Remember a couple of years ago, when a trailer for a fake game that appeared in Watch Dogs 2 turned out—maybe, according to sources—to be a real project called Pioneer? It looks like that report may have been accurate, because now it appears that the whole thing has been cancelled.
RIP Pioneer. 😭 https://t.co/YP8LK1s6fXJanuary 15, 2019
Hutchinson is in a position to know: Prior to co-founding Typhoon Studios in 2017, Hutchinson was the creative director of Far Cry 4 and Assassin's Creed 3. And while he didn't come out and say explicitly that the project had been cancelled, he did have this to say when asked about it specifically:
Jonathan Cooper, the animation art director on Asasssin's Creed 3, also chimed in:
☠️ RIP Pioneer ☠️ https://t.co/tNkl6sqHHYJanuary 15, 2019
It's worth emphasizing that this is all purely speculative, not just because of the nature of the tweets, but because Pioneer was never actually confirmed to exist in the first place. It's really more akin to sad musing about what might have been, then, but it fits with the 2016 report, which said that the game was facing an uncertain fate: Development wasn't unfolding as smoothly as expected, and so the announcement had been put off while the project was "retooled." But the trailer had already been inserted into Watch Dogs 2 by that point, and so out the door it went.
I've emailed Ubisoft to ask if there's anything to all of this, and I'll update if I receive a reply. But unless Hutchinson and Cooper are messing with us, it looks like that's the end of any hope we had of one day getting our hands on Pioneer.
