Jake Solomon, the designer behind XCOM: Enemy Unknown and the director of XCOM 2, has announced that his company Midsummer Studios will be closing down without having released a game.
In a post on X, Solomon shared some work-in-progress footage of the project he and his studio were working on, which was called Burbank (although it's not clear whether that would have been the game's final name or not).
He says he wanted to share a glimpse of Burbank "before we close the doors at Midsummer Studios", so it's pretty clear that the studio is no more, especially given that it's not common for developers to release pre-alpha footage if the game is still in active development.
Solomon describes Burbank as "life sims + The Truman Show", but he also says the project was "more than that", allowing players to "share whatever stories and characters they can dream up".
He also confirms that the studio was using generative AI for characters' "memory, reasoning, and speech", which would have been central to Burbank's systems. However, Solomon says Midsummer "had no interest in replacing any (that's Solomon's stress) developers with AI".
Alongside Solomon, Midsummer also included luminaries like The...
