This is why the ‘Wonder Woman’ game was cancelled
It’s been revealed why Warner Bros. Games scrapped their Wonder Woman game, despite spending more than $100million on development.
Warner Bros. announced their Wonder Woman game back in 2021 with the project being developed by Monolith, the studio behind Lord Of The Rings title Middle-earth: Shadow Of Mordor and the F.E.A.R. series. The single-player, open-world action-adventure game was due to feature an original story set in the DC universe.
However earlier this week, the game was cancelled and Monolith was shut down alongside MultiVersus developers Player First Games and WB Games San Diego.
“We need to make some substantial changes to our portfolio/team structure if we are to commit the necessary resources to get back to a ‘fewer but bigger franchises’ strategy,” explained Warner Bros. head of games JB Perrette at the time.
However, Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has told the Kinda Funny Games podcast that the Wonder Woman game has been in trouble since the start.
According to Schreier, Monolith originally started working on a new IP after the success of Middle-earth: Shadow Of War. “But Warner Bros decides it’s not interested in a new IP and decides they are going to make a Wonder Woman game [instead],” he explained.
After several lead developers quit, work began on Wonder Woman in 2021 with the game making use of Monolith’s Nemesis System. Created for Shadow Of Mordor, the AI game engine allowed enemies to remember previous encounters with you and let them adjust their combat style accordingly. “They were playing around with this idea that Wonder Woman would befriend people, it was the Nemesis System in reverse where they would become your allies, but it wasn’t coming together,” said Schreier.
“They rebooted it [last year] to be more of a God Of War style, traditional action game, but by then it was kind of too late.”
Last year, after a number of failures, Warner Bros. confirmed it was set to focus on four gaming franchises going forward: Mortal Kombat, Batman, Harry Potter and Game Of Thrones. A sequel to Hogwarts Legacy, set to tie into the upcoming HBO reboot of the series, has been described as a “high priority” for the studio and a new Batman game has been confirmed from Arkham developers Rocksteady.
In other news, fans are expecting Warner Bros. to release a remake of Middle-earth: Shadow Of War so they can retain patent rights for the Nemesis system which are currently due to expire in 2036.
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Ali Shutler
NME
