It’s been nearly three years since we’ve heard anything on the brilliantly named Whore of the Orient, a game billed as the spiritual successor to LA Noire.
Whore of the Orient (Whorient, if you will) was in development by a team lead by LA Noire creator, Brendan McNamara, but it seems now we won’t be seeing it after all.
The game’s producer, Derek Proud, said in an interview with the Gamehugs podcast this week that he doesn’t believe the game will ever see the light of day.
When asked if he thought the game would ever see a release, Proud said:
I don’t think so. That was one of the games and one of the studios I kind of left right at the bitter end. When we got wrapped up.
Whore of the Orient was announced back in 2012 for PC, Xbox 360, and PS3. The game was intended to take place in 1936 in Shanghai, and was to feature an ambitious plot that dealt with Communism and Western influence.
The development studio at Kennedy Miller Mitchell (featuring many staff who worked on LA Noire) was then hit with layoffs in 2013 because they didn’t have a publisher.
KMM’s Doug Mitchell said at the time that the game was still in development regardless, and the studio later received $200,000 in funding from Screen NSW.
That was the last anyone heard of the game, which was a shame, because Proud seemed… well, proud of what they’d achieved:
We were creating a game with all of that rich texture to it. And we fought for it. Brendan [McNamara – studio head], Alex Carlyle [design lead], Vicky Lord [general manager] and Naresh Hirani [project producer] all fought to keep that project alive. And I fought, too, it was something we were all passionate about. But in the end, that was the way it went.
Okay, so even if Whore of the Orient as we knew it never sees a release, can someone please just make another game with the same name?
I’m just very much in love with how ridiculous that title is.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.