Arkane puts The Crossing on hold

By Robert Purchese Published 18 May, 2009

Dark Messiah dev had financial trouble.

Arkane and Valve have put ambitious multiplayer shooter The Crossing on hold, deciding to focus on a first-person RPG and an iPhone strategy game instead.

"We ran into an unexpected financial challenge some months ago and we had to put The Crossing on hold," Arkane boss Raphael Colantonio told Joystiq. "Since then, we shifted our efforts to other very good projects."

The Crossing was in development for PC and 360, and aimed to ditch campaign AI in favour of real-life players, a bit like Left 4 Dead. The two heroes - the Elites - were to be beefed up, whereas enemy-players would fill many different roles while trying to stop them progressing. The story was supposed to be quite close to Nicole Kidman film, The Others.

The last we saw of The Crossing was in a trailer published early last year.

Arkane Studios is the developer behind Dark Messiah of Might & Magic, the first-person fantasy action game that used clever Source-based physics to dispose of enemies with; patches of ground could be frozen for enemies to slip on, things could be set alight, boxes could come crashing down and so on.

Head over to our Dark Messiah of Might & Magic PC review to see what we thought. Avoid the Xbox 360 version, incidentally.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (4) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • PearOfAnguish #1 3 years ago

    deciding to focus on a first-person RPG

    Arx Fatalis 2? Yes please.

  • jimboton #2 3 years ago

    Nicole Kidman film? was she the director or something?

    Dark Messiah was good but Arx Fatalis was better. Let's hope this means we'll get another one ;)

  • TheTingler #3 3 years ago

    Would say "shame", except for the bit about focusing on a first-person RPG. Sorry Arkane, but while The Crossing sounded interesting, that's what I REALLY want from you guys!

    I suspect it's more likely to be Dark Messiah 2 than Arx Fatalis 2.

  • Gurrah #4 3 years ago

    Both Arx Fatalis and Dark Messiah were, and still are, brilliant games. Whatever Arkane decides to do, my hopes are high for it being something great, even though The crossing looked quite charming. But it's weird, the video from last year looked like a lot of the assets were done already, what have they been doing for the last couple of months, waiting for funding?