.”
“Then the EA acquisition happened, and that gave us a little bit more time to keep massaging and refining the game… All the core concepts are still there – the climbing, the fighting, the shooting, the sneaking mechanics, the racing, the story, the character – but it’s gotten so much better than it did back then. It was more like a tech demo at that point.”
The good news, French went on, is that the development team has assimilated some of the workforce from other Pandemic titles in recent months, meaning work on The Saboteur has since kicked up a gear.
“The team has grown,” explained French. “We inherit people from Mercenaries and other games, so we’ve definitely got a lot more people working on the project, helping refine all those little details that we’ve been talking about but nobody had time to touch.”