Obsidian Entertainment CEO Feargus Urquhart broke his silence regarding the studio’s canceled Xbox One project Stormlands this week, shedding light on a pattern of executive behavior that has led to the cancellation of multiple Xbox One exclusives over the past several years.
Urquhart’s testimony arrives after the recent cancellation of the Microsoft-funded action game Scalebound and suggests that Microsoft executives are to blame for the Xbox One’s lack of exclusive AAA releases.
Initially slated as a launch title for the Xbox One, Obsidian Entertainment’s Stormwinds was a role-playing game that followed up on the studio’s previous projects Fallout: New Vegas and Dungeon Siege III. Despite a promising start from an established developer, the project was ultimately canned by publisher Microsoft prior to the Xbox One’s retail debut in 2013.
While many games are canceled due to quality concerns or missed milestones, however, Urquhart pins the blame on Microsoft’s executives, who apparently need constant reassurance from internal advocates before they can be convinced to dole out needed funding.
“It comes down to budget and it comes down to having a champion [at Microsoft],” Urquhart said in an interview with IGN this week. “I can see games that had champions and weren’t canceled until $80 million were spent, [and] there’s games that had a $10 million budget and had a champion and ended up the budget was $60 million and it shipped.”
“Why did Stormwinds get canceled?” Urquhart asks. “Stomwinds got canceled because we didn’t have an advocate.”
Xbox One fans recently lost another platform exclusive with the cancellation of Scalebound, a dragon-riding action game from Bayonetta series developer Platinum Games. Given the Japanese studio’s lack of public discussion regarding the cancellation, corporate politics may be to blame.
An Xbox One remake of the card-battling action-RPG Phantom Dust met a similar fate in 2015. Initially granting developer Darkside Studios $5 million to create a multiplayer-only reboot of Phantom Dust, Microsoft later publicly stated that the game would be “a 30-hour [single-player] JRPG.” The team was not notified of this sudden change in scope, nor was its budget increased. The project was eventually canceled and Darkside Studios was later shuttered.
Of the many games Microsoft showcased at its E3 2014 presentation, Crackdown is one of the few first-party, Xbox One-exclusive projects that has not yet been released or canceled. To date, Crackdown has still not been showcased in a playable state.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.