Last week's Tokyo Dungeon indie event brought with it some public updates on CYBORG-PROTOTYPE, a single-player hybrid fighting game/roguelike that's been in development for the last ~4 years: in addition to opening a Steam page, they let people go hands-on for the first time in a while, and just from watching what little footage has made it out there, they've reached a point where they're starting to hone in on the production.
This game is being made by Goshow Inc., one of the many branches on the DreamFactory tree... to give a quick history lesson, a chunk of the team that worked on the original Virtua Fighter jumped ship to Namco and created Tekken 1, 2 and Soul Edge, only to jump ship once again to form DreamFactory after being headhunted by Square, for whom they developed Tobal 1 & 2, Ergheiz: GOD BLESS THE RING and The Bouncer; pre-The Bouncer, there was a significant staff exodus from DreamFactory, with the departing staff scattering to a multitude of different independent studios that mostly went on to doing contract work on other big fighting/combat action games, and most have persisted in one form or another to this very day.
In Goshow's case, they've assisted on the likes of Street Fighter V, MvC3, Gunslinger Stratos and the sicko favourite Garouden Breakblow FIST OR TWIST, among many other uncredited or non-fighting-game titles, but their calling card as a developer has been the Gladiator/Colosseum series of RPG-hybrid combat games that spanned PS2, PSP and PS3—those games could be seen as a continuation of DreamFactory's dalliances with single-player RPG-format combat games as seen in Ergheiz and Tobal 2, and CYBORG-PROTOTYPE is being positioned as the latest and most modern successor to that lineage.
After so many years in development, Goshow's being quite frank about the fact that they're hitting a wall in terms of budget, so I imagine it won't be too long before they make it available for purchase, one way or another. They've been pretty canny about promoting the game whenever Ergheiz makes its way back into the public consciousness (a more common occurrence than one might expect), so I hope that strangely large dormant fanbase is able to find their way to CYBORG-PROTOTYPE when the time comes.
