A former Bend Studio developer has spoken out about the studio's scrapped new live service IP, which was canceled earlier this year in a move the ex-animator says he saw coming.
As highlighted on the r/GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit, Robert Morrison – now a senior animator at Ready or Not studio VOID Interactive, but for three years (up until this June) a senior animator for gameplay at Bend Studios – recently took to Twitter to share a roundup of all the games he's worked on in the last 10 years, a number of which were canceled. Alongside PlatinumGames' Scalebound and Splash Damage's Transformers: Reactivate, he also points to the unnamed "Bend Studio IP," prompting a few questions from fans.
Responding to one user saying that they'll "never get over what they did" to Bend Studio, Morrison says: "To be fair we didn't make enough substantial progress over the three years I was there. I saw the eventual cancellation coming prior to it."
To be fair we didn’t make enough substantial progress over the 3 years I was there. I saw the eventual cancellation coming prior to it.October 29, 2025
It's bad news for anyone curious about what the project could have been, too, as Morrison clarifies that he "can't say anything about the content of the game," and asked if he believes anything about it will ever make its way into the public eye, he simply says: "I don't think so."
On Morrison's LinkedIn page, he refers to the scrapped project as "Mirror Pond," describing his work creating "hand-keyed and mocap-based gameplay animation for main player characters and NPCs. Locomotion, traversal, combat, abilities, interactions, select screen, and much more." He also adds that he contributed to "integration and iteration within the Decima engine."
When the game's cancellation was first reported earlier this year, it was claimed that the project was a live-service title – scrapped at the same time as an apparent God of War live-service game from Bluepoint, the Demon's Souls remake studio. Since then, in June, it was reported that around 30% of Bend Studio staff had been affected by layoffs – Sony also confirmed in a statement at the time that the studio's previous project was indeed a live service title.
