Techland put the development of Hellraid "on hold" last month, saying it needed to focus its efforts on the successful zombie survival game Dying Light, and that looked very much like that. The first-person fantasy brawler struck me as potentially interesting when I initially heard about it—big Dark Messiah fan here—but it's development hasn't gone smoothly. It was originally supposed to be out in 2013, but got pushed back to 2014, and then 2015. So even though Techland said it intended to "send it back to the drawing board and invent our dark fantasy title anew," the general sense was that we wouldn't be hearing from it again.
But Techland CEO Pawel Marchewka told Eurogamer that assumption is entirely incorrect. The timing is still up in the air, but he insisted that the studio will return to Hellraid after it's handled its Dying Light obligations. "Once we deliver everything we want [for Dying Light], probably by the, I don't know, end of the third quarter this year, we will then maybe start to send some new [Hellraid] materials or information or thinking about what's the release date, something like that," he said.
The reason Techland made the announcement about suspending development in the first place is that it wanted to be up-front with fans, many of whom "were expecting new things coming from Hellraid at E3 and Gamescom" that it wouldn't be able to deliver.
"It's definitely not dead," he said. "It's just we want to make sure the needs from our Dying Light players are satisfied as quickly as possible and we needed some resources for that."
Techland recently released the co-op focused Bozak Horde DLC for Dying Light, and while Marchewka didn't reveal what the studio is getting up to next, he did hint at quite a bit more to come—perhaps even a full-on expansion.
