Fan Sues Over KotOR 2’s Canceled DLC On Switch

Jedi and Sith fight in the cover art for KotOR 2.

Image: Obsidian Entertainment

A new gamer lawsuit rises. Three months after Aspyr said it was abandoning promised DLC for the remaster of Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords on Nintendo Switch, someone is suing the publisher for failing to make good on its original promise or to offer a refund when that was no longer possible.

The class-action lawsuit (via The Gamer) was filed by Malachi Mickelonis earlier this summer and accuses Aspyr of fake advertising. He apparently bought the game but never actually played it. The lawsuit alleges he was waiting for the “Restored Content DLC” before starting the game on Switch. Oops.

KotOR 2 came to the Nintendo handheld hybrid on June 8, 2022, and the studio promised to eventually add the “Restored Content” as DLC for the game down the road. Originally brought to the PC version via mods, the “Restored Content” pack is essentially a fan-made “director’s cut” of the beloved but much beleaguered 2004 Star Wars RPG. “It’ll drop in Q3 2022,” the studio tweeted on several occasions. It did not.

Instead, the studio announced back in June of this year that it was no longer moving forward with the DLC pack promised at launch. Aspyr offered players free codes for the other remastered Star Wars games on Switch as an apology. The news came after the reports the studio was struggling with its planned, ground-up remake of the first Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic for PlayStation 5. A year later, the Texas-based studio is probably in an even worse place as parent company Embracer begins to implode, laying off developers across its bloated portfolio of studios.

“[Malachi Mickelonis] felt completely duped and was upset because he had relied on Defendants’ representations that the Restored Content DLC would be released for KotOR,” the new lawsuit reads. “In fact, Plaintiff did not even play KotOR after purchasing it, instead choosing to wait until the Restored Content DLC was released. But Defendants never did. Plaintiff would potentially be interested in purchasing other games with Restored Content DLC from Defendants’ in the future if they have the advertised content, are not deceptively advertised, and accordingly priced at fair market value without being artificially inflated due to the deceptive advertising.”

The class action lawsuit means anyone else who bought the game can join it, though it’s not clear who else has or will. KotOR 2 was $20 when it first came out on Switch. It’s currently on sale for $7.50.

Sega Just Canceled Its Most Expensive Game Ever

A new report claims that Sega’s recently canceled online extraction shooter, Hyenas, was the publisher’s most expensive game production ever, beating out even Sega AM2’s historically pricey adventure game Shenmue, which famously cost $70 million in turn-of-the-century dollars to develop.

Announced in June 2022, Hyenas was being developed by Total War and Alien: Isolation dev Creative Assembly. It was described as a “sci-fi space piracy multiplayer FPS” pitting teams of players against both each other and NPCs as they fought to steal valuable items and pieces of pop culture. On September 28—just 17 days after the most recent Hyenas beta—Sega canceled the shooter before its official launch. According to developers who worked on the ill-fated project, Hyenas was the single most expensive video game Sega’s ever made.

In an October 4 report from VGC, backed up by a YouTuber with inside knowledge of Creative Assembly, developers explained that the reason the upcoming shooter was canned came down to a lack of direction and an engine change midway through development that caused a lot of headaches.

Sega

One anonymous developer, when asked what went wrong, cited multiple reasons, including a “total lack of direction” and leadership that was “asleep at the wheel.” That same dev also claimed an engine change “part way through the process” didn’t help the team working on the game. According to the report, Hyenas was greenlit in an effort by Creative Assembly’s management to create a console shooter with broad appeal. Reportedly the studio management directly named Destiny and PUBG as inspiration.

Kotaku has contacted Sega for more information.

It’s believed that Hyenas was an example of one of Sega’s so-called “Super Games” and had a budget to match, with a developer who worked on the game telling VGC it was Sega’s “biggest budget game ever.”

“Towards the end, there were people from Sega Japan more or less permanently at the UK office,” claimed the anonymous developer. “This has never happened the whole time I’ve worked at CA. They occasionally came to visit and check how a game was looking but as I said previously, generally hands-off.”

While Hyenas was originally planned to be released as a premium title, before it was killed it had become a free-to-play shooter. However, after multiple online closed beta tests for the game, sources speaking to VGC claim that Sega wasn’t happy with the expensive shooter’s progress and that led to its cancellation in late September.

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Canceled PS2 Daredevil Game Now Playable 20 Years Later

Daredevil: The Man Without Fear, a 2003 PlayStation 2 superhero game that was in development by 5,000 Ft. Studios for the PlayStation 2 before getting canceled, has resurfaced after 20 years with a new playable build.

Read More: The Life And Death Of A Daredevil Video Game

The game preservation group Hidden Palace managed to release a playable version of Daredevil: The Man Without Fear on October 31 via member Casuallynoted, who apparently obtained the build from an anonymous developer of 5,000 Ft. It’s a late prototype with a fair amount of bugs, including possible crashes after the first chapter and getting stuck behind walls. That said, it still features the bones of what 5,000 Ft. Studios and publisher Encore Inc. were working on in collaboration with Sony during the early aughts.

The brainchild of 5,000 Ft. Studios, a Nevada-based developer whose previous credits only included two Army Men ports from 2001, Daredevil: The Man Without Fear started out as a simple project before ballooning in scope. Originally known as Daredevil: The Video Game before adopting the same name as author Frank Miller’s 1993 comic, Daredevil was prototyped as a series of “vignettes” showcasing pivotal moments in the blind crimefighter’s history.

However, as the Lost Media Wiki explains, Marvel’s imminent Daredevil movie project led 5,000 Ft. to rework the concept into an open-world adventure, now also slated for the Xbox and PC. Tensions arose when Sony had very specific requests for new types of gameplay to add to the game, while Marvel wanted it to hew more closely to the upcoming Daredevil movie.

More trouble struck when the developers tried to adapt the then-popular RenderWare engine to the project’s changing needs. After running into serious issues there, they reduced the project’s scope from open-world adventure back to linear brawler. Problems continued as “internal strife” at the studio caused it to miss its February 2003 release. A new date was set for summer, but staff departures and continuing bickering between Sony and Marvel put the final nails in the Daredevil game’s coffin. 5,000 Ft. Studios itself closed in 2012.

Now, though, thanks to an anonymous developer reportedly connected to 5,000 Ft. Studios, a near-final build of the canceled PlayStation 2 game has been released onto the internet via the game preservation group Hidden Palace.

Hidden Palace

Although it wound up getting canceled due to creative differences between Marvel and Sony, based on the video it looks pretty tight. It recalls early-aughts 3D superhero gems such as The Incredible Hulk and Spider-Man, with a bit of Tomb Raider mixed in, too.

The game apparently tells an original story based on the 1999 Elektra Lives Again comic and starring Daredevil’s arch-enemy The Kingpin. It’s a shame, then, that it was canceled just before completion. As The Hidden Palace notes, only the Game Boy Advance ever ended up getting a Daredevil game. The much less ambitious Daredevil: The Man Without Fear for Game Boy Advance arrived just in time for the Mark Steven Johnson-directed live-action film.

Read More: Why I Love Daredevil

As Hidden Palace reports, the newly released build of Daredevil: The Man Without Fear is playable, but with several bugs and game-breaking glitches since it’s unfinished. It’s nice that this finally snuck out 20 years later, though still a bummer the project never got to live up to its potential. With the success of Insomniac Games’ Marvel’s Spider-Man series, and the Wolverine game on the horizon, maybe Daredevil will get another shot at video game redemption.