In a new interview with NME, Hasan Kahraman called the launch of the Abandoned Realtime Experience “a really big disaster”. Originally planned to launch on August 10 the app went live but once inside there was nothing to see or do. It would take a few days to finally upload a video, the same one they had already released on Twitter which only clocked 4 seconds.
The app which is supposed to run both the trailers and later demos using not only 4k picture but 3D and haptic feedback, which ultimately amounted to very little in their first teaser. On top of that, a disclaimer reading “All content is rendered in 3D images and therefore not a high-quality video,” seems to undercut some of those initial claims.
Kahraman did have an answer for this, however, stating:
Basically, we had to cut out some footage from the opening teaser and I knew that it wasn’t a good idea to use the same footage that we had on Twitter and put in there because it’s literally just four seconds of footage and it doesn’t give much. But we needed to do this because people wanted to have a patch, right? That was our first priority – just get the patch out there because we will be adding more content later.
Again following this he states vague technical issues that impeded the launch of the first trailer. However, in this interview he goes a step further, laying a portion of the blame directly on the Unreal Engine 5 that is running the app. He stated:
It started with engine issues when we had the patch delay and we couldn’t really resolve that. We weren’t alone – we had some other teams working with that so, it got really out of hand. Maybe it’s because we use Unreal Engine 5, which is in early access, which is not really recommended for a project like this. But we did it anyway because we needed the features that it had.
In the grand scheme of things, both of these statements feel largely unsatisfactory. He proceeded to go on and once again state that his is not associated with Kojima, or Konami, or Silent Hill. However, this time he added that Abandoned is not even a horror game and that “Abandoned is a shooter/survival game. It has some horror elements in it but it’s not really a horror game. It’s not what people think – that it’s Silent Hill.”
The problem here is that their marketing campaign has allowed for any misunderstanding there might be to flourish. Most indie developers need to outline their game before any development begins with some form of Kickstarter. Those that have the money almost always choose to make the first thing you see of the game comprehensive. While it may be fun to tease your game or build up to an announcement this issue with that if he is not connected to Hideo Kojima is just that, He isn’t Hideo Kojima.
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