It’s always a mystery what exactly goes on behind closed studio doors and what is happening during a game’s development. Though it would appear that Remedy Entertainment has pulled the plug on its mysterious multiplayer game, Kestrel, which was previously known as Vanguard. The studio will instead be shifting its focus to its more established IPs including Control, Alan Wake and Max Payne.
From what information was shared about the Kestrel project, it was meant to be “a premium game with a strong cooperative multiplayer component” and was going to be published by Chinese gaming monolith, Tencent. However, with the cancellation of Kestrel, the studio has confirmed that its other projects are still going smoothly and what resources that were originally meant for Kestrel will instead be going to these projects. The projects in question include remakes of Max Payne 1 and 2, Control 2, and a multiplayer spin-off from Control codenamed “Condor”.
From what was said by the studios CEO, Tero Virtala, “Codename Kestrel showed early promise but the project was still in its early concept stage,” he later added that “We can reallocate talented Kestrel developers to these other game projects, and many of our support functions get additional focus on their operations. This is yet another means to ensure that our game projects continue advancing well. I want to thank our Kestrel development team. Though we decided to discontinue the project for wider Remedy benefits, our team has done good work and provided us with valuable learnings.”
As mentioned before, the project had struggled a fair bit in the beginning and even had to be rebooted, as was announced by Remedy Entertainment in November 2023. However, with the trouble project being scrapped and recycled into other Remedy projects, we will hopefully hear more about them soon; including Condor which according to what we know, will be a four-player cooperative “player versus environment” game.
