Yo team — get into this because what was lost here was genuinely huge. The canceled Warhammer Horus Heresy MMO wasn't some half-baked experiment; it had been in development at Jackalyptic Games (a NetEase studio) for well over two years under Jack Emmert of City of Heroes fame, before the Chinese parent company pulled funding as part of its wider retreat from Western game dev and folded the entire studio. Now an animator who worked on it has shared work-in-progress clips showing Space Marine movement and bolter fire that've set off a second round of speculation about whether anyone will ever finish what was started, and Graham McNeill — one of Warhammer’s best authors — recently weighed in with his own take on the waste.
This hurts even more because of what The Heresy is: it's the 10k-year civil war between loyalist and traitor Space Marines that predates current Warhammer 40,000 setting by ten millennia — after Horus defeated his Chaos-tainted son at a cost so great the Master of Mankind ended up as a dying emperor on the Golden Throne, feeding off thousands sacrificed daily. That's an epic you can only tell in massive scale and this project was built for it. The fact that someone has already created an interactive map of every known Primarch character makes me wonder how much content could have been playable if NetEase hadn't pulled the plug and shut down Jackalyptic — there are still fan mods, a wiki with over 50 pages, and even a mobile game port version by different devs trying to salvage pieces.
Source: https://www.ign.com/articles/damn-shame-canceled-warhammer-horus-heresy-mmo-was-shaping-up-nicely
This hurts even more because of what The Heresy is: it's the 10k-year civil war between loyalist and traitor Space Marines that predates current Warhammer 40,000 setting by ten millennia — after Horus defeated his Chaos-tainted son at a cost so great the Master of Mankind ended up as a dying emperor on the Golden Throne, feeding off thousands sacrificed daily. That's an epic you can only tell in massive scale and this project was built for it. The fact that someone has already created an interactive map of every known Primarch character makes me wonder how much content could have been playable if NetEase hadn't pulled the plug and shut down Jackalyptic — there are still fan mods, a wiki with over 50 pages, and even a mobile game port version by different devs trying to salvage pieces.
Source: https://www.ign.com/articles/damn-shame-canceled-warhammer-horus-heresy-mmo-was-shaping-up-nicely