Ubisoft has reportedly canned a sequel to flawed gem Immortals Fenyx Rising
Not so immortal after all.
You know what game was actually alright? Immortals Fenyx Rising. Ubisoft's Breath of the Wild-like didn't burn up the charts—we scored it a respectable but not astounding 72% in our Immortals review—but it was a solid game with some funny moments and memorable characters. Characters who will have to remain in our memory forever, I guess, because a new report from VGC says Ubisoft has quietly cancelled a sequel.
According to anonymous dev sources spoken to by both VGC and Kotaku, Ubisoft has killed off a sequel to Immortals Fenyx Rising at an early stage of development, apparently because company brass felt that the first game had struggled to establish itself as an IP, which I think is MBA-speak for 'people stopped talking about this game about a week after it came out'.
Ubisoft hasn't exactly confirmed the original report, but it did provide a statement to VGC saying that it's "reallocating some creative teams and resources within the Quebec studio to other unannounced projects" and that their tech and expertise would "serve as an accelerator for the development of these key projects focused on our biggest brands".
That doesn't bode well for Immortals' future. I don't think there's any world in which you could plausibly call the game one of Ubisoft's "biggest brands," and it makes sense that the company would want all hands on deck for surer bets for more well-known properties. It does, after all, have a thousand different Assassin's Creed projects going, and, hey, remember that Splinter Cell remake? I guess that doesn't count as unannounced; I'm just really keen to violate other countries' sovereignty with Michael Ironside again.
So, alas, if you were hoping for more BotW-likes on PC, it's looking very likely you'll have to scratch an Immortals sequel off your list of potential candidates. We'll always have the original (plus, uh, the actual BotW and even Tears of the Kingdom if you want to get emulated about it), but it'll be a shame if Ubisoft has truly ditched off something imperfect but new in favour of its "biggest brands".