The Saboteur - "We're not even alpha yet"

Pandemic's The Saboteur isn't coming out any time soon. Just in case you thought it might be.

"There's still definitely a lot of work to do," dev boss Tom French told VG247 in London this week.

"We're not even alpha yet. There's little quirks and kinks, but we still have plenty of time to work that kind of crap out."

This year? Recent mag articles had pegged it for a 2009 ship. Doesn't sound like it.

"We haven't said an exact date yet," said French. "We are getting closer, and we are getting closer to locking down that date. We want to make sure we hit the right window. We don't want to get lost, and hopefully we'll find the right window and the right place in time to get this game out.

"It's a pretty ambitious project and there's a lot of content there to explore and we're really proud of it. We just want to make it come out at the right time and give it the level of polish we want to deliver it at too."

French admitted that Pandemic's April 2007 announcement of the game - a sprawling open world action story set in wartime Paris - was too early considering what had been accomplished at that point.

"We definitely started talking about it a bit too soon," French said.

"We only had a small section of the world even built at that point. We had all these big ideas and aspirations, and it was time to prove it, really. We just went quiet.

"Then the EA acquisition happened, and that gave us a little bit more time to keep massaging and refining the game... All the core concepts are still there - the climbing, the fighting, the shooting, the sneaking mechanics, the racing, the story, the character - but it's gotten so much better than it did back then. It was more like a tech demo at that point."

French assured us, however, that the project was ramping up.

"The team has grown," he said. "We inherit people from Mercenaries and other games, so we've definitely got a lot more people working on the project, helping refine all those little details that we've been talking about but nobody had time to touch."

Get screens and more info from the game's official site.