The cancelled Legacy of Kain: Dead Sun from Climax Studios was three years into development before it bit the dust. The game was a third-person, action-platformer that featured a tortured main character being led on by a vampire named Gein.

Eurogamer has a lengthy postmortem on the cancelled title, explaining what happened and why it didn’t come to fruition like it should have. One source explained to Eurogamer that the game was aiming to lure in the Call of Duty crowd because the original Legacy of Kain games were too “niche”…

“It wasn’t for them,” […] “They’re a very niche audience, really. [It was more] can we persuade people who play Call of Duty now to play a Legacy of Kain game? Which is harder. We want to see him more violent. We want to see him covered in blood. That was the feedback we got. Ergo, that’s what happened.”

Oh forbid we have a game that’s not a Call of Duty, Hollywood-style, set-piece laden, blockbuster where people who aren’t dude-bros might actually enjoy it… you know, like Dark Souls.

Anyway, the footage of the game can be viewed below, where you can check out just under two minutes.

The footage above is nothing different than what we’ve seen before of the game, where we got a good glimpse at some of the combat, the story involving Gein absorbing the soul of a man named Asher who fights for control over Gein’s body, and the very impressive tech that saw the vampire and human symbiotic duo being able to glimpse through portals in time, not unlike the E3 trailer for BioShock: Infinite.

In fact, an entire year ago 32 whole minutes of the game was posted up on InsideGamer, where enough of the game could be seen to make a decent judgment on what to expect from a finished product.

One hurdle after another helped put an end to the development of Dead Sun, especially since the developers were trying to make a game to match the scope and style of Game of Thrones, which had just debuted back at the time.

It’s an interesting read but I’m not at all surprised that it was a game that just could make it in a market that’s fueled by disparate niche audiences all enjoying different games across different genres. Trying to force-feed the Legacy of Kain audience some Call of Duty-style garbage to bolster sales is the best way to kill sales potential and turn off your core audience. Anyway, this is just another nail in the coffin for the Legacy of Kain franchise.