Staff members who worked on Unknown 9: Awakening report layoffs across the team at Canadian outfit Reflector Entertainment.
Jobs lost include roles within Reflector's art, marketing, narrative and quality assurance (QA) teams, Game Developer reported.
Unknown 9: Awakening launched last month to mixed reviews. On Steam, where it sits with a Mixed rating, less than 100 players have rated the game.
Published by Bandai Namco, Unknown 9: Awakening felt like an attempt to recapture the sci-fi adventure of Assassin's Creed, in a modern Tomb Raider-style globe-trotting story that featured secret societies vying over the remnants of an ancient civilisation.
First announced in 2020, the project drew interest due to its intriguing debut trailer featuring a younger version of protagonist Haroona (played in the final game by Anya Chalotra, AKA Yennefer in Netflix's The Witcher). It was the first project from the Montreal-based Reflector, co-founded by former Assassin's Creed Unity creative director Alexandre Amancio.
The game was also meant to act as a central point for the franchise as a cross-media brand. Just this week, a second season of the Unknown 9: Out of Sight tie-in podcast was launched, while the fourth issue of its graphic novel series Unknown 9: Torment arrived. There's also a web series, Unknown 9: Passage, which you can go watch on YouTube.
"Unfortunately, I was affected by the layoffs at Reflector Entertainment, which means I'm currently looking for a job as a Narrative Designer or Game Writer. If you hear of any opportunities, please let me know," one staff member who lost their job wrote.
Eurogamer has contacted Bandai Namco for comment.
boundle (thoughts on cracking AITD) wrote:
i guess thouth if without a legit key the installation was rolling back we are all fucking then
The studio behind bold Assassin's Creed-meets-Tomb Raider transmedia attempt Unknown 9 has signalled an end to the franchise, following the poor performance of last year's initial video game.
Unknown 9: Awakening, a generic globe-trotting adventure starring The Witcher TV series' Anya Chalotra, "didn't come near the company's expectations," the boss of developer Reflector Entertainment Herve Hoerdt said in a statement today, "and didn't warrant any further exploration in this universe". Ouch.
One of the Reflector's two future projects - presumably another Unknown 9 game which had been in the "conceptualisation phase" - has now been cancelled, Hoerdt added. This therefore means the studio was "terminating this development line".
"This decision correlates directly with the failure of the studio's ambitious and courageous first project, a new IP with a rich transmedia universe," Hoerdt continued.
Reflector had ambitious plans for Unknown 9 as an ongoing series, supported by podcasts, comics, novels, and several web series. While many of these have now been released, some ahead of Awakening itself, following a lengthy delay to the video game, none appear to have made any real impression.
Reflector will now go through a second round of redundancies, following previous job losses reported back in November 2024, as the company shrinks to a "single project approach the studio will adopt for the imminent future".
This project is an "existing Bandai Namco IP" and is "shaping up well", Hoerdt concluded.
boundle (thoughts on cracking AITD) wrote:
i guess thouth if without a legit key the installation was rolling back we are all fucking then
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