Bethesda officially cancels Prey 2, one of the coolest games I ever saw at E3

This one hurts.

Publisher Bethesda has revealed that Prey 2, the sequel to the 2006 sci-fi first-person shooter, is officially cancelled. CNET discovered this via Bethesda vice president Pete Hines at the ongoing PAX Australia convention.

“It wasn’t up to our quality standard, and we decided to cancel it,” Hines told CNET. “It’s no longer in development. That wasn’t an easy decision, but it’s one that won’t surprise many folks given that we hadn’t been talking about it.”

Bethesda originally unveiled Prey 2 at E3 2011. While the original was a pretty standard shooter, the sequel was an open-world game that focused on bounty hunting. The trailer and hands-off demo had a lot of people buzzing. Unfortunately, that was pretty much the last good look we ever got at the game. Slowly, Bethesda talked less and less about it, sometimes only to say that work was completely restarted. Now, Prey 2 is officially done.

Which kind of sucks. I was at E3 2011, and Prey 2 was the coolest thing I saw at that show (keep in mind that Bethesda’s Skyrim was also on display right next door). Sure, my preview of it was hands-off, so maybe everything I saw was just smoke and mirrors, but the demo showed off a beautiful world and interesting characters who would react to their surroundings (for instance, the tone in one alien’s voice completely changed when he was suddenly staring at a drawn gun).

Sadly, we’ll never get to play Prey 2 now. It joins the likes of Sonic X-treme and StarFox 2 in the sad halls of games that almost were.