To be honest my first suspician might be that the studio developing the game might have been pulling a "Duke Nukem Forever", living off the money, and only producing the bits of stuff that we have seen to make it look like they were developing something. It's also equally possible that the truth is similar, but not quite as bad, as they were working, but very slowly and using far more money than was needed. In the latter case they might very well simply want to can the studio, take what assets they produced, and see if they can pass it over to another studio, hence there not being an official cancellation.
The industry keeps things so quiet that it's impossible to really know for sure.
Any way it goes, it sounded like a quirky take on the sandbox genere and like it could be amusing. I always got the impression that it's big gimmick was going to be trying to cross "Leisure Suit Larry" with "Grand Theft Auto" rather than being a straight crime game.
I've said my piece on game prices enough times where I won't comment on that aspect of things directly for the moment, but to play Devil's advocate I'll point out that "SAW" was not all that good of a game. It had some good atmosphere, and a few interesting puzzles, but also had horribly broken combat, and the most "challenging" aspects of the game mostly come from the broken nature of a few mini-games it keeps recycling combined with some rather draconian time limits. One infamous example being a timed room that requires you to do stuff running around a room and also solve 2 7x7 "Pipedream" type puzzles (vaguely similar to hacking in the original Bioshock) in a couple of minutes. Gamefaqs has been full of people talking about that paticular room, and how the only way to beat it is to pretty much keep doing it until the random number generator tosses you a couple of puzzles you recognize in succession.
SAW sold as well as it did because of a successful franchise, and because it apparently had a lot of people from the old "Silent Hill" games working on it. Sure, it made a profit on three million dollars, but it also had a ridiculous amount of hype by it's very existance. What's more the only reason why it's as good as it is (atmosphere wise and such) is because it was apparently using a near legendary team of designers. I mean let's be honest, the guys who did "Silent Hill" are going to create an awesome atmosphere for a horror game no matter what happens, and they did.
The industry keeps things so quiet that it's impossible to really know for sure.
Any way it goes, it sounded like a quirky take on the sandbox genere and like it could be amusing. I always got the impression that it's big gimmick was going to be trying to cross "Leisure Suit Larry" with "Grand Theft Auto" rather than being a straight crime game.
I've said my piece on game prices enough times where I won't comment on that aspect of things directly for the moment, but to play Devil's advocate I'll point out that "SAW" was not all that good of a game. It had some good atmosphere, and a few interesting puzzles, but also had horribly broken combat, and the most "challenging" aspects of the game mostly come from the broken nature of a few mini-games it keeps recycling combined with some rather draconian time limits. One infamous example being a timed room that requires you to do stuff running around a room and also solve 2 7x7 "Pipedream" type puzzles (vaguely similar to hacking in the original Bioshock) in a couple of minutes. Gamefaqs has been full of people talking about that paticular room, and how the only way to beat it is to pretty much keep doing it until the random number generator tosses you a couple of puzzles you recognize in succession.
SAW sold as well as it did because of a successful franchise, and because it apparently had a lot of people from the old "Silent Hill" games working on it. Sure, it made a profit on three million dollars, but it also had a ridiculous amount of hype by it's very existance. What's more the only reason why it's as good as it is (atmosphere wise and such) is because it was apparently using a near legendary team of designers. I mean let's be honest, the guys who did "Silent Hill" are going to create an awesome atmosphere for a horror game no matter what happens, and they did.
