Producer Dereck Proud has just confirmed that the spiritual successor of L.A. Noire, Whore of the Orient, has arrived at an impasse. Likely, it won’t happen.
You may not have heard of it. And now, you may not even be able to play it. We are talking here about Whore of the Orient, a mysterious game announced back in 2012 that was supposed to be the spiritual successor of L.A. Noire. It was gonna make use of the technology Team Bondi had back then and take us to the Shanghai of 1936. If the title is luring, the content seems even more so. Back in those days, China was struggling between heavy forces: Western modernization, Communists and the Kuomintang policies trying to suppress everything that went against their political agenda.
Whore of the Orient was supposed to bring back all the elements we had enjoyed about L.A. Noire. Plenty of corruption, some sparks of mystery, the fights and shootings, the drills of a police force traversing the dirty waters of a society with way too many black sheep… Even those cat-and-mouse chases, as showed in a leaked gameplay of 2013.
However, in a recent episode of the GameHugs podcast, producer Dereck Proud, who currently works as director at Garoo Games, has confirmed that the game is unlikely coming out. “It was something we were all passionate about,” he said. “But in the end, that was the way it went.”
Whore of the Orient and Its Development Problems
Derek Proud also said that even if the game never sees the light of day, no one can blame the enthusiasm of the people behind it. One of them was Brendan McNamara, creator and mastermind behind L.A. Noire. In one occasion, he even said that Whore of the Orient was “one of the great untold stories of the twentieth century.” Truth is, the project was giving more headaches than successes for its people.
First, Team Bondi went completely down after releasing L.A. Noire. The studio was then bought by Kennedy Miller Mitchell, an Australia-based production company. Two years later, they faced other round of layoffs due to their bleeding lack of publisher. As a last resort, the team received $200,000 in direct funding from Screen NSW, a branch of the Australian government. By then, the game was allegedly still in development. Until now.
Another one to add to our particular “Games That Could Be But Never Were” list.
[Source: Polygon]
