with renewed vigor, making both games effectively
unplayable once more. Player counts for the
original Titanfall dropped so low that, before the
end of 2021, Respawn announced that it was being
pulled from sale and would no longer be available
on subscription services.
That seemed like a final nail in the coffin for
Titanfall, as even with the few remaining players
migrating to Titanfall 2, all was not well. Fans
openly mocked Respawn’s repeated statements
that Titanfall was the ‘core of our DNA’, decrying it
as a slap in the face to the fanbase as long as the
DDoS issues remained unfixed. Respawn declined
to comment for this article, however, there’s no
doubt the studio is now operating on a higher level,
with all its efforts catering to the larger player base
(and revenues) of Apex Legends.
Fortunately, the tale of Titanfall does have a
happy ending. Towards the end of 2021, following
the return of the hacking scandal to Titanfall 2,
enterprising modders released the ‘Northstar
client’. Taking its name from one of the in-gameTitans, Northstar allows players to host their own
Titanfall 2 servers and play via a server browser
rather than matchmaking, safe from DDoS attacks.
The mod also offers a huge variety of adapted game
modes and other fun features never implemented
in the original game. This has seen thousands of
players return to mech-stomping action on PC
(sorry, console players).SOLE SOLDIER
A passionate fanbase can move mountains, and
that’s the hope of fans of the long-running anime
and manga series Saint Seiya. The original series,
released in 1986, featured magical warriors
engaged in a war against the Olympian pantheon of
deities and a game for the Nintendo Entertainment
System was released in Japan a year later.
Since then, Saint Seiya has seen a number of
adaptations, with 18 games across numerous
platforms and a whole bunch of arcade and
pachinko spin-offs in Japan. The most recent title
was the fighting game Saint Seiya: Soldiers’ Soul,It’s always sad news when a game gets canceled, but some
titles don’t even get that closure, remaining on development
death row indefinitely. The term ‘development hell’ was coined
long before the rise of the games industry, referring to media
that ends up trapped in a state of limbo for any number of
reasons, whether due to lack of funds, creative differences,
legal disputes, or something else entirely.
The tech and gaming industry actually has its own term for
projects like this; ‘vaporware’ refers to games and software
(and sometimes hardware) that is officially announced but
releases late or doesn’t release at all. Some games stagger
through development hell only to be released in a lackluster
final form, such as the infamous Duke Nukem Forever,
which spent a whopping 15 years in development and went
through multiple different game engines and development
teams. Despite a decade and a half of hype, Forever tanked
with terrible review scores and unimpressive sales figures,
potentially killing the Duke Nukem IP forever (pun intended).
Another hotly-anticipated game that may never get released
is Beyond Good and Evil 2, a prequel to the legendary 2003
action-adventure title. Although the original was considered
a commercial failure, it reviewed well and gained enough ofa cult following for Ubisoft to greenlight a second game from
creator Michel Ancel (of Rayman fame). This was back in 2008,
and fans heard nothing until a re-announcement at E3 in 2017,
where Ancel confirmed that previous clips and screenshots
were from a ditched version of the project.
In 2020, Ancel retired from game development,
leaving many fans concerned about the fate of the game.
Coincidentally, Ancel had also been working outside of Ubisoft
on a survival game named Wild (announced in 2014) that
had also been labeled as vaporware by some journalists.
Ancel was keen to stress that both games would remain in
development without him, and BGaE2 was confirmed as ‘still in
development’ by Ubisoft in 2021, but no release date nor new
gameplay footage has surfaced yet.
One game that many are hoping will be released one day
is Scalebound, which officially began development in 2013. A
dragon-riding RPG from developer PlatinumGames, it was
canceled in May 2019 after a troubled development period, to
the dismay of fans. Still, Microsoft remains the holder of the
Scalebound IP and Platinum’s head designer Hideki Kamiya
confirmed in a recent interview that he was ‘totally serious’
about resurrecting the game should he get the chance.LOST AND DAMNED
Beyond Good and Evil 2 was greenlit in
2008, but fans heard nothing until 2017.left behind
42 MAXIMU MPC JUN 2022
© UBISOFT