PopCap pulled plug on Diablo-style RPG

By Tom Bramwell Published 28 September, 2010

"It was in beta... but something's missing."

PopCap has revealed that it almost finished work on a casual RPG game in a similar vein to Diablo but eventually pulled the plug.

"It got pretty far," creative director Jason Kapalka told Develop. "It was in beta, and it felt like a turn-based version of Diablo that was very cute."

Apparently complexity became an issue and in the end the developer decided to put the game on ice.

"We get to a stage after months and months of development where we think there's something fun about it - but there's something missing. Either there's not enough depth, or we don't think it'll be a success, or something. That's when the game enters design review."

Apparently there are "over a dozen games that sort of work but never made it" in the same stage as the Diablo thing, and occasionally PopCap goes back to them and tries to make them work.

Thanks in part to this perfectionist attitude, PopCap's hit-rate is rather excellent. Although best known to most for the likes of Bejeweled, it hit all the right notes with casual and core gamers alike when it released Plants vs. Zombies last year - one of our Games of 2009.

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About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000. Follow him on Twitter.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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