You talk about having proof and that you've seen things that indicate there was a fully playable COH2 prototype. I find this to be questionable, but I've seen people create mockups of all kinds of things. I do it myself for prospective prototypes. I can create a very convincing COH mock up in probably a couple days.
There was a time where a playable build was a measure of the amount of work that was already invested into a project, at least a little. But today, for a while now, dev tools have existed that blur that line significantly. For example, a small team of developers using something like
this could have a playable *something* running in days to weeks. It might still require huge amounts of work to make the gameplay itself function, but its theoretically possible for someone to see something that looks like and feels at a glance like a playable demo that's actually closer to Icon in its functionality.
I mean jeez,
this thing is actually free. If I had the time and energy to write a Plan Z CoH clone, I'd probably do it in something like that.
As an aside, everything I know strongly suggests that none of the CoH2 efforts (there was more than one, depending on how you count) reached a legitimate play-testable alpha, although its possible there was some code written for it. Paragon didn't have the resources to drive three separate full projects, and if Paragon Studios managed to survive about a month longer than it did, I think we would have gotten to see that Island-hopping game Matt Miller mentions in
this article that Azrael linked to upstream. I was told we were probably days away from PS spilling the beans to CoH players as an early sneak peek when the shutdown decision came down. There was really no time for a CoH2 with CoH1 still in development and that other game also spinning up. From 2007 to about 2010, CoH2 was a possibility. After 2010, it wasn't really anymore (before that, Cryptic was working on the aborted MUO).
I was never told this, nor did anyone ever imply it to me, but I have often wondered if one of the reasons NC decided to pull the trigger on PS was that they knew if they didn't do it then, it would look much worse after PS announced Island-hopping-crafting-game-I-wish-I-could-use-the-name-for-but-probably-shouldn't. It might have looked even worse after PS, well, did the next thing after announcing it, which Matt aluded to in
this interview.
They were going to Kickstarter it.