The game used a good idea but failed to impress audiences

Jun 21, 2012 19:11 GMT  ·  By

The development team who rebooted Syndicate for publisher Electronic Arts is still feeling positive about the game experience they managed to deliver despite the fact that the game was a commercial failure and was widely criticized by gamers.

Mikael Nermark, who is the chief executive officer working at Starbreeze, told Edge that, “I’m still proud of it. To have the courage to reboot the franchise – We knew from the get-go that there was going to be a small but very vocal of gamers and journalists that was going to hate us whatever route we took.”

He added, “If we didn’t do an exact copy of the game, they’d hate us. If we did do an exact copy, they’d say we didn’t innovate. They were never ours to win; it was a lost battle from the get-go.”

The leader of the EA Games label, Frank Gibeau, recently said that the rebooted Syndicate was a commercial flop and mentioned that his own company would learn from the gamble.

Nermark refused to comment directly on those statements, but he believes that both companies have made some mistakes linked to Syndicate.

The original Syndicate was a deep game that allowed players to outfit four operatives with a variety of weapons in order to then tackle a number of missions that often involved ultra-violence and civilian victims.

The reboot moved the game to the shooter space and offered a rather traditional experience, with a number of superpowers set to evoke the cyberpunk world it was set in.

The game was launched on the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360 and the PC.

Starbreeze was also working on a video game based on the Bourne universe, which was also set to be published by Electronic Arts, which was canceled because of concerns over quality.

It’s not clear what the developer is currently creating.