Just Where is Project Awakening?

The word vaporware is one that gets thrown around too easily, which means its meaning has become more than a little diluted, but when a game is in development for eight years with next no showings and not even an official title announcement, you can’t help but wonder if it really is shovelware, even if the company responsible for it insists that it isn’t. There have, unfortunately enough, been a number of prominent examples of that over the years, and one that comes to mind quite often is Project Awakening.

Though not on the same level of mainstream attention as something like, say, Beyond Good and Evil 2, Project Awakening is still very much a game that turned more than a few heads with its eye-catching announcement years and years ago, and then went on to follow it up with a prolonged period of next to nothing. Cygames’ action RPG has been in the upcoming pile for years now, and even at this point, it looks no closer to launch than it has at any point in the last near-decade. So what exactly is going on?

Project Awakening was first announced all the way back in 2016, close to a decade ago, but it wasn’t until Cygames showed off a gameplay trailer (or a supposed gameplay trailer, at least) at Tokyo Game Show 2018 that it really caught the attention of the masses. That first trailer was admittedly an impressive one. For starters, it boasted stunning visual fidelity, looking so spectacular that many didn’t believe that it was actual gameplay footage or representative of the real game itself. On top of that, it also painted an intriguing picture of its high fantasy setting, which Cygames promised would deliver an epic combat-focused action RPG experience taking cues from the likes of Monster Hunter and Dragon’s Dogma.

The combination of an intriguing premise and how good that TGS trailer looked instantly shot Project Awakening up many people’s lists of most anticipated games, especially with behind-closed-door previews at E3 2018 also seeming quite optimistic about how the game was shaping up (even though there wasn’t much that was shared by way of finer details even back then). All of that early buzz, however, was bafflingly followed by three years of complete radio silence. For three years, Cygames said and showed absolutely nothing else of the game, and though another update did finally arrive in 2021, it was essentially just a tech demo showing glimpses of Cygames’ Callista Game Engine’s open world tech and development process, as well as a few snippets of the game’s fantasy setting. And since then? Radio silence again.

Three more years have passed, and Cygames has barely said a word about Project Awakening– until very recently, that is. Taking to Twitter, the developer recently provided assurances that the action RPG hadn’t been cancelled, and the dev team was “working hard behind the scenes”, with more updates on the game supposedly set to be shared in the “coming months”. Undoubtedly, that’s reassuring for those who have been looking forward to the game and may have started fearing of late that perhaps the project had been shelved entirely. But when Cygames does finally share more updates on Project Awakening, how significant should we expect those updates to be?

Maybe it’s the fact that it’s been eight years since the game was announced, or maybe it’s… no, it’s that- it’s been eight years, and perhaps the time has finally arrived for Cygames to lift the lid on what exactly Project Awakening is going to be. Until now, we’ve had minimal details on the game- we know it’s a combat-focused action RPG taking inspiration from Monster Hunter and Dragon’s Dogma that will set players lose in a fantasy open world setting, and we know that it will feature some co-op elements.

But beyond those surface level details? We don’t really know much else- including the game’s name, funnily enough. The premise is, of course, interesting enough to the point where it has sustained at least some level of interest over the course of eight years (despite minimal updates), while fans of Granblue Fantasy: Relink (which enjoyed plenty of critical and commercial success upon its release earlier this year) will also be curious to see another AAA action RPG from Cygames. But the next time that Project Awakening does show up again – which will hopefully be not long from now – it will do so with a much more substantial showing than it has in the past. Ideally one that gives us a much more solid idea of what the game is going to be, what some of its core systems and mechanics are going to be, and, you know, what it’s going to be called.

That, of course, brings us to the next question. When exactly is Cygames going to show off Project Awakening again? With Granblue Fantasy: Relink now out of the way, is the studio ready to turn its full attention to the long in development open world action RPG? And if that is the case, does that mean we’ll be getting a showing sooner rather than later? As mentioned, the developer did suggest that more news would be shared in the next few months, but that isn’t exactly a narrow window.

The next couple of months are going to bring plenty of major showcase events, from Summer Game Fest to a rumoured PlayStation Showcase sometime this month. Could one of those serve as the stage where Project Awakening surfaces? After all, with the game being developed as a PlayStation exclusive (as it stands, at least), a new trailer at a Sony event wouldn’t go amiss. Then again, there’s every chance that a May event (or even one in June) is too soon for Cygames, in which case we could be looking at anything from Gamescom in August to Tokyo Game Show in September to The Game Awards in December. And yes, all of that is assuming that Project Awakening does indeed re-emerge this year, which certainly isn’t set in stone either.

Clearly, what little Cygames has shown and said of Project Awakening over the course of nearly a decade has been interesting enough that even in spite of how long the game’s development has dragged on and how silent the developer has been about it, it is still a game that many continue to keep their eye on. Cygames has our attention, and has had it for a while, but it’s slowly being eroded away by the passage of time, so hopefully, the developer won’t be waiting much longer than it already has, and will come out with a long overdue meaty new showing for Project Awakening in the relatively near future.