The Rise and Fall of Lost Planet

[Music] at the farthest edges of space there exists a world unlike any other the world war hostile alien life-forms known as the acred are fought endlessly for the thermal energy that runs through their veins where an intergalactic syndicate and lowly snow pirates battle for supremacy using towering robots known as vinyl suits where the temperature and environment fluctuate constantly as if trying to consciously expel those unable to adapt to its capriciousness to those caught within its turmoil this world is edie and 3 a hostile celestial body that welcomes only the most daring of explorers and serves as the setting for Capcom's Lost Planet series originally conceived by Megaman maestro kg in F&A and a team of former devil may cry and Onimusha developers the Lost Planet series provided early adopters of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 with an unusual yet entertaining take on the third-person shooter one that melded together Eastern and Western design values in ways unique to its genre yet much like edn 3 itself Lost Planet would undergo many dramatic shifts with each of its entries featuring wildly different takes on his core narrative and mechanics while all of these games found players willing to accept these changes this refusal to remain the same resulted in loss planets fanbase gradually eroding away and Capcom eventually moving on to pursue greener pastures too many gamers lost planet was inexorably linked with Capcom's pursuit of western-style games and developers during the 7th console generation and the many disappointments that this initiative resulted in yet to those the forlorn series managed to touch it was also one of the more unique and underrated experiences of its era even though it could never quite settle on a single style this is the rise and fall of Lost Planet [Music] [Music] this is my xbox 360 it's here and it's on as the sixth console generation was coming to a close Capcom was looking cautiously towards the future while it had continued to release critically beloved games over the past several years this output had often failed to translate into strong sales with the Japanese company reporting net losses throughout much of the early 2000s as a result Capcom had come to place increasing stock and it's proven properties with K G and F in a revealing at a 2011 lecture that it had mandated seventy to eighty percent of its new games be sequels to existing franchises a policy that in practice resulted in most attempts to pitch original titles not receiving approval an F own a however had designs to debut two wholly new games on the next generation of consoles the first was dead rising a zombie game that would place a high emphasis on slapstick combat in dark humor and the second was Lost Planet extreme condition a futuristic shooter that would melt together the gameplay of western titles like halo with Japanese mecha action Capcom's executives had expressed skepticism at both games viability and soundly rejected them yet in F&A was undeterred betting that his superiors would be forced to greenlight these concepts if an exorbitant amount of time and resources were spent prototyping them in F&A allowed Lost Planet and Dead Rising to continue just stating as prototypes until they became sufficiently developed and then pitched them once more the tactic worked and the two projects were given the go-ahead during both this extended prototyping phase and the period that would follow many elements of Los planets design would undergo drastic changes originally the game featured a first-person perspective with producer Jun Takeuchi revealing in a 2006 interview with Xbox Gazette that it was decided early on to switch to third-person due to more and more nonsense being introduced into the game such as the ability to grapple oneself onto walls and enemy vital suits in addition Capcom's Andrew Szymanski would reveal in 2012 that early iterations of the game were likewise much more exploration focused with a stronger emphasis on surveying every nook and cranny within the game's environments than fighting acred however after receiving development kits for the xbox360 very early on Capcom decided that both lost planet and Dead Rising would be developed exclusively for Microsoft's upcoming console while this move gave lost planets development team much more powerful technology with which they could craft their opus their inexperience with the 360s Hardware simultaneously forced them to pare down this open-endedness resulting in the game becoming a much more linear and straightforward experience if there was one thing that remained consistent about lost planet from the very beginning of its development it was its team's commitment to making sure it would be as globally appealing as possible true to an effing A's original vision loss planets developers worked hard to imbue it set pieces with the same sense of bombast intention as thematically similar western media taking cues not just from its most popular shooters but also films such as Starship Troopers and John Carpenter's The Thing yet they also did their best to ensure their eastern fans wouldn't feel left out baking the game's vital suits and other anime esque elements into its levels wherever appropriate and modeling the game's protagonist after South Korean actor leap younghoon a detail that Capcom would heavily promote at the game's official unveiling in 2005 and in the months that would follow [Music] [Music] [Applause] when lost planet extreme condition would finally launch on the 360 in January of 2007 this attempt to appeal to a global market would largely pay off with the game quickly finding a sizable audience will lead to brave its fearsome world and its occasional blemish its gameplay which felt like a mix of Monster Hunters weighty combat in third-person shooting mechanics stuck fast to many players as what it's almost arcade like emphasis on collecting thermal energy which drained with every step the player took yet allowed one to heal and operate vital suits the diversity and visual beauty of the game's single-player campaign was also praised as were the monstrously powerful acred that typically end capped its levels while their presence caused many plenty of pain the satisfaction attained from successfully defeating them was unlike any other experience on the platform and the games online multiplayer which offered a host of standard competitive game modes with some Lost Planet esque twists would receive accolades as well albeit to a slightly lesser degree than its single-player content not so popular was lost planets story a complicated revenge tale that sees leap young uns character Wayne Holton attempt to rest the frostbitten planet of edn 3 from NEVEC a nefarious interstellar corporation the story would be almost universally maligned by critics for being bizarre and seemingly poorly translated we need your help Wayne we could use enable pilot many also took umbrage with how difficult the game's weightiness needed to evade certain enemy's attacks complaining that unless one had lightning-fast reflexes it was easy to end up in scenarios in which one would loop through knocked down animations over and over but in the end these hitches would do little to dispel 360 owners from picking up lost planet in earnest with Capcom announcing that it had shipped over 1 million copies of the shooter shortly after its release much like Dead Rising which had launched on Microsoft's high-definition console just five months prior Lost Planet was an imperfect experience one whose flaws prevented it from attaining mainstream recognition on the scale as other more conventional games in its genre yet it did just enough things right and launched just early enough in its platform's lifecycle to convince most to look past these flaws and establish a passionate fan base for itself sadly this fanbase wouldn't last [Music] in the lead up to los planets release Capcom had been adamant about the game's exclusivity to the 360 turning down any suggestion that it might eventually migrate to other platforms yet migrated would with ports of the game arriving on the PC and PlayStation 3 over the course of the next 12 months though both versions featured a smattering of content not present in the game's original skew critics would not be as kind to the port's as they had been to their progenitor with many - writing them for not being as well optimized for their hardware as they could have been despite this both versions would go on to sell decently and would be followed in June of 2008 by Lost Planet colony's edition an enhanced repackaging of extreme condition for the 360 and PC colonies edition featured a variety of new features and content unseen in any prior version of the game including score attack and boss rush modes for its single-player campaign and a bevy of new maps and competitive scenarios for its multiplayer the game also allowed 360 players to compete against PC players online making it one of the first and only games of its generation that featured cross play between the two platforms in exchange however one couldn't play against people or import save data from the original version of the game a point of frustration for players hoping to carry over their progress from it The Lost Planet brand would continue to expand throughout the rest of 2008 with Capcom announcing that plans were in motion to produce a live-action Lost Planet movie with Warner Brothers in July and the PTX 40 a vital suit appearing as a playable character in the crossover fighting game Tatsunoko vs. Capcom which would debut on Japanese Wiis and arcade cabinets in December the latter would feature a slew of minigames associated with each of the games characters with PTX as being a Kay extermination mission a top-down commando s cooter in which the player fights various acred on a sprite based rendition of edn 3 although simple time constraints would lead every other minigame but a Kay extermination mission to be cut from the fighting games Western release wherein it would be expanded upon and retitled Tatsunoko vs. Capcom ultimate all shooters amidst all of this news of an official lost planet sequel remained elusive though to the industry at large the lack of such an announcement was much less interesting than what was going on with Capcom as a whole during extreme conditions development the company had made no illusions about it wanting became to appeal equally to both Japanese and American gamers expressing that it had much to gain from pursuing a more global audience than it typically aimed for less than three years later this interest in making its games more internationally appealing had morphed into a company-wide directive with Capcom employing numerous non Japanese developers to create some of its most important titles and imbuing its homegrown games with design elements it believed Western gamers would find particularly appealing in F&A who was one of Capcom's most public advocates of this initiative during this time would repeatedly express that though it was a different look for the company it had ultimately helped them climb out of the financial rut they had become stuck in during the early 2000s and that other developers from the Land of the Rising Sun would do best to follow their lead from his perspective the Japanese video game industry had become creatively stagnant and that unless it made a stronger effort to learn from the ambitiousness of the Western market it would fade into a relevancy it is within these circumstances that Lost Planet 2 would be unveiled in early 2009 build right out of the gate as a bigger badder and more bombastic evolution of extreme conditions tenets Lost Planet 2 would quickly garner attention from the gaming press for its setting which was now semi-tropical due to IDI and three being forcibly warmed and its support of four player co-op throughout the entirety of a single-player campaign in a 2010 interview with GamesRadar Jun Takeuchi who would return to serve as the game's producer would explain that the latter had been one of fans most requested features to be included in the sequel and then while the team had taken cues from other cooperative shooters like Halo and Gears of War in crafting it its design had also been heavily influenced by the ways in which Forza Motorsport 3 had integrated together at sing player and multiplayer components this newfound focus on cooperative play in turn led the team to turn the game's playable characters into blank slates which the player could customize to their liking with Takeuchi explaining that they wanted the player to be able to imprint themselves upon the game's protagonist this time around leap jung-hoon surrogate in extreme condition had its charm but by possessing such a distinct appearance it was comparatively much harder to identify with him Vande feedback had also resulted in the team reworking how easily players could be repeatedly knocked down by enemies as well as making it so that thermal energy no longer depleted on its own in the hope that it would encourage players to explore the game's environments more freely both these changes and the many many other features and additions that the team managed to bacon to the sequel had proved more challenging to implement than they had anticipated while there had been very little uncertainty as to what content they wanted Lost Planet 2 to offer that its predecessor Hatton's the sheer amount of said content still made the process of bringing it together a considerable undertaking and this time around Capcom had decided that the game would launch simultaneously on both the 360 and PlayStation 3 with a PC release to follow shortly after yet the team persevered motivated by a desire to create an experience that would offer a substantial evolution over the first Lost Planet and stand toe-to-toe with the western video game industry's best in its own unique way unfortunately when Lost Planet 2 would launch in May of 2010 there was little consensus as to whether they had succeeded some felt that its single-player campaign and its newfound emphasis on cooperative play made for a thrilling experience heralding it as a worthy successor to extreme conditions and to benchmark within its genre yet others felt that its levels contain too many strange and infuriating design decisions to be truly enjoyable from poorly explaining it's complicated control schemes to not indicating properly where mission objectives were located the game entrusted players to instinctively know what to do to an infuriating degree and turned into even more of a slog if one was forced to play through it alone a few critics would also take greater umbrage with the game's unique weighty feel than they had with the series first entry expressing that within their current gaming climate which at this point in time had come to be dominated by other more conventional fueling third-person shooters it felt severely mismatched players opinions on Lost Planet 2 were not utterly split across the board most tended to concede that the game story which followed multiple mercenary factions on a series of globe-trotting escapades across IDI and 3 was overwrought in cheesy many also agreed on a more positive note that the game's competitive multiplayer options were robust and filled with a lot of variety especially when it came to all the ways with which the player could customize their avatar but for the most part Lost Planet 2 would divide the room both in and outside the series fanbase with many fans of the first Lost Planet abandoning ship as new players took hold of it at an investor's meeting the following July Capcom would report that critical reception aside the game had managed to sell 1.5 million units across the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 not a terrible number but not what they had been hoping for either from the company's perspective Lost Planet 2 had underperformed as a result of it both not doing enough to distinguish itself from other third-person shooters and it getting delayed from what was going to be a much earlier release stage which Capcom claimed had resulted in the titles marketing not coming together as it should Cajun F&A on the other hand would attribute the game's failures to the fact that he hadn't been involved in his creation as the first one insinuating in a fall 2010 interview with edge magazine that the people who had taken his place for the sequel's production didn't have the love for the property that he would have brought to it eeen F&A would also tell the New York Times during this period that he felt the Lost Planet 2 team had failed in part because they made the game to Japanese and not American enough as it would happen these comments would both come up shortly before an F&H departure of Capcom in October the outspoken producer would explain at the time that he felt there was nowhere further to go within his company and that because of this he had decided to strike out on his own following this Dean F&A would found his own studio concept which would go on to co-develop titles such as soul sacrifice and mighty number 9 after going silent for a good two years Lost Planet would come roaring back to life in the spring of 2012 with Capcom announcing two very different entries in the storied series within the span of a few months one of these entries was e^x troopers a Lost Planet spin-off for the PlayStation 3 and 3ds featuring the same setting narrative beats and general style of gameplay as the main line Lost Planet games but filtered through a chirpy anime lens DX troopers would generate a decent amount of interest following its reveal unfortunately this interest would soon turn to dismay when Capcom would divulge that it had no plans to release either version of VX troopers outside of Japan calls to understand why Capcom had chosen to do so following its launch in November of 2012 would result in the company painting a rather complicated picture of the game status unlike the mainline Lost Planet games e^x troopers had been built very specifically with a Japanese market in mind as a result its developers had not been very mindful about constructing it in such a way that would make it easy to localize with Capcom USA's then senior vice president Christian Svensson revealing on Capcom's official forums that all of the text featured in the game is actually hard-coded into its art preparing it for an overseas release would thus be a much more arduous process than normal as doing so would not only mean translating everything in it but we're working a lot of its assets and Capcom didn't feel like there existed enough demand to compensate for this further upsetting was the fact that IX troopers hadn't even been that considerable of a success in its home country impressions from both local reviewers and importers abroad were almost universally positive with pundits finding its visuals of delight to behold and its gameplay easy to pick up and learn while still being sufficiently deep yet sales were low so much so that neither the 3ds nor the PlayStation 3 version would crack more than 20,000 units during their first week of release the other entry that capcom wooded Vale in the spring of 2012 was Lost Planet 3 with the company announcing at its captivate showcase event that the series third main line entry was on its way and being developed by spark unlimited a video game studio based in Sherman Oaks California at the time of Lost Planet two's release Capcom had expressed that as a result of its catalogs flagging sales it would only be developing new properties at its home offices in Japan going forward in order to ensure that their quality would be of a high enough standard yet it had made it clear that any of its pre existing franchises could find themselves in the hands of Western developers with a 2010 report on Capcom in the Nikkei Japan's largest financial newspaper stating that their added muscle would enable the company to complete games in a more cost-efficient manner and avoid overly long development cycles something that Lost Planet 2 had suffered severely from for this reason it was not immensely surprising that Capcom had chosen to hand off Lost Planet to an American studio what was surprising was the specific choice of studio most of the other developers that Capcom had previously given its old properties to and typically possessed very solid pedigrees ninja theory the studio behind DMC Devil May Cry had previously released critically acclaimed titles like Heavenly Sword and enslaved Odyssey to the West and grin which had helped 2009's Bionic Commando had worked on a smattering of well-received Ghost Recon games spark unlimited on the other hand at a dismal reputation founded in 2002 by a group of former Medal of Honor developers the studio had cut its teeth on the decently received Call of Duty finest hour in 2004 before going on to release the poorly received first-person shooters legendary and turning point fall of Liberty in 2008 why Capcom had nonetheless decided to go with spark would gradually be revealed to have been a complicated and multifaceted decision towards the end of Lost Planet two's production Kenji Oh Kudo who served as the first and second games director had become motivated to return to the setting and gameplay experience of extreme condition in order to both reattempt certain mechanics that ended up on the cutting room floor when development was shifted over to the 360 and offer a more cinematic story-driven experience than Lost Planet 2 concluding that a Western developer would be best suited to make such an experience Capcom proceeded to try and shop it to a number of potential candidates before arriving at SPARC the california-based studios game ography was middling but it seemed well equipped to make cinematic experiences due to it both being located within the nerve center of the American film industry and having picked up many staff since its founding that it worked within it the studio had also just completed a very impressive prototype for a project it was working on with another publisher and when both parties sat down in person to discuss what they wanted the next Lost Planet came to focus on they found that sparks vision aligned almost perfectly with oh kudos all of a sudden the studio seemed like the ideal candidate to work with its understanding of what Capcom wanted to do seemed practically kismet and its skills appeared to utterly belie its reputation yet because of this reputation it wouldn't have any problems working in a highly collaborative fashion on a property it didn't own with Andrew Szymanski explaining to video gamer in 2013 that a developer with more clout would have likely only wanted to work on its own projects one thing led to another and SPARC assumed the reins of Lost Planet 3 at the Corriveau Guto and sparks shared vision for what they wanted Lost Planet 3 to entail was a desire to go back even further into Edie and threes history than the first game and focus on humanity's earliest attempts to colonize it where lost planet two had attempted to bond players to its protagonists by making them blank slates that can be customized to one's liking boss Planet 3 would do so by making its protagonist a multinational crew of blue-collar workers everyday people with lives aspirations and families that gamers both young and old could immediately understand and intimately relate to in order to achieve an atmosphere that would be conducive to such tender and realistic subject matter cooperative play was quickly gutted from Lost Planet 3 single-player as were many of the previous games more extravagant weapons and technological wonders the players grappling hook was neutered so that it could only work in specific context well human sized guns and vital suits were removed altogether replaced wholesale by the utility rig a bulking robot Walker that true to its name would function less as a weapon and more as a tool to facilitate travel and soft puzzles spark also made the hard decision to completely revamp the game's characters a year into production throwing out all of their old models which had been hand animated and partially stylized after finding that they did a poor job of conveying the level of emotional subtlety they wanted the game to achieve in their place spark used the digital double system to bring Lost Planet 3 cast to life hiring actors that looked and sounded like the characters that the script called for and then transposing their likeness and performances into the game through the use of performance capture technology as development on Lost Planet 3 reached its end spark had no illusions of how much rested on the game's impending launch not only was the Lost Planet series future at stake but potentially Capcom's entire global strategy - just four months before three would hit store shelves Capcom had expressed to its investors that it was disappointed in both the quality and commercial reception of the games that had outsourced to overseas developers in recent years and that because of this it would be recommitting to developing most of its future titles back home in and Lost Planet 3 would not only be one of the last games Capcom would develop in collaboration with a western studio but one of the last to vouch for the company's continued relationship with them grandfather please please say something you're on my hand in the end however the only thing that Lost Planet 3 would end up vouching for upon its August 2013 release was spark storytelling acumen critics almost universally agreed that Lost Planet 3 s writing and performances were very strong the game's narrative which followed Jim Payton a family man on an expedition to mine the resources of EDM 3 on Neb expand and eventually uncover the planets hidden secrets helped nuanced and mature in ways that the series previous entries had never been able to achieve yet everything else about the game left much to be desired with the way that Payton controlled proving an especially massive point of contention where the previous two Lost planets had felt like third person shooters by way of Monster Hunter in their weightiness and depth 3 just felt like a conventional Western third-person shooter to longtime fans that had come to accept the unique feel and depth offered by its predecessors it was hard not to feel like the series had drained itself of its soul even an understanding that spark had done so to try and keep his gameplay and story equally grounded critics likewise found the game's many firefights repetitive and overly long its level design done exciting and the utility rig while not without its moments of brilliance to not have been as creatively or extensively utilized as it could have been outside of the game's online multiplayer which many found to once again offer an enjoyable if safe palette of competitive experiences it seemed as if every aspect of Lost Planet 3 s gameplay was missing something and its sales weren't about to pick up the slack with Capcom reporting the following November that the game had sold just 300,000 units worldwide well below the expectations that had been set for it had a considerable downgrade from the series first two entries but the quality of the game's story was hard to argue with so much so that the games riders Richard Gobert Orion Walker and Matt so foes the latter of whom also served as its director would all be nominated for outstanding man in video game writing by the Writers Guild of America the following year and later end up joining Santa Monica studio where they would help right mm 18s God of War in an interview with Kotaku two months after the game's release Andrew Szymanski who had served as its lead producer would express that while the critical response to Lost Planet 3 had been harsher than they were expecting internally he did agree that the game could have benefited for more crazy Capcom esque elements he and the rest of the team at spark were still satisfied with what they had managed to achieve but if there was one thing they had learned in hindsight it's that it wasn't always necessary to reinvent the wheel Lost Planet 3 could have been more in line with what its predecessors had offered gameplay wise rather than attempt another completely different experiment [Music] following its work on Lost Planet three spark unlimited would collaborate with tekmoto II and concept on the ill-received a EBIT Ninja Gaiden Z before ultimately laying off its staff and closing down in May of 2015 outside is some downloadable content for threes multiplayer mode that would release towards the end of 2013 neither Capcom nor spark would indicate any desire before the latter's closure to do anything further with los planets universe to outside observers it seemed apparent that threes chilly reception had effectively curved both parties interest in continuing the series any lasting hope that the Lost Planet movie would still miraculously materialize would also be shot down during this period with David Hayter who had previously been assigned to write its screenplay revealing to IGN that it had quietly folded after the 2008 financial crisis struck Warner Brothers since expressing its discontent in 2013 at people's reception towards its globally focused catalog Capcom has withdrawn from both trying to create games skewed predominantly towards the West and working with non-japanese developers doubling down instead on selling audiences homegrown experiences that speak to both its legacy and history as a Japanese studio western flavor titles like operation Raccoon City and Dark Void have been wiped from its portfolio replaced by indelibly Capcom experiences like 2018 s Monster Hunter World and 2019 Resident Evil 2 and fans for the most part have been immensely happy with this as a result it's hard to ascertain whether Capcom would want to revive Lost Planet at all today even though its 1st and 2nd entries were in a vastly Eastern in their design the series is still inexorably linked to a philosophy that the company would likely wish to avoid as thing currently stand but the studio is Wiley and as its wealth of fighting titles demonstrate not one to forget about its back catalog of games if there ever existed a group of people bold enough to try to revive and reinvent lost planet for the modern age it would be the men and women of cat go [Music] [Music] our documentaries are crowdfunded and made possible by the generous supporters backing us on patreon if you enjoy our content consider subscribing to our Channel and becoming a patron to help us create more thank you

Channel: GVMERS

Views: 551,895

Rating: 4.9473009 out of 5

Keywords: Lost Planet, Lost Planet 2, Lost Planet 3, Lost Planet 4, E.X. Troopers, Broken Horizon, The History of Lost Planet, Capcom, Documentary, Cancelled, Dead Rising, Keiji Inafune, Jun Takeuchi, Spark Unlimited, Extreme Conditions, Extreme Condition, Colonies, ‎ロスト プラネット, Monster Hunter

Id: v-O_Ru8CYts

Length: 34min 20sec (2060 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 25 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/ITriedLightningTendr]

They're all kind of distinct games, oddly. 1 was more 3rd person shooter world story, 2 is almost monster hunter in a lot of respects, 3 is like playing a civilian.

[u/forsayken]

Just so happens these games are 80% off on Steam right now. $3, $4, and $5 each. Tempted. First one was pretty good.

[u/0451fan0451]

For whatever reason, the one thing I remember about the first game is that it had really good looking motion blur. Made 30 FPS motion look surprisingly smooth yet readable.

[u/Dezuuu]

With all the re-releases Capcom are doing (even bringing Phoenix Wright to PS4) I really hoped they'd bring Lost Planet 1 and 2 to current gen. 2 still looks pretty great on PS3, all it needs is some upscaling and stability improvements like they did with RE5 and 6.

[u/SolarMoth]

Still love these games. Campaign was entertaining. Multiplayer was pretty good, especially all the mechs.

[u/battlebrocade]

Would love a remaster of LP2. It's a pretty solid game, imo, but the netcode and lobby system is by far one of the worst things Capcom has ever done. This shit needed dedicated servers.

[u/matticusiv]

I know I'm in the minority, but I really liked 3. It almost feels like Firewatch, but with mechs and monsters.

[u/lpeccap]

I absolutely loved the first two games. Unfortunately they tried to make the third game marketable to western audiences and it was super generic.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]