The Swedish conglomerate, which is in the process of splitting into three companies, is now rumored to have scrapped plans for a sequel to Red Faction: Guerrilla.

Rock Paper Shotgun is reporting that Red Faction: Guerrilla, which was released in 2009, was to be continued by Embracer Group, but the project has been scrapped. This wasn’t done by Volition: they created the IP over two decades ago, but later moved on to Saints Row, and had a little detour (Agents of Mayhem), but the Saints Row reboot was a failure, and the proposed $2 billion deal with Savvy Games fell through, so Embracer had to tighten their belts. Volition was one of the casualties. So who worked on the game?

It was Fishlabs. The Hamburg-based studio had previously developed Chorus, a space combat game that was released in 2021. Before submitting a pitch for Red Faction, the studio had ideas for a Lord of the Rings game. This was pitched to Middle-Earth Enterprises by Fishlabs. (This company, one of the “successors” of Embracer, would focus on the Tolkien legacy). However, the German studio didn’t get much response, so they moved on to Red Faction…

The new Red Faction was to take place about 100 years after Guerrilla, so it would have been set on a more colorful and terraformed Mars. It would have featured a female protagonist leading a revolution of underground workers. According to Rock Paper Shotgun’s source, Fishlabs looked at what made Red Faction: Guerrilla good and what made Red Faction: Armageddon bad, and would have worked from a mix of the two. They also wanted to use the GeoMod engine (which provided destructibility), but also thought about immersive simulator elements, vehicle customization, and dynamic dialog.

Plaion (a publishing arm of Embracer) was initially positive about the concept, but a vote within the publisher at the end of November saw the project canceled, and Fishlabs had to lay off about 50 people, so now it’s just a support studio… too bad.

Source: WCCFTech, RPS