Bethesda at their absolute lowest level here, completely willing to destroy a promising studio just to force them into a buy out. People often say Fallout 76 was Bethesda at their worst, but that was just sheer incompetence, this was purposeful malice.
I wouldn’t say it’s their lowest level, as they’ve done this to pretty much every subsidiary studio they own or try to purchase. It’s just what they do and what they’ve always done, they’re incompetent, greedy fucks
@@HorrorsofCody Yikes. I think you're confusing publishing contracts with development. Let's not blame Arkane or Id (as y'all literally have the pity train currently going for Human Head, remember they sold the rights to Prey initially) for having their ass glued to Bethesda lol, they're great devs. Bethesda, or any other greedy AAA publisher is going to fill any game it currently has its hands on with shit, let this be a lesson to future devs.
Literally wanted this team's talent so badly they would rather pressure them into bankruptcy than let them work for themselves or release this game. Beyond scummy
Obsidian: Hey is there any way we can get a bit more time to iron out the bugs? Bethesda: No. We'll do QA, dw about it. Obsidian: Um no that's okay... We'll do what we can.
@@scorpion3128 "hey we got got a 84 out of 85 on metacritic for out fallout game that you guys set a deadline of 18 months, can you guys give us some royalties?" "No"
@@JeskidoYT You should have seen what a mess Oblivion and even Morrowind were at release. Even to this day the most recommended mods are unofficial bug fixes. Edit: Oh shit and I just remembered constantly falling through the floor of the first dungeon in Daggerfall. Bethesda never had quality control.
Okay, wow, was gonna say a little "Prey's sequel ended up being Prey", joke, but now, Bethesda pretty much pulled a Mr. Burns. "So, you come crawling back eh?" Wow, my opinion on Bethesda got somehow... Lower!
Yeah Honestly I would've rather have played Human Head Software's Prey 2 rather than Arkane Studio's Reboot Prey, honestly playing as a Sci Fi Bounty Hunter in a Alien World would've been my jam and no one has done since to my knowledge...
if i remember right they fucked over obsidian and didnt pay them their bonuses because new vegas was like 5 points below what was expected (instead of being rated something like a 90/100 it was 85/100 it was something petty and small like that but those arnt the exact numbers)
@@crazyunclecrispy6140 this narrative is overplayed. The heads of obsidian themselves say that they accepted those terms because they believed they could do the job in that time and they just missed the mark.
Damn, this one still hurts just about as much as Scalebound. This is why it was such a big deal that metroid dread is actually happening. It's so rare that a canceled project comes back from the dead in this industry
Yeah, and it wasn’t even a thematically-relevant name. If I recall the Typhon weren’t even actual predators in the traditional sense.They didn’t need to eat, they didn’t hunt people, they were basically a living virus.
It did have a totally different name. They were making the game and Bethesda just went, “put the name Prey on it to sell more and get these nerds off our backs.” The developer has talked openly about how it was never designed to be like Prey but that’s what Bethesda wanted it to be called.
@@gdhuertas07 it wouldn't surprise me if some of the devs at arkane were calling it something like that. but afaik, bethesda forced them to call it "prey", anyway, because they'd risk losing the license if the name wasn't used.
Bethesda should have let prey 2017 stand on its own instead of attaching it to prey, they're two very different games. It likely hurt an amazing games sales due to the disappointment over prey 2 which is such a shame.
Yeah, honestly. The game was so good, but nothing like what its predecessor was like I was expecting it to be like the og prey, but I was surprised by how genuinely good it was. Like It was ridiculously good and it's criminally underrated
Out of every game that's ever been cancelled, this one is the one I'm most disappointed about. It still looks really good. So many cool ideas and we've not really had anything similar since. I enjoyed Bethesdas Prey but I'm still gutted.
Meh kinda. We can't really tell what we would have actually got even if it did came out. These teaser trailers over glorify many mechanics and concepts that never live up to their marketing. This game could had been no different than the one I will be mentioning. But the whole scanner thing for bounties and parkour mechanics in a neonoir style metropolitan area shown is essentially what we got in Cyberpunk. Except busted, shallow in implementation of said mechanics, and an no aliens.
@@mccarthy5825 So funnily enough, this video was recently released. A game called Vigilance 2099 which very much looks like the type of game Prey 2 was going to be. th-cam.com/video/sYRmh-23GfU/w-d-xo.html
@@BadTimeBabble damn! Never ever heard of this! Granted I havnt kept up enough on games as much as I did back in the Mega Drive and Saturn/Psx days but this really seems to be someone who was an avid fan of Prey and knowledgeable about Prey 2! Thanks so much for pointing that out. I must ask, if you have any idea on a good emulator box to get... I want to go from Nes say to Dc/Naomi and hopefully good Saturn emulation... I am thinking about a raspberry pi... Id love something I could use to play mostly Capcom Cps1-2-3 board arcade, Mega drive,SNES, Saturn, Psx and DC games.. Any help is appreciated. So much conflicting info to sift through online!
I knew nothing about this Prey until this moment but I remember being super hyped for Bethesda’s Prey and it was just meh when I got to play it. I think I got bored and never finished it. Not a terrible game or anything but just kind of mediocre from what I remember.
And the most galling part: All that double-dealing and backstabbing was to poach a developer that had expertise with _the id Tech 4 engine._ The engine that saw a whole SIX GAMES released on it (expansions notwithstanding) with its final hurrah being, of all things, _Brink-_ ironically contributed to by Human Head Studios. So much lost, for nothing.
Yeah, even back then Bethesda's games were renowned for being buggy messes. Morrowind was genuinely unplayable for me on the Xbox 360, the sound kept glitching out and my save files kept getting corrupted.
I don't understand. At the beginning it seemed Bethesda already had Human Head Studios, but wanted to own them. So it just seems like they shot themselves in the foot because they wanted their foot and the foot questioned their sanity.
At GameStop they gave us a Bethesda keychain set. Skyrim, Rage, and Prey 2 so I thought "oh shit Prey 2 is still a things" I still have that keychain somewhere
Man Bethesda is an absolute nightmare to work for. A more recent example is what happened to Mick Gordon. They tried to say how he was a deva and it was all his fault that he wasn’t able to produce the soundtrack with that Reddit post. Only problem is Mick has receipts. TH-cam won’t allow me to link his response he gave on November 9th on his Twitter profile so I guess if anyone is interested check it out. TLDR; at one point he hadn’t gotten paid for the gig for 11 months citing that they weren’t using what he created spoiler alert they did use it. Also when they announced they would ship a finalized vinyl album mastered by him on launch they not once discussed this with him. He found out when the public did. Which made him go WTF am I getting paid for this. While they went “don’t worry about it now”
Remind me of Betheda sueing Mojang because of their game "'Scrolls'". Someone tells Bethesda they can´t trademark regular dictionary words just because they used it.
@@CrocvsGator they don't own the word "Prey", they might try to scare you into changing it but if you're experienced in legal stuff you might be alright.
@@warlockguy42 The problem isn't whether or not Bethesda has any legal standing to win a spurious lawsuit over a name they don't own the trademark to. Whenever scummy companies like Bethesda do this, their goal isn't to win the court case, it's to bring out their army of lawyers against a smaller company that can't afford to defend itself even if they would obviously win because court battles of this kind are insanely expensive and can last for years. Unfortunately, more often than not all you need to do to win a court case is to outspend your opponent into submission before a verdict is decided.
When I first saw the original Prey 2, I was really hyped for it. While Arkane's Prey is still good I will always regret not being able to to play this lost game.
The original Prey was also stuck in development hell. I remember seeing info on it all the way back in '98. It was announced around that time that 2 CDs worth of original music was recorded for the game by industrial band KMFDM. The music was going to be dynamic and change up according to what kind of enemy you were fighting and how intense the battle got. After this version of the game was scrapped, so was the music and not even members of the band knows who has it cause they gave the masters to 3D Realms and haven't seen it since when I last tried to ask about it. This early version of Prey was supposed to originally release in '99 and looked way different too. I used to have footage of that game on an old PC. But there's a bit of a what happened situation there too on that early version of the first game.
Pete said once that it was " Not up to our standard" Then they released games like 76 and rage 2 EDIT: I liked raged 2. I 100% it: even the ultra nightmare play through and perma death. But it was purely the gameplay. The story, world, missions, dlc etc were either lacking or straight up bad. Rage 2 isn’t top quality when you compare it to something like how prey 2 was coming along. Comparing it to the “not up to our standards” that’s what I mean when I said rage 2. Not that it’s a horrible game, just that rage 2 and others aren’t screaming top quality
were either of those games that bad sure I wouldn't argue with you If you called them mediocre but I struggle to find someone anybody that actually goes into detail about why the game is bad instead of talking about how Bethesda cheeped out on the merchandise and how the prices at the atom shop are overpriced
@@waidwml2166 literally search up anything about Fallout 76 when it was launched and you'll find that the game was broken piece of shit game, idk how long you've been under a rock
So you're telling me that we lost a perfectly good game not because of bad game development? But because Bethesda wanted to have their cake and eat it too?
Fun coincidence: I played through the original Prey just yesterday, and was talking with a buddy of mine of what might have happened with Prey 2, and now this pops up in my feed. Thank you so much for this!
Some...strange, gullible part of my soul hopes that Prey 2 can come back in some way, shape or form, be it a near-complete build being leaked or Roundhouse being given the chance to revive the project with id Tech 7 or the Void Engine, but I think the chances of that happening are pretty much zero, which is a damn shame. It also sucks that (to my knowledge, anyway) there's no legal way to play the original Prey on PC. The only way to get a copy these days (outside of just pirating it) is either buying an old copy on eBay or finding an unsold Steam key somewhere. It makes me wish that Nightdive could possibly get the chance to bring that game back, but the chances of THAT happening are only slightly more than Prey 2 coming back or being leaked.
The worst part of this (besides never getting this cool bounty hunter experience) is that Bethesda put me in a position where I have to give Kotaku props.
Arkane's Prey is perhaps one of the best games of all time, in my opinion. But I am disheartened to see how it was built upon the torched ashes of another potentially great and fully realized project, and I'm sympathetic to those who didn't get what they were hoping for.
To this day I think the intro to Prey 1 (first 15 minute sequence of events) stands as one of the greatest and most memorable in FPS history. Right up there with Half Life.
Plus, it’s a genuinely terrifying! I mean...seeing your loved ones basically run through an alien food processing plant... My only regret is I didn’t finish the game because I just couldn’t defeat the final boss.
Worst part is Arkane's game was actually already being developed, they just were forced to take the name (among a bunch of other shitty bethesda stuff). So this deal didn't just fuck up Prey 2 and Human Head, but also affected Arkane in a really bad way, garnering bad PR for a game that is honestly awesome. All because bethesda couldn't let go.
Really sucks when a game you love is grown from soil fertilized of those murdered before it. The studio got a really raw deal, one that did have a vision and that vision was just then painted over and dismissed like it never existed.
Having spoke with the devs behind Typhon that got "arbitrarily" renamed Prey, they were working on the game without Prey ever actually having been handed to them. Just one day the execs above them told them that calling it Prey would sell better and they had no choice. There is supposedly zero relation between the two games other than Bethesda owned both studios and had this shit fight with the Prey devs which then caused them to basically force the Prey name onto an otherwise unrelated project just to throw it in the face of the original devs of Prey.
Can we somehow get this to Phil Spencer's attention? Like the game was practically in a finished state so Xbox is sitting on an exclusive title they own made by a studio they technically also own and they didn't even pay for the development. Yeah it's not some next generation title, but the game still looks absolutely stunning, just set this thing in 4K and add HDR support and you got something truly special here.
Oh fucking god! We're doing this! Oh the ruthless backdoor shenanigans and the eventual buying out of a company anyway (that also lead to a lawsuit and a poor publisher holding the bag for an unfinished game). And then the name itself put on a game that had nothing to do with it. It's just all so delicious.
I remember being so interested in this game and describing it in an Xbox party as "mirrors edge meets batman, in space". When reading up on it someone related to the game said they believed it could have been one of the best looking games on the 7th gen. I'd love for the demo or something to get leaked someday
I'm still disappointed that we didn't get the original prey 2. I enjoyed prey, but then I found out about the original it ruined the new one for me. The original was so fucking good
So what you're saying is that Prey 2 was going great until Bethesda straight up *murdered* it in the name of shitty business practices? ... ... ...well, no more Bethesda games for me. Ever.
In the recent noclip documentary on Prey 2017 the Devs basically said Bethesda just asked Arkane to use the name for their new game because they'd paid so much for it (It's a brilliant game too)
Prey 2017 is indeed an underrated gem. I highly recommend it. As someone who only briefly encountered the 2006 Prey, I feel sorry for all the fans of it who didn’t get what they wanted… I hope it doesn’t dissuade from you playing Prey 2017 because you’d be missing out on a great game.
For me it was the total opposite - it was a new Prey game, and I loved the original. It’s unlikely I would have jumped on it as fast as I did if it was called anything else - and well, I fell in love with Prey 2017 all the same. 😊
One of the leading people who worked on Arkane's Prey recently took to the internet and revealed that the name Prey was Thrust upon their game at pretty much the 11th hour and that they originally came up with the names Typhon and Starseed as potential names for the game, so it wasn't that they scrapped Human Head's Prey 2 and started over. It was probably more likely that Prey 2 was already scrapped and Bethesda had to scramble to find something, ANYTHING, that could pass as, at the very least, a reboot of Prey
I'll always be sad that we never got to experience Prey 2 because the core concept just seemed too promising and the demo and CGI trailer they showcased looked really cool. Fuck Bethesda for cancelling it. With that, the Prey we got by Arkane is easily one of my favourite games of the last generation so all in all I got kinda mixed feelings on the outcome.
IIRC, Kotaku's blacklisting also came as a result of their Fallout 4 leaks, where they got their hands on a bunch of casting documents despite them being under NDA.
Yeah I'm getting pretty fed up with them. I loved fallout 3, new vegas and skyrim. But every time i hear about what goes on behind the scenes there I'm disgusted
Activision, EA, and Bethesda need to be thrown in a SAW type scenario with a single wooden spoon, and told the spoon is the key to getting out. I mean, EA will undoubtedly win, they have the most experience with corporate serial killing, but, I mean, no matter what, two upsides and one meh-side.
uff this one hit harder than other "What Happened?", bethesda truely sucks, have you heard the saying "good things happen to good people"? welp is a lie, good things happen to the biggest Ahole in the room
It wasn't actually ever a decision on Arkane's end to use either the existing Prey 2 stuff or start from scratch. Prey was a game they were already working on, and was never supposed to be related to the Prey IP in the first place. When Bethesda got the rights to the IP, they said they would help fund this new project Arkane was working on if they agreed to call it Prey.
They wanted Human Head that badly apparently. What's honestly fascinating to me is that after all that bad blood that Bethesda was still willing to get the remnants of Human Head and own them. That tells me either the bad blood wasn't as bad as it appeared to be or that they wanted Human Head that badly that almost a full decade later they still dropped the cash to do this. I remember reading somewhere that it wasn't even like a closing down Human Head was bought but they were actually split up and that the new studio was formed quickly from the burned out husk. They got what they wanted in the end and if somehow the next thing out of the new studio is something like Prey 2 then it would be probably the pettiest way this could go. I once described this entire situation as this: Human Head did everything they could to not be bought out by Bethesda. Then when everything went to hell and almost a decade had passed they went back to Bethesda and in the end couldn't escape their fate. Like a final girl in a slasher film coming back to be killed off.
@@Deliveredmean42 Even being bought out by EA sounds leagues better than this. I mean, Respawn is amazing and it's doing it's own thing while also making bank for EA. But god forbid if you're Pop Cap and make mobile oriented games, then you're be made to milk money like anything. EA really ruined 2D PvZ with potrait mode and microtransactions and BF:N sucked.
I had Covid-19 last month and while I was sick I discovered this series. And not only for helping me to overcome a difficult time, these videos easily became my favorite all over youtube. thank you matt
As much as it will hurt your sqiggly-spooch to do it, you've gotta do one on "The Quiet Man." Some games come down "What Happened" road and they don't even deserve it ("Prey 2" for example), but that slow, arthouse flop turd really, REALLY does deserve it.
@@porassrivastava8242 Matt's done a stream of The Quiet Man, but he hasn't dedicated a Wha Happun episode to it yet as of the time of writing this comment.
OMG THANK YOU FOR DOING THIS GAME. I was going back through old Giant Bomb podcasts the other day and they were talking about seeing this game at E3 (before it got cancelled) and gushing about how cool it looked. I instantly wanted to know what happened.
What's insane is this could have been a multi-sequel franchise that thundered along making big bucks, but whoever was wheeling and dealing at bethesda got in a horn-locking ego-match with human head and jacked it all up. Fucking hell. Arkane's Prey is fine but damn. I'd love if we could put a name to this disaster. Someone specific chose this path at bethesda. I've dealt with douchebags over contracts who get all ego-splooge for no reason but to "win" a negotiation, to no one's benefit. This guy sounds like a real hog-choad.
![Prey: How an ending no one picked contextualizes eldritch horror [Fixed Audio]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/StjI5nKqdsY/mqdefault.jpg)
➤ FPS Documentary Link - www.kickstarter.com/projects/fandamental/first-person-shooter-the-definitive-fps-documentary?ref=8i6hw6
Perfect use for Turbo Killer, Midwich Valley, and Carpenter Brut.
I'm so hyped for this, it's awesome you're getting the word out
Mr cashgrab
While I'm not a huge fan of the FPS genre, this project seems interesting and I wish the creators the best
god i hope chex quest is included
This one hits kinda different, a game undermined by deliberate malice instead of bumbling incompetence
I was thinking the same thing. Really a petty move from Bethesda.
@@kevinallain2415 yep.
There's a few other What Happun like that, Sonic Extreme is also one of them and Sonic Boom and I think 2 others but Don't remember which they were
Agreed. The developers seemed competent based on that footage but Bethesda said no
same thing happened with Primal Rage 2
Bethesda at their absolute lowest level here, completely willing to destroy a promising studio just to force them into a buy out. People often say Fallout 76 was Bethesda at their worst, but that was just sheer incompetence, this was purposeful malice.
Horse armor was pretty bad too. It was obvious they cut it from the game just to make a cool million
I wouldn’t say it’s their lowest level, as they’ve done this to pretty much every subsidiary studio they own or try to purchase. It’s just what they do and what they’ve always done, they’re incompetent, greedy fucks
When's Bethesda up besides iD games?
@@HorrorsofCody Yikes. I think you're confusing publishing contracts with development. Let's not blame Arkane or Id (as y'all literally have the pity train currently going for Human Head, remember they sold the rights to Prey initially) for having their ass glued to Bethesda lol, they're great devs. Bethesda, or any other greedy AAA publisher is going to fill any game it currently has its hands on with shit, let this be a lesson to future devs.
@@aversiac-2oof this didn't age as well as it should
So basically, Bethesda was like "If we can't have it, NO ONE CAN!"
Literally wanted this team's talent so badly they would rather pressure them into bankruptcy than let them work for themselves or release this game. Beyond scummy
@@PredictableEnigma yeah it's horrible and the fact that Bethesda was as bad back then as they are now is still amazing and sad....
... While laughing maniacally as they push the button on the 10000 mini nuke doomsday launcher.
@@dark_side_cookies yep.
@@PredictableEnigma Don't worry bruh they got their karma. Fallout 76 still sucks LMAOOOOOO.
Bethesda quality standards has ro be the funniest oxymoron of the industry.
Even their more beloved games were/are plagued with bugs.
Lately every single game company has been going with the Bethesda route of quality, a buggy mess. :(
Obsidian: Hey is there any way we can get a bit more time to iron out the bugs?
Bethesda: No. We'll do QA, dw about it.
Obsidian: Um no that's okay... We'll do what we can.
@@scorpion3128 "hey we got got a 84 out of 85 on metacritic for out fallout game that you guys set a deadline of 18 months, can you guys give us some royalties?"
"No"
Just a message from the future: Starfield is out and it's a joke.
I will never forgive Bethesda for canceling it. Bethesda's quality standards? *MY ASS!*
Agreeed!
@@JeskidoYT You should have seen what a mess Oblivion and even Morrowind were at release. Even to this day the most recommended mods are unofficial bug fixes.
Edit: Oh shit and I just remembered constantly falling through the floor of the first dungeon in Daggerfall.
Bethesda never had quality control.
@@Mankey619 listen i disliked fo76 at launch as much as the next person lets not pretend that it was a scam we all saw what it was like way beforehand
16 times the details
TBF as a publisher Bethesda are pretty good, I mean they publish both Doom and Wolfenstein...
Yeah as a dev team they are awful...
Okay, wow, was gonna say a little "Prey's sequel ended up being Prey", joke, but now, Bethesda pretty much pulled a Mr. Burns.
"So, you come crawling back eh?"
Wow, my opinion on Bethesda got somehow... Lower!
Yeah Honestly I would've rather have played Human Head Software's Prey 2 rather than Arkane Studio's Reboot Prey, honestly playing as a Sci Fi Bounty Hunter in a Alien World would've been my jam and no one has done since to my knowledge...
Yeah the same, I don´t have any hope at the moment that Elder Scrolls 6 will be any good
Um, what?
if i remember right they fucked over obsidian and didnt pay them their bonuses because new vegas was like 5 points below what was expected (instead of being rated something like a 90/100 it was 85/100 it was something petty and small like that but those arnt the exact numbers)
@@crazyunclecrispy6140 this narrative is overplayed. The heads of obsidian themselves say that they accepted those terms because they believed they could do the job in that time and they just missed the mark.
Damn, this one still hurts just about as much as Scalebound. This is why it was such a big deal that metroid dread is actually happening. It's so rare that a canceled project comes back from the dead in this industry
My wound from Scalebound will never heal.
It would be like Blizzard suddenly announcing hey, remember that starcraft ghost game from ages ago? Yea, Holiday 2023 B)
Duke the nuclear boy came back.
Scalebound and this are what keep me up at night, just sighing into the dark for what it could have been.
Don’t you mean…back from the DREAD?! I’ll see myself out
As far as I'm concerned, Bethesda owes us two Prey 2s.
It's free money, Todd!
Double the free money!
They owe us all of our money back.
One now. They shut arcane down. Maybe we can see prey 2 now?
I would personally call both of them:
"Arkane Studios' Prey 2"
&
"Human Head Studios' Prey 2"
Simple and to the point
Pete Hines really should not talk anymore, ever.
Or breathe, really.
Pete Hines is the living embodiment of the "There is no war in Ba Sing Se" meme.
@@LordArikado Oh my god, what a perfect comparison to make for Pete Hines. I love it. Lmao
The Prey roboot was actually a good game it just should've had a different name because it had nothing to do with Prey
Exactly!
Yeah, and it wasn’t even a thematically-relevant name.
If I recall the Typhon weren’t even actual predators in the traditional sense.They didn’t need to eat, they didn’t hunt people, they were basically a living virus.
I call Prey 2017 Neuroshock.
It did have a totally different name. They were making the game and Bethesda just went, “put the name Prey on it to sell more and get these nerds off our backs.” The developer has talked openly about how it was never designed to be like Prey but that’s what Bethesda wanted it to be called.
@@gdhuertas07 it wouldn't surprise me if some of the devs at arkane were calling it something like that. but afaik, bethesda forced them to call it "prey", anyway, because they'd risk losing the license if the name wasn't used.
Bethesda should have let prey 2017 stand on its own instead of attaching it to prey, they're two very different games. It likely hurt an amazing games sales due to the disappointment over prey 2 which is such a shame.
They should have called it Talos 1 and leave the Prey name alone.
@@juangiraldotabares Too complicated a name for marketing teams with zero guts, even though I like it.
Yeah, honestly. The game was so good, but nothing like what its predecessor was like
I was expecting it to be like the og prey, but I was surprised by how genuinely good it was. Like
It was ridiculously good and it's criminally underrated
@@AgarthanExecutioner Yes i agree. It’s the perfect system shock 3.
@@AgarthanExecutioner Yes, Prey 2017 was surprisingly great. I had a really good time with it. Might be time to play through it again.
Out of every game that's ever been cancelled, this one is the one I'm most disappointed about. It still looks really good. So many cool ideas and we've not really had anything similar since. I enjoyed Bethesdas Prey but I'm still gutted.
Can't say better than that. My thoughts exactly mate!
Meh kinda. We can't really tell what we would have actually got even if it did came out. These teaser trailers over glorify many mechanics and concepts that never live up to their marketing. This game could had been no different than the one I will be mentioning. But the whole scanner thing for bounties and parkour mechanics in a neonoir style metropolitan area shown is essentially what we got in Cyberpunk. Except busted, shallow in implementation of said mechanics, and an no aliens.
@@mccarthy5825 So funnily enough, this video was recently released. A game called Vigilance 2099 which very much looks like the type of game Prey 2 was going to be.
th-cam.com/video/sYRmh-23GfU/w-d-xo.html
@@BadTimeBabble damn! Never ever heard of this! Granted I havnt kept up enough on games as much as I did back in the Mega Drive and Saturn/Psx days but this really seems to be someone who was an avid fan of Prey and knowledgeable about Prey 2!
Thanks so much for pointing that out. I must ask, if you have any idea on a good emulator box to get... I want to go from Nes say to Dc/Naomi and hopefully good Saturn emulation... I am thinking about a raspberry pi... Id love something I could use to play mostly Capcom Cps1-2-3 board arcade, Mega drive,SNES, Saturn, Psx and DC games..
Any help is appreciated. So much conflicting info to sift through online!
I knew nothing about this Prey until this moment but I remember being super hyped for Bethesda’s Prey and it was just meh when I got to play it. I think I got bored and never finished it. Not a terrible game or anything but just kind of mediocre from what I remember.
This show should have a subgenre: “Wha Happen: The Bethesda Being a Dick Chronicles.”
Yep, along with All Things Crapcom.
Wha did Todd do this time?
The Capcom Chronicles and the Bethesda Blunders
"You're either a fan of first person shooters or you like the sound of my voice"
How about I've never been able to sleep at night since cancellation?
So, you sleep at day?
Something like that. I'm not a huge FPS guy but I loved the first Prey and really wanted the sequel to happen.
God tier comment
Always bummed out see games that could've been great get cancelled.
...what?
And the most galling part: All that double-dealing and backstabbing was to poach a developer that had expertise with _the id Tech 4 engine._ The engine that saw a whole SIX GAMES released on it (expansions notwithstanding) with its final hurrah being, of all things, _Brink-_ ironically contributed to by Human Head Studios.
So much lost, for nothing.
The Bethesda quote didn't age poorly because it was alredy laughable day one
Yeah, even back then Bethesda's games were renowned for being buggy messes. Morrowind was genuinely unplayable for me on the Xbox 360, the sound kept glitching out and my save files kept getting corrupted.
@@hollylucianta6711 You mean the original Xbox, right? Morrowind has never been released on 360.
@@BIadelores You could play it on Xbox 360 if you downloaded an update for it from xbox live.
edit: you needed to have the original xbox disc tho
I don't understand. At the beginning it seemed Bethesda already had Human Head Studios, but wanted to own them. So it just seems like they shot themselves in the foot because they wanted their foot and the foot questioned their sanity.
And they still got them at the end!
Praying for Prey 2
Preying for Pray 2
Amen?
In Human Head's name we Prey, amen.
Pray 2
Thots and Preyers!
At GameStop they gave us a Bethesda keychain set. Skyrim, Rage, and Prey 2 so I thought "oh shit Prey 2 is still a things"
I still have that keychain somewhere
I played and beat Prey (2006) for the first time yesterday and it just hurt me in a way I can’t explain when it said Prey will continue
Man Bethesda is an absolute nightmare to work for. A more recent example is what happened to Mick Gordon. They tried to say how he was a deva and it was all his fault that he wasn’t able to produce the soundtrack with that Reddit post. Only problem is Mick has receipts. TH-cam won’t allow me to link his response he gave on November 9th on his Twitter profile so I guess if anyone is interested check it out.
TLDR; at one point he hadn’t gotten paid for the gig for 11 months citing that they weren’t using what he created spoiler alert they did use it. Also when they announced they would ship a finalized vinyl album mastered by him on launch they not once discussed this with him. He found out when the public did. Which made him go WTF am I getting paid for this. While they went “don’t worry about it now”
the sad thing isn't that we won't get the sequel to original prey but that we won't get a sequel to either prey
This franchise's legacy now is forcing "Prey for the Gods" to be renamed "Praey for the Gods."
Remind me of Betheda sueing Mojang because of their game "'Scrolls'". Someone tells Bethesda they can´t trademark regular dictionary words just because they used it.
@@svoloch125 it was actually even worse, it was Ion Maiden to Ion Fury
@@CrocvsGator they don't own the word "Prey", they might try to scare you into changing it but if you're experienced in legal stuff you might be alright.
@@CrocvsGator At least you're making progress, I have a lot of ideas for video games but don't know where to go from there.
@@warlockguy42 The problem isn't whether or not Bethesda has any legal standing to win a spurious lawsuit over a name they don't own the trademark to. Whenever scummy companies like Bethesda do this, their goal isn't to win the court case, it's to bring out their army of lawyers against a smaller company that can't afford to defend itself even if they would obviously win because court battles of this kind are insanely expensive and can last for years. Unfortunately, more often than not all you need to do to win a court case is to outspend your opponent into submission before a verdict is decided.
When I first saw the original Prey 2, I was really hyped for it. While Arkane's Prey is still good I will always regret not being able to to play this lost game.
The original Prey was also stuck in development hell. I remember seeing info on it all the way back in '98. It was announced around that time that 2 CDs worth of original music was recorded for the game by industrial band KMFDM. The music was going to be dynamic and change up according to what kind of enemy you were fighting and how intense the battle got. After this version of the game was scrapped, so was the music and not even members of the band knows who has it cause they gave the masters to 3D Realms and haven't seen it since when I last tried to ask about it. This early version of Prey was supposed to originally release in '99 and looked way different too. I used to have footage of that game on an old PC. But there's a bit of a what happened situation there too on that early version of the first game.
Thanks for sharing this info 👍 do you still have access to the old gameplay footage?
The game we deserved and once again they never came through with. Sad face.
The FPS trailer couldn't have a better soundtrack. Carpenter Brut is the new "Guile's theme goes with everything"
Heard it in Hotline Miami and am always jacked to hear Brut's stuff anywhere else
I love Carpenter Brut!!
was looking for this comment. been a brut fan before the Miami Series featured him heavily in Miami 2.
Somewhere, in a unknown jail cell where only cancerous rodents dwell, a inmate weeps for Prey 2's death.
I understood that reference.
i believe it was a dungeon, not a jail
Civvie and Prey deserved better
" ... failed to meet BETHESDA'S quality standards..."
*an
Pete said once that it was " Not up to our standard"
Then they released games like 76 and rage 2
EDIT: I liked raged 2. I 100% it: even the ultra nightmare play through and perma death. But it was purely the gameplay. The story, world, missions, dlc etc were either lacking or straight up bad. Rage 2 isn’t top quality when you compare it to something like how prey 2 was coming along. Comparing it to the “not up to our standards” that’s what I mean when I said rage 2. Not that it’s a horrible game, just that rage 2 and others aren’t screaming top quality
*Intense laughter turning into depressed sobbing*
Hey, those games are at least defendable. Kind of. Sort of. Maybe.
Now, Rogue Warrior, on the other hand...
i played all the way through the main story of rage 2 on gamepass and don't remember a thing about it. but I *did* finish it so that's something!
were either of those games that bad sure I wouldn't argue with you If you called them mediocre but I struggle to find someone anybody that actually goes into detail about why the game is bad instead of talking about how Bethesda cheeped out on the merchandise and how the prices at the atom shop are overpriced
@@waidwml2166 literally search up anything about Fallout 76 when it was launched and you'll find that the game was broken piece of shit game, idk how long you've been under a rock
So you're telling me that we lost a perfectly good game not because of bad game development? But because Bethesda wanted to have their cake and eat it too?
Fun coincidence: I played through the original Prey just yesterday, and was talking with a buddy of mine of what might have happened with Prey 2, and now this pops up in my feed.
Thank you so much for this!
It's crazy when the universe syncs up like that isn't it?
@@mccarthy5825definitely not google hearing him and his body talk and then using the algorithm to put it in his feed
Some...strange, gullible part of my soul hopes that Prey 2 can come back in some way, shape or form, be it a near-complete build being leaked or Roundhouse being given the chance to revive the project with id Tech 7 or the Void Engine, but I think the chances of that happening are pretty much zero, which is a damn shame.
It also sucks that (to my knowledge, anyway) there's no legal way to play the original Prey on PC. The only way to get a copy these days (outside of just pirating it) is either buying an old copy on eBay or finding an unsold Steam key somewhere. It makes me wish that Nightdive could possibly get the chance to bring that game back, but the chances of THAT happening are only slightly more than Prey 2 coming back or being leaked.
This game honestly looked like a modern FPS. I'm not sure how the final product would have turned out, but it seemed to be well ahead of it's time.
I pray for a day that we can play the canceled Prey.
The worst part of this (besides never getting this cool bounty hunter experience) is that Bethesda put me in a position where I have to give Kotaku props.
this is the game that made me despise Bethesda. I've never forgiven them for this
I wish we could do a "Snyder Cut" situation with this game
So many games need the snyder cut treatment.
@@porassrivastava8242 Will Act 3 from MGS5 please stand up!!!!
Then the media will call you "toxic fans", or something like that.
clearly Rogue Warrior and Fallout 76 reached Bethesda's quality standard
but this didnt
The quality was too damn high!
I like Arkane's Prey but I wish Prey 2 didn't have to get sacrificed for it as it looked awesome
Arkane's Prey is perhaps one of the best games of all time, in my opinion. But I am disheartened to see how it was built upon the torched ashes of another potentially great and fully realized project, and I'm sympathetic to those who didn't get what they were hoping for.
Arkane's Prey is just a System shock rip off
I still remember being hyped for the IGN trailer or gameplay snippet
To this day I think the intro to Prey 1 (first 15 minute sequence of events) stands as one of the greatest and most memorable in FPS history. Right up there with Half Life.
Plus, it’s a genuinely terrifying! I mean...seeing your loved ones basically run through an alien food processing plant... My only regret is I didn’t finish the game because I just couldn’t defeat the final boss.
Why hasn’t anyone tried to make at least a spiritual successor to this game?
Or what’s stopping Bethesda from doing it now? I just want it so bad
You'd trust Bethesda to do that?
Let's be clear here. You want BETHESDA to make it? Post Fallout 76?
A diffrent company
Chasing trends is more important for AAA publishers
Worst part is Arkane's game was actually already being developed, they just were forced to take the name (among a bunch of other shitty bethesda stuff). So this deal didn't just fuck up Prey 2 and Human Head, but also affected Arkane in a really bad way, garnering bad PR for a game that is honestly awesome.
All because bethesda couldn't let go.
Really sucks when a game you love is grown from soil fertilized of those murdered before it.
The studio got a really raw deal, one that did have a vision and that vision was just then painted over and dismissed like it never existed.
Having spoke with the devs behind Typhon that got "arbitrarily" renamed Prey, they were working on the game without Prey ever actually having been handed to them. Just one day the execs above them told them that calling it Prey would sell better and they had no choice. There is supposedly zero relation between the two games other than Bethesda owned both studios and had this shit fight with the Prey devs which then caused them to basically force the Prey name onto an otherwise unrelated project just to throw it in the face of the original devs of Prey.
Can we somehow get this to Phil Spencer's attention? Like the game was practically in a finished state so Xbox is sitting on an exclusive title they own made by a studio they technically also own and they didn't even pay for the development. Yeah it's not some next generation title, but the game still looks absolutely stunning, just set this thing in 4K and add HDR support and you got something truly special here.
As much as this situation sucks for Human Head, Arkane's Prey kicked ass. Awesome game
2:21 "We promise that Uwe Boll will never direct one of our movies" lmao.
Oh fucking god! We're doing this! Oh the ruthless backdoor shenanigans and the eventual buying out of a company anyway (that also lead to a lawsuit and a poor publisher holding the bag for an unfinished game). And then the name itself put on a game that had nothing to do with it. It's just all so delicious.
I love how you added the glitches in the background.
Also, next Wha Happun? The Capcom 5 deal and the games.
Already a flophouse files on that I believe
Man seeing those clips from Republic commando made me so nostalgic to play it again
I remember being so interested in this game and describing it in an Xbox party as "mirrors edge meets batman, in space". When reading up on it someone related to the game said they believed it could have been one of the best looking games on the 7th gen. I'd love for the demo or something to get leaked someday
Let's hope that Microsoft brings Prey 2 back
The question is if Roundhouse want to make Prey 2 which they might we don't know yet
They need to allow for Human Head's version Prey to be publically sold again as well too.
@@firestarter6488 #releasethehumanheadcut
@@firestarter6488 so that's why I can't find it anywhere. Fuck I've been wanting to play the original Prey for years
Perfect Sunday night treat
Edite: Nvm, that ending was kinda depressing
Bethesda is ruthless as a company...
Prey 2 coulda been cyberpunk before cyberpunk (and i mean the good parts)
It's wild how forward thinking this title was. Truly ahead of its time
Still salty about Prey 2’s cancellation
I love that they used Carpenter Brut - Turbo Killer for that trailer... Really smart of them.
Sorry Matt, but I actually love listening to your voice in these little exposés
I'm still disappointed that we didn't get the original prey 2. I enjoyed prey, but then I found out about the original it ruined the new one for me. The original was so fucking good
prey 2 in my opinion was the one of most anticipated game i was so looking forward too.
So what you're saying is that Prey 2 was going great until Bethesda straight up *murdered* it in the name of shitty business practices?
...
...
...well, no more Bethesda games for me. Ever.
Civvie explanation about what happened to Prey 2 was the most heartbreaing thing ever
In the recent noclip documentary on Prey 2017 the Devs basically said Bethesda just asked Arkane to use the name for their new game because they'd paid so much for it
(It's a brilliant game too)
Prey 2017 is indeed an underrated gem. I highly recommend it. As someone who only briefly encountered the 2006 Prey, I feel sorry for all the fans of it who didn’t get what they wanted… I hope it doesn’t dissuade from you playing Prey 2017 because you’d be missing out on a great game.
For me it was the total opposite - it was a new Prey game, and I loved the original. It’s unlikely I would have jumped on it as fast as I did if it was called anything else - and well, I fell in love with Prey 2017 all the same. 😊
One of the leading people who worked on Arkane's Prey recently took to the internet and revealed that the name Prey was Thrust upon their game at pretty much the 11th hour and that they originally came up with the names Typhon and Starseed as potential names for the game, so it wasn't that they scrapped Human Head's Prey 2 and started over. It was probably more likely that Prey 2 was already scrapped and Bethesda had to scramble to find something, ANYTHING, that could pass as, at the very least, a reboot of Prey
Such a shame. This looked like what Star Wars Bounty Hunter should have been (1313 aside).
But star wars bounty hunter was kinda good on the PS2
I'll always be sad that we never got to experience Prey 2 because the core concept just seemed too promising and the demo and CGI trailer they showcased looked really cool. Fuck Bethesda for cancelling it. With that, the Prey we got by Arkane is easily one of my favourite games of the last generation so all in all I got kinda mixed feelings on the outcome.
Oh holy shit, this hits me hard
IIRC, Kotaku's blacklisting also came as a result of their Fallout 4 leaks, where they got their hands on a bunch of casting documents despite them being under NDA.
I will always waiting for someone to make this game
Man, as if I needed more reasons to dislike Bethesda.
Yeah I'm getting pretty fed up with them. I loved fallout 3, new vegas and skyrim. But every time i hear about what goes on behind the scenes there I'm disgusted
Activision, EA, and Bethesda need to be thrown in a SAW type scenario with a single wooden spoon, and told the spoon is the key to getting out.
I mean, EA will undoubtedly win, they have the most experience with corporate serial killing, but, I mean, no matter what, two upsides and one meh-side.
uff this one hit harder than other "What Happened?", bethesda truely sucks, have you heard the saying "good things happen to good people"? welp is a lie, good things happen to the biggest Ahole in the room
It wasn't actually ever a decision on Arkane's end to use either the existing Prey 2 stuff or start from scratch. Prey was a game they were already working on, and was never supposed to be related to the Prey IP in the first place. When Bethesda got the rights to the IP, they said they would help fund this new project Arkane was working on if they agreed to call it Prey.
Been binging this series lately and my big takeaway is Bethesda is worse than EA but no one talks about it because their games are slightly better
They're just about as cloak-and-dagger as it gets.
They're just about as cloak-and-dagger as it gets.
Dude prey 1 was ahead of its time when it first released I remember me and bf playing it so much and the multiplayer was awesome
the greatest betrayal, will never understand Bethesda's thought process on this one
@@Gatorade69 But... wouldn't releasing a product will give them more money?
@@Deliveredmean42
only part of it
They wanted ALL of it
They wanted Human Head that badly apparently. What's honestly fascinating to me is that after all that bad blood that Bethesda was still willing to get the remnants of Human Head and own them.
That tells me either the bad blood wasn't as bad as it appeared to be or that they wanted Human Head that badly that almost a full decade later they still dropped the cash to do this. I remember reading somewhere that it wasn't even like a closing down Human Head was bought but they were actually split up and that the new studio was formed quickly from the burned out husk. They got what they wanted in the end and if somehow the next thing out of the new studio is something like Prey 2 then it would be probably the pettiest way this could go.
I once described this entire situation as this: Human Head did everything they could to not be bought out by Bethesda. Then when everything went to hell and almost a decade had passed they went back to Bethesda and in the end couldn't escape their fate. Like a final girl in a slasher film coming back to be killed off.
@@shinigamainako8663 Its just as bad as being bought by EA and slowly or quickly dying by poison...
@@Deliveredmean42 Even being bought out by EA sounds leagues better than this. I mean, Respawn is amazing and it's doing it's own thing while also making bank for EA. But god forbid if you're Pop Cap and make mobile oriented games, then you're be made to milk money like anything. EA really ruined 2D PvZ with potrait mode and microtransactions and BF:N sucked.
Arkane's Prey is such a great game, that has nothing to do with the name Prey. It feels like Bethesda shoved the title down their throat.
I fucking love Prey 2017 but a very dirty thing was done for it to exist.
I had Covid-19 last month and while I was sick I discovered this series. And not only for helping me to overcome a difficult time, these videos easily became my favorite all over youtube. thank you matt
As much as I hate EA and Ubisoft and Activision, I've always had a special hatred for Bethesda
The guys in that dev studio are really cool, they’d often stop by when I worked at the GameStop and were super chill and friendly.
"well time just kept on ticking, into the future". You can't slip that shit past me
The world was robbed of potentially one of the greatest gaming experiences ever
One more reason to completely disregard Bethesda as a company
same goes for EA, Ubisoft, Activision etc
We can still hope for prey 2 now that roundhouse productions is there.
This game had so much potential
Just goes to show-never, NEVER make a deal without getting it in writing.
Please, someone in Human Head, leak what's available and stick it to Bethesda!
Reminder that the game is almost fully done (like 90%), so it's somewhere sitting in someone's hard drive
As much as it will hurt your sqiggly-spooch to do it, you've gotta do one on "The Quiet Man." Some games come down "What Happened" road and they don't even deserve it ("Prey 2" for example), but that slow, arthouse flop turd really, REALLY does deserve it.
I think he has already done one about that pretentious crap
@@porassrivastava8242 Eeewwww....lemmie look
@@porassrivastava8242 Matt's done a stream of The Quiet Man, but he hasn't dedicated a Wha Happun episode to it yet as of the time of writing this comment.
I friggin love Prey 2017 and everything Arkane makes but goddamn does it suck we didn't get Prey 2.
When I'm about to go to bed but there's a what happened video. You know I'm staying up to watch it.
OMG THANK YOU FOR DOING THIS GAME. I was going back through old Giant Bomb podcasts the other day and they were talking about seeing this game at E3 (before it got cancelled) and gushing about how cool it looked. I instantly wanted to know what happened.
Seeing the OG Xbox's "Area 51" in that trailer made me shed a tear... - Nick
What's insane is this could have been a multi-sequel franchise that thundered along making big bucks, but whoever was wheeling and dealing at bethesda got in a horn-locking ego-match with human head and jacked it all up. Fucking hell.
Arkane's Prey is fine but damn. I'd love if we could put a name to this disaster. Someone specific chose this path at bethesda. I've dealt with douchebags over contracts who get all ego-splooge for no reason but to "win" a negotiation, to no one's benefit. This guy sounds like a real hog-choad.
I played the other prey made by arkane studios. I skipped over it the first time because I was salty about prey 2 but it's actually pretty good.