Beta + Cancelled PC / MAC Video Games - Page 8 of 137

Breakaway is a canceled team-based multiplayer brawler game published by Amazon Game Studios and developed by Amazon Game Studios Orange County (formerly Double Helix Games) from 2014 to 2018, exclusively for PC.

Breakaway was officially revealed in September 2016, during the TwitchCon as we can read on MMOculture:

Amazon Game Studios, a subsidiary of e-commerce giant Amazon, today announced several new online games, the first titled Breakaway. Breakaway is a 4 vs 4 mythological brawler where players assemble a team from a roster of legendary warriors, including the relentless gladiator Spartacus, the twisted sorceress Morgan Le Fay, and the bloodthirsty warlord Vlad the Impaler.
At the start of each round, warriors can summon persistent buildables onto the playing field that dynamically alter the game. Buildables can besiege foes, shield teammates, or create new pathways through the arena. Players battle across several fabled locations such as El Dorado, Atlantis, and Styx to control the Relic, defending it from attackers, and smashing it into an opponent’s base.
Breakaway is powered by Amazon Lumberyard and integrates directly with Twitch (also owned by Amazon). Breakaway introduces four new ways for the Twitch community to interact with broadcasters.
Metastream allows streamers to customize their broadcasts with real-time stat overlays.
Broadcaster Match Builder lets broadcasters invite their followers to join their matches.
Broadcaster Spotlight adds to the excitement of streaming. It tells players when they’re in a match that’s being broadcast, and lets them follow the broadcaster with a single click.
Stream+ gives broadcasters new ways to interact with their viewers through polls, and by allowing viewers to wager loyalty points that are redeemable for in-game rewards.

The game went into playable alpha in December 2016 and Polygon was able to write a short preview about it:

We got to go hands-on with Breakaway at Amazon Game Studios recently and were pleasantly surprised by the game’s depth, considering how easy it was to pick up and play. The game’s heroes include a mix of archetypical warriors, like the tank class Black Knight, melee swordsman Spartacus and spellcaster Morgan Le Fay, who do battle on fabled battlegrounds such as El Dorado and Atlantis.
Each hero has a pair of structures he or she can build, including turrets, walls and healing shrines. Players can build one structure per round to cut off routes or support their allies in a push into the enemy’s base. Adding to the depth are upgrades that players can purchase mid-game with gold they earn over the course of battle. There’s a complexity in Breakaway underpinning the brawling, relic-running action, but with a little coaching from the developer, much of it was easy to grasp within an hour or so.
While securing the relic and dunking it into the enemy’s home base is the primary goal, players can score through other means. A full-team kill will also win your team a round. And if the in-game clock ticks down to zero and you’ve got control of the relic on your opponent’s half of the map, you’ll win that round. Those two scoring opportunities make for some of the best, most nail-biting moments in Breakaway, as you either frantically try to hunt down the last surviving player on the enemy team before the others respawn, or desperately pass the relic to your teammates to secure field position.

After months of playable alpha, however, Amazon took the decision in October 2017 to make a major overhaul on its gameplay, after they already made one for its playable heroes some months before, as we can still read on Polygon:

Amazon Game Studios’ competitive sports brawler with a mythological twist, Breakaway, is getting a major overhaul, the studio said today. After a months-long public alpha test, Amazon says its going to take time to “iterate and evolve” Breakaway’s core gameplay.
And it sounds like the Breakaway team intends to go a bit dark while that happens.
“Over the course of the Alpha we received a lot of feedback from you that we’re taking to heart,” the Breakaway team said in a post on the game’s website. “In order to get it right, we’re letting our team take the time to iterate and evolve Breakaway’s core gameplay to deliver what you’ve asked for. We aren’t sure how long this will take, but we think it’s the right thing to do for the game, and you, the community.
“We won’t be hosting Alpha matches during this time, but we still want to hear your ideas for how to improve the game, and we’ll share our ideas for your feedback.”
The Breakaway public alpha ran from June to September. The game had been playable on PC in private alpha tests prior to that, but in June, Amazon made major changes to Breakaway’s gameplay and its playable heroes. The studio shifted away from characters based on historical and legendary figures to more fantasy-based heroes, with an art overhaul to match.

Unfortunately, in March 2018, only 5 months after the announcement of the overhaul, the project was ultimately cancelled, again, covered by Polygon:

Amazon’s in-house game studio has put an end to development on Breakaway, the competitive fantasy sport brawler that Amazon Game Studios announced in 2016. In a statement posted to Reddit, developers announced that the game is “no longer in active development.”
Breakaway’s cancellation was confirmed this past weekend. Amazon Game Studios’ previous update on the game indicated that the development team was overhauling the title and taking “the time to iterate and evolve Breakaway’s core gameplay.” That was in the wake of a softer reboot of the game that amplified the game’s fantasy elements and redesigned its cast of characters.
Here’s Amazon Game Studios’ update on Breakaway from the game’s subreddit:
Since our last announcement, we have worked to implement community feedback and iterate on Breakaway’s core gameplay. While we have developed many ideas and made a lot of progress, we are also setting a very high bar for ourselves. In spite of our efforts, we didn’t achieve the breakthrough that made the game what we all hoped it could be. After a lot of soul searching, the team decided to focus on new ideas. As a result, Breakaway is no longer in active development.

The beginning in the video game industry by a giant like Amazon was mostly tumultuous: in addition to the cancellation of Breakaway, the company took 6 years to develop another multiplayer game, Crucible, released in May 2020, before being shutted down in November of the same year. Their other game, New World, was released in September 2021, after also experiencing some setbacks during its development.

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PC / MAC

Unknown Heroes (Mindware Studios) [PC – Cancelled]

Daniel Nicaise

25-12-2022

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Unknown Heroes is a canceled World War II Role-Playing Game developed by Mindware Studios, around 2005-2006, for the PC.

Very few information are currently available for this game. It was first mentionned in September 2008, on the Czech website Visiongame during an interview of Mindware’s lead designer Nikola Matoušková while talking about another cancelled project, Voodoo Nights:

V.G.: Not so long ago, Voodoo Nights was remembered in an article about canceled projects. No one really showed interest in such an interesting game?
N.M.: Many people showed interest, many publishers were even enthusiastic. But as I said before, pushing a new IP address is nearly impossible these days. Especially for a small business in the East. There were a lot of negotiations going on, but in the end, it all kind of fell apart. After a while, one of our main stakeholders came up with the game Army of Two, which had an almost identical concept. Interesting coincidence. And we had more of those irons in the fire, for example the very promising WWII epic RPG Unknown Heroes. There, too, all the negotiations kind of burned out in a weird way. Now I’m still waiting for another big publisher to unexpectedly release this game.

Years later, a low resolution gameplay video was published by one of the folks from Visiongame, showing what looked like a tactical squad based Third-Person Shooter:

During their existence, Mindware had another project that got canceled with their MMOFPS Mindhack.

If you know someone who worked on Unknown Heroes and could help us preserve more screenshots, footage or details, please let us know!

Microsoft, Others, PC / MAC, Playstation 2 (PS2), Sony, Xbox

Zombies: The Awakening (Krysalide) [PC/XBOX/PS2 – Cancelled]

U64 Staff & Contributors

22-12-2022

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Zombies: The Awakening is a canceled survival-horror first-person shooter developed by Krysalide for the PC, Playstation 2 and Xbox around 2003-2004 for a release planned in the beginning of 2005.

Using the Unreal Engine 2, Zombies: The Awakening was the first game from a small team composed of 15 people. Few is known about the game itself apart from the official announcement on the old website that we can now find everywhere on the Internet:

“Mix of FPS and survival/horror. Balance between action and adventure to offer a varied experience to the player.
Interactive use of the surroundings in order to survive in the besieged town : find objects to block paths, use electricity or gaz to forge a path to freedom. Find food and medication to save your skin and that of other survivors.
Beware the contamination… zombies attacks will slowly turn you into one of them… See your body changing, becoming slow and clumsy, but also more resistant to bullets and other attacks. But will you find a cure in time ? Find medikits, ingredients to a serum and use the sickness to your advantage.
Find other survivors. Each will bring new skills in medication, combat, electronics… and each one will have a different personnality and weaponry.
When ammo is sparse, use other mayhem devices : electric drill, molotov cocktail, and many more…

Half of the city is plunged in darkness. If you want to avoid surprises, find reliable light sources.

20 hours of intense gameplay, 11 levels to test your survival instincts, 20 weapons and 12 sidekicks.
Various and dangerous enemies, with different behaviors and intelligence. Hordes of living dead, squad based military, zombies, and bikers from hell ready to plunder town…”

On December 2003, a developer from Krysalide was interviewed by Ownt and shared more about the game:

“Zombies is a first-person shooter created to replicate the vibe of Resident Evil while offering the freedom of movement of a first-person game. Krysalide hopes to avoid the heavyweight competition of FPS by standing out for the gameplay peculiar to any good survival horror game.
The game will last about 15 hours and will be a series of missions and puzzles placed on a linear frame. Each mission will allow you to meet a new secondary character with his own weapon and special skills.
The project is ambitious, especially since it is planned to integrate into the game a substantial multiplayer part that the developer of Krysalide compares to Counter Strike with zombies in the center and on each side of the character classes (bikers, soldiers, police officers, survivors).”

However, after some gameplay was revealed initially on February 2004, the game vanished before French website NoFrag was informed from the CEO of Krysalide himself, Loïc Barrier, that it was definitely canceled due to lack of publishers interested in the project:

It’s been a year since we last talked about Zombies: The Awakening, and for a good reason: today I had confirmation from Loïc Barrier, the boss of Krysalide, that the game will never be released. It was canceled, apparently a while ago, when Krysalide realized that no publisher would accept the project as the developer had designed it.

We can speculate that it was too ambitious for a first game from a small team of 15 people that had never made before their own game.

After the cancellation of Zombies: The Awakening, Krysalide would still work as an outsource company on various projects made by French developers such as The Crew and Dishonored 2 before disappearing.

Article by Daniel Nicaise

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Microsoft, PC / MAC, Playstation 2 (PS2), Sony, Xbox

Toon Army (Brat Designs) [PC/XBOX/PS2 – Unreleased]

U64 Staff & Contributors

20-12-2022

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Toon Army is a canceled World War II first-person shooter developed by Brat Designs in 2004 for the PC, Xbox and Playstation 2 systems.

Information on Toon Army are pretty scarce as the game quickly vanished after it’s announcement, following the shutdown of Brat Designs. As we could read on the official website back then, now saved by Gamespy, Toon Army was going to be:

“A gritty, foul-mouthed, wise-cracking, cartoon World War 2 FPS battlefield game allowing both single player and multiplayer modes over a multitude of terrains, with up to 32 players in a game. Following the misadventures of GI John Doe the player takes on the dreaded Axis powers across Africa and Europe. At the players disposal are a wide range of weapons, devices and vehicles, including tanks, field artillery, aircraft, gun posts and much more.”

Using their proprietary engine named Mercury, Brat Designs promised a game similar to Battlefield for it’s gameplay alongside Cannon Fodder and Worms for it’s humorous art direction, featuring vast detailed terrains and interiors, interactive environments with fully destructible buildings, weather conditions including fog, rain and snow, micro vegitation, advanced shader technology and advanced lighting and shadowing. Two campaigns and various multiplayer and cooperative modes were also planned.

Toon Army wasn’t the only victim of Brat Designs shutdown. The company also had another similar game named Solar which was canceled in the process, alongside expansion packs and apparently a sequel for their only released game, Breed.

Article by Daniel Nicaise

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GameCube, Microsoft, Nintendo, PC / MAC, Playstation 2 (PS2), Sony, Xbox

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse [PC/XBOX/PS2/GC – Cancelled]

U64 Staff & Contributors

20-12-2022

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The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is a canceled beat them up/action game developed and published by The 3DO Company from 2000 to 2003, for PC, Playstation 2, Xbox and Gamecube.

As we can read on Gamespot, the game was a single-player action game centered on Abaddon, an archangel who must face off against the apocalyptic horsemen of the title, alongside Satan, and prevent the end of the world. Before players can take on the horsemen, they would have to find the three mortals known as “the chosen”, who were born with the power to fight the horsemen, to even the odds. However, while the three chosen are unaware of their abilities, the horsemen do know of them and the threat they pose. Players would be charged with finding and protecting the three chosen until they can be reunited and combine their powers to save the world. The chosen were Jesse Horner, a scantily clad 18-year-old prostitute; Jimmy Ray Flynt, a tattooed preacher turned serial killer; and Anderson Scott, a corrupt politician who actually unleashes the horsemen in the first place and only later realized he is one of the chosen. Players would take direct control of Abaddon, with the three chosen providing support based on their unique abilities. Jesse would be the party’s healer, Jimmy Ray’s mystic sight would reveal demons, and Senator Scott’s power of persuasion would take control of his enemies and force them to do his bidding.

It would appear that 3DO had broad ambitions for The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, surrounding himself with multiple big names, such as Stan Winston as producer and comic artist Simon Bisley and illustrator David de Vries as game designers, in addition to many vocal talents like Tim Curry as Satan, Lance Henriksen as Abaddon and Traci Lords as Pestilence, one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

The game would have more than 18 levels, ranging from the postapocalyptic world created by World War III to the depths of hell, featuring hand-to-hand fighting, swords, and projectile weapons, in addition to special abilities like a Matrix-like slow-motion effect and lots of gory effects, including dismemberment, dynamic exit wounds, and motion-captured finishing moves provided by Hollywood’s Smashcut Action Team to ensure that the game’s combat sequences appeared intricate and realistic. The gameplay would center on exploration and combat alternating between standard melee and ranged fights.

It was showed at E3 2003 where Gamespot wrote a preview:

“Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is similar in look and feel to Devil May Cry during its action elements. Abaddon’s starting weapons include a pair of powerful pistols and two large swords that can be used to hack off the limbs and heads of your opponents. In the E3 build, only basic combat moves were available, but 3DO representatives noted that acrobatic, wire-fighting moves will be included as advanced combos. Abaddon also has the ability to execute superhuman maneuvers, such as using his swords to deflect bullets back at the enemies who shot them. You’ll also collect the souls of the enemies you kill, adding to your power in a meter called “the wrath of God.” Borrowing a page from Mortal Kombat, you’ll even be able to perform some gory finishing moves on higher-level enemies such as bosses.
The game will include some slower-paced exploration elements that will allow you to interact with non-player characters to gain more background story and hints on the dangers lying ahead. You’ll also be able to pick up bonus items to help you in your quest. There will also be some horror elements mixed in during the exploration portions, like the shadowy creatures we glimpsed running along a hallway behind us. We even found a room with a particularly gruesome murder–a Catholic priest crucified against a wall decorated with a bloody pentagram.
Currently, the game appears to be in a somewhat rough state, with many of the combat maneuvers and finishing moves not yet complete and the graphics looking a bit rough around the edges. 3DO is still aiming for Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to be released at the end of this year for the PC, PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube, but the release could slip into 2004 if the game isn’t ready.”

Sadly, only a few days after it’s first and only official presentation, 3DO went bankrupt. As we can read on IGN, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse’s rights were purchased by former creator and development director Michael Mendheim, helped by numerous investors who founded a company called Four Horsemen Entertainment L.L.C. We learned that, unlike others franchises bought by differents publishers after 3DO’s demise, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was neglected because it was in its then-early stages it may not have been large enough. Publishers may have also been unwilling to provide the time necessary to complete the title properly.

“Now that Four Horsemen is officially in new hands, what was initially intended as a title for current generation consoles has become an entire entertainment franchise. The new company will begin by releasing comic books and a graphic novel based on the property, and eventually release a completely revamped version of the video game for next-generation systems.
Mendheim has confirmed that the key players are back on board: Simon Bisley is creating the artwork, and Hollywood effects legend Stan Winston is handling toy and movie rights. The star voice talent slated for the first iteration of the game, including Tim Curry and Traci Lords, are also apparently still committed to the project.
While few details about the new version of the game are available yet, Mendheim did hint at horseback-based combat and an ambitious multiplayer mode involving epic battles of angels versus demons in which the player takes the role of one of the four horsemen.”

However, as far as we know, only comic books would be released, instead of the movie and the various iterations offered for video game concepts.

Article by Daniel Nicaise

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