Uncharted Gamers Lament Cancelled Title That'll Never Be

Naughty Dog fans are mourning a cancelled Xbox game that was supposedly going to be “Uncharted for Xbox”.

Xbox has published quite a lot of games over the years, but it’s also seen a lot of game cancellations in that time too. Just more recently, we’ve seen the Perfect Dark reboot cancelled, as well as Rare’s Everwild.

It’s a bit of a bleak time to be a developer, where you spend years of your life working on a project that may or may not even see the light of day.

But even going back a decade or so, it’s clear that this is not a recent development for Microsoft.

A new report published this week by Liam Robertson from Did You Know Gaming? claims that Xbox once tried to make its own take on the Uncharted-style gameplay formula, before cancelling it.

The game, which was codenamed Project Ranger at the time, was supposedly going to be made by Gears of War studio The Coalition (then known as Black Tusk Studios), and was going to be a mix of gameplay inspired by Uncharted with the espionage themes of Mission: Impossible.

However, the project was later cancelled with The Coalition being shuffled over to work on Gears of War: Ultimate Edition and Gears of War 4.

Since then, the developer has mainly worked on Gears of War titles, and there has been no sign of Project Ranger being revived.

“It's funny how Xbox made two attempts at making a single player spy-stealth game by a new studio and both got cancelled,” reads one comment on Reddit.

“Microsoft wanted a lot of alternatives to Sony first-party games on Xbox One back then,” reads another comment. “They made a big deal about getting Insomniac to do Sunset Overdrive obviously but I also remember before Dead Rising 3 they wanted to do a gritty Dead Rising reboot.”

“It’s surprising how Uncharted — a video game series that actually justifies a wide array of sequels — somehow side-stepped the endless sequel trend entirely, and instead the franchise just went away suddenly for what seems like the most arbitrary reason,” reads a third comment.

Considering the popularity of the Uncharted and Tomb Raider games, it’s surprising that nothing has really filled the void those two franchises have left behind. The last Uncharted game was released in 2017, while the last Tomb Raider was in 2018. And it’s unknown yet if we’re even going to get another one in either series.