The Turok you’ve always wanted, is just a bunch of marines fighting dinosaurs? Why not go and play Ark, or ask for a new Dino Crisis or something?
For my part, I really want a proper Turok: a bewildering adventure-shooter set in a sprawling, confused, highly anachronistic Lost Land, a mystifying cosmic cesspit home to both staggering beauty and inconceivable horrors of immense scale and/or quantity, where entire civilizations at all levels of technological/sociological progress may as well have came into existence from nothing just yesterday and fallen into arbitrary positions/roles in the world, and have been under constant existential threat from, oh, say, a vicious militant race of simian dinosoids, for as long as they can remember.
Oh, and there are dinosaurs there, too, because the Lost Land drags in things from any point in any conceivable timeline, and just has to have the most high-stakes wilderness going.
This is a part of why I have always wanted to sympathise with Evolution. That damned game was promoted as being so much of what I just outlined, they talked about roughing your way through a dangerous and immense wilderness and also infiltrating heavily fortified bases and defending heavily populated future-cities, and acquiring increasingly sophisticated (and powerful) weaponry along the way…in a way that made me think that it was going to be one big open world where you went about this stuff. Didn’t help that previous Turoks (hello, Turok 2) presented you with dauntingly open maps to pick your way through as your competence dictated, I guess. That made running into a wall not 10 metres off the beaten path in the beginning pretty disappointing, let alone finding that the game channeled the player down a criminally linear, cut-up sequence of set piece encounters. And it also turned out that there was plenty else wrong with that game. But I guess I found the guns and much of the action satisfying, and thematically I still hold it up as the last Turok game to actually try to be a ■■■■■■■ Turok game.
This is all to say, that I really hope Disney never brings their cancelled abomination back into development. Or that they rebrand it. Hopefully they don’t even touch the license ever again, and eventually just quietly sell it to someone who actually knows what they’re doing.
That reboot that Propaganda produced may have been a half-okay game, and may’ve even evoke some of the features people remember liking about the original games – dinosaurs, increasingly crazy weaponry, sci-fi elements, a Native American protagonist, etc – but it’s a ■■■■■■■ space marine shooter. Clearly it was conceived in a cynical marketing department by people who saw the creative core of the franchise as just a hindrance that needed to be ejected to clear room for the then least risky game concept in the AAA space, so they could make a (somewhat) predictable return on the big risky AAA cash injection they put into the game. The only value that Disney seems to see in the Turok brand the sense of nostalgia and brand acceptance it conjures – and those can be difficult/expensive things to build from scratch, so I understand wanting to pull some amount of that out of a filing cabinet of existing properties – but by solely valuing promotion over even loose integrity to the source material, you’re disassociating the thing people want from the label they refer to it by, hence putting that thing further out of reach.
And for people who want that thing (e.g. me), that’s obviously really ■■■■■■. So hopefully something crazy happens and they sell it or lose the rights somehow, and someone who cares picks it up. But I’m not hopeful.
