Stadia users were surprised to see a mysterious game named Orpheus in the cloud gaming platform’s store this morning. Once downloaded, they found it to be a development build of Ubisoft’s upcoming adventure game Gods & Monsters, with temporary character models and assets seemingly taken straight from the Assassin’s Creed series.
“Regretfully, on Thursday morning, we mistakenly made an E3 2019 demo version of Gods & Monsters from Ubisoft available on the Stadia store that was not intended for the public to play,” a Google Stadia rep told Kotaku via email. “A few hundred gamers were able to play it for less than 30 minutes. We sincerely apologize to our partners at Ubisoft for this mistake.”
Back during E3 2019, Kotaku boss man Stephen Totilo described Gods & Monsters as a mix between The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Greek mythology, the latter a direct result of the team behind Assassin’s Creed Odyssey leading the project. Those details come through in spades in the footage that’s now proliferating (and steadily being removed by Ubisoft) across social media.
“Our vision for the game formerly known as Gods & Monsters has evolved in surprising ways, which is common when developing exciting new worlds,” Ubisoft Quebec executive producer Marc-Alexis Cote explained to Kotaku. “This footage is from our E3 2019 demo, which was shown to select press last June and is now over one year old. Much has changed since then in terms of features, tone, art and character design, and even the name of the game. We are hard at work and very excited to finally show players what we have created at the end of summer.”
An Ubisoft rep told Kotaku that Orpheus is not the game’s new name despite appearing as such in the Stadia leak. The developer plans to reveal that information during next month’s Ubisoft Forward broadcast.
Correction — 06/12/20, 1:15 p.m. ET: Ubisoft has clarified that “end of summer” does not mean the Ubisoft Forward event in July. Kotaku apologizes for the error.
The game formerly known as Gods & Monsters is still without an official release date. It will be available across multiple platforms in addition to Stadia, including PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC.