Canceled Xbox Exclusive Knights of Decayden Revealed

gamerant.com:

For every video game that is successfully released, there's a bunch of them that never really go anywhere or end up getting canceled early in their development. Xbox, for example, is sure to have a proverbial closet full of such projects, and while they're canceled for good reason in most cases, sometimes it's interesting to look back at them and imagine what could've been.

Knights of Decayden (or Decadyn, in some cases) is one such title. Originally envisioned as an Xbox exclusive, it was supposed to release on Microsoft's very first iteration of the console, only for Microsoft to end up canceling it in the early 2000s. The project was headed by Totally Games: a studio known for its work on titles such as Star Wars: X-Wing, and it would've leveraged the developer's expertise in aerial combat.

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It was Axios' Stephen Totilo who managed to get a scoop on Knights of Decayden by talking with Xbox head Phil Spencer, who admitted that his first job at Xbox was to cancel the game in question. Totilo then spoke to Larry Holland, who was the head of Knights of Decayden at Totally Games back in the day. This led to a slew of reveals about the title, as well as a fully fledged gameplay trailer that was used to pitch the game to both Sony and Microsoft. The central conceit of the game was that it would feature jousting-based aerial combat featuring knights, monsters, and an assortment of other classic fantasy tropes.

Holland admitted that, much like some other canceled Xbox games from the annals of history, Knights of Decayden was in a rough state when it was canceled. The studio agreed to a «very aggressive schedule» to get the game out, which made it impossible for them to