I guess the writing was on the wall considering the game has been in development hell for many years, but I still look back at the original announcement trailer and think about how cool this game could have been. It was essentially sold as Minecraft but better - with proper combat, better exploration, powerful dedicated modding tools, and more. It was to be created by the creators of probably the biggest Minecraft server ever, which meant they understood the ins and outs of the game and what it needed to improve.
...even after a major reboot of the game engine...
Custom engines claim another victim.
Game dev is hard. Game engines are apparently impossible and cost prohibitive these days, unless licensed out en masse. They're killing studios and franchises left and right.
Though as an unrelated counterexample, Kitten Space Agency is doing a custom game engine and development is scary fast right now. They’re doing all the work in public and it’s wild how good the dev team is.
Sometimes there's a rock hard justification. Orbital mechanics is a great one. Game engines are literally not built for physics at celestial scales.
KSA's feature scope is way narrower than, say, a game with tons of NPCs and voxels and elaborate foilage and MMO-scale multiplayer and such. The DayZ guy and that studio are also pretty experienced at this point.
So yeah, I agree! And I'm glad KSA is seemingly progressing well, actually...
Let this be a lesson : do not re-develop your game engine when it's almost done already.
You can't delay your game until it's perfect as if you were Shigeru Miyamoto. You need to get something playable with a solid base out the dole, and iterate with feedback.
That's really sad. Can we at least have their stuff now? I mean it would be a waste to not open-source all the code and assets they've developed and make them available under MIT, CC and similar licenses.