Come along, because this surprise escaped before its time. In June 2019, days before E3, Ninja Theory’s new game leaked on the internet. The British studio, known for Heavenly Sword, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, DmC: Devil May Cry and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, had a project quite different from what fans expected: a competitive online action game called Bleeding Edge.
The leaked video, recorded straight from a screen, was about one minute long and showed the characters in a stretch of gameplay with four-versus-four matches focused on melee combat. The same material announced a technical test starting June 27.
To understand the context: Ninja Theory had been bought by Microsoft a year earlier, at E3 2018, and Bleeding Edge would be one of the studio’s first games inside the Xbox family. Creative director Rahni Tucker later said the idea was born from a wish to fill an empty space: she wondered where “a competitive team-based third-person action multiplayer” was. It is nice to know that the team started with just ten people and reached 25 at launch, much smaller than the usual Xbox Game Studios teams.
What came next
Bleeding Edge was released on March 24, 2020 for PC and Xbox One, published by Xbox Game Studios, with 13 characters to choose from, most focused on melee attacks and a few with ranged attacks. Critical reception was mixed: Metacritic averages were 62 on PC and 66 on Xbox One. On January 28, 2021, Ninja Theory halted the game’s development. The studio later released Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II in 2024, the continuation of the Senua story that had won over so many people in 2017.
Source: Eurogamer.
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