Remember back in 2013 when Capcom showed a stunning title running on their custom Panta Rhei Engine, that was scheduled to release along with, at that time, the new consoles? It was called ‘Deep Down’, and looked like an interesting cross between Dark Souls and Monster Hunter, backed by powerful visuals and graphical fidelity. However, almost four years later, there’s no word at all about the game or the engine.
One of the reasons could be Capcom’s less than stellar track record these past few years. Street Fighter V was supposed to be a massive success, with estimated sales of 2 million in it’s opening months. Sadly, the game has yet to sell over 1.7 million almost a year and a half later. Resident Evil 7 was expected to cross 4 million in sales in three months, and it got close, but sales have rapidly declined since. Dead Rising 4 has barely sold a million, and was expected to sell more than twice that much. So, Capcom has not been doing so well when it comes to selling their biggest IPs and this might be the reason why they are hesitant to back a whole new project running on a whole new engine.
The new Monster Hunter game might finally bring in a broader audience to the franchise, but Capcom has also stated an intent in bringing their games to mobile, and even taking the route of ‘games as a service’, but never really acted on those intents.
The last word on Deep Down was back in 2015 when director Yoshinori Ono talked to Famitsu, saying:
“We are currently working diligently on Deep Down, so please give us a little more time. We may be able to show you some big developments this year.”
The game’s producer Kazunori Sugiura had this to say:
“[Deep Down] is a title that has to be able to compete for the next 15 years or so, so from a graphics standpoint we can’t release it as it is now, saying that it’s the best there is.”
Some would argue that the PS4 just wasn’t powerful enough to run a game that pretty, but Capcom did have the game at Tokyo Game Show, playable at 60 FPS on the PS4 .
Whatever the reason, we can only hope that the game shows up sometime soon, if only to release on the Playstation 5.
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