Dean Hall's DayZ Follow-Up Seemingly Canceled

Ion, the game announced in 2015 by DayZ creator Dean Hall, has reportedly been canceled.

Neither Hall's company, RocketWerkz, nor co-developer Improbable are currently working on Ion, according to a report from Eurogamer.

"We're not actively working on Ion," Hall stated. "I am not involved in that. Nor is RocketWerkz."

For its part, Improbable declared, "We can definitely say that Improbable is not currently working on Ion."

"Ion was initially conceived as a project for co-development between Improbable and RocketWerkz," the former said. "A lot has changed since then. Dean Hall moved back to New Zealand from London, RocketWerkz has started work on a number of other games, and we have grown increasingly into a platform for games to be deployed on.

"We currently have no plans to develop or release a game ourself," the company concluded.

Ion was revealed by Hall at Microsoft's 2015 E3 conference. The designer said at the time that Ion is "not a game," but more of a universe that's defined by physics, biology, and chemistry. Take a look at the reveal trailer above.

Since 2015, little has been said about the sci-fi experience. We know it was due to launch for Xbox One and PC first, but now it appears the title will not launch on any platform.

Elsewhere in the Eurogamer interview, Hall confirms active development ceased on Ion when he moved from London to New Zealand between August and October last year. He also gives a clue as to why the project is no longer being built upon.

"Ion could only happen with a company like Improbable, with the scale of technology like that, and that's not a game we could do alone," said Hall, who left DayZ publisher Bohemia Interactive in 2014 to set up RocketWerkz.

"Games get paused, cancelled, pulled back all the time in the industry," he added, before concluding that he wants RocketWerkz to have greater control over its future projects: "The whole idea of setting up RocketWerkz was to try a lot of different stuff. Part of what we were doing with RocketWerkz in the early days was experimenting around and saying, 'How do we want to make games?' Do we want to focus on partnering, do we want to look for other people to do technology? And the decision we've made is to very much focus on the projects we control in their entirety ourselves."

RocketWerkz is reportedly working on a number of other projects, including one multiplayer game and one title that may be revealed later this month.