Megaman Legends 3 - Cancelled

[Forte 0]

It's funny how this hasn't been posted here yet, but since I posted the topic about the announcement of this game, I guess it's pretty handy that I get to post the topic about how it was cancelled. This is a relatively late reaction, so bear with me if this is old news to you.

 

Following the announcement of the game in Late September/Early October of last year, Capcom opened the "MegaMan Legends 3 Dev Room" at their online community, capcom-unity. The Dev Room, which was a forum style user group, was made to garner interest from the fans, and also measure the amount of support that was going to go into the game. From the beginning, the users of the Dev Room were informed that they would be working beside the actual development team in order to help make the game not only something the fans dreamed of, but something they helped create, as well. Capcom also released a video introduction to the Dev Room, telling users of all the things they could do to help the development along, and to help fans who are less talented/too busy to truly help feel better, they included the fact that it was ok to just sit back and watch, too.

 

However, on July 18, 2011, the Dev Room posted an announcement after a few weeks of inactivity, stating that the MegaMan Legends 3 project had been officially cancelled by Capcom with no intention of reviving the project in the near future. This sparked a major community outrage from the hundreds of fans who had been onboard the project for the better part of a year, following all the updates and eagerly anticipating the release of the MegaMan Legends 3 Beta, which has recently been confirmed to have been completed. To make matters worse, at the very beginning, Capcom did not answer any questions as to why the game was cancelled when development seemed so far along. Rumors started to circulate around the internet that Capcom was removing people from Comic-con for wearing MegaMan related things or mentioning MegaMan Legends 3, but such rumors were confirmed to be just that, and that they held no truth. Other anti-Capcom rumors began to pop up, such as that they were suing the Indie Rock-Opera band, The Protomen, over copyright infringement, which was also confirmed to be untrue by the band themselves.

 

After countless questions asked via twitter to Capcom of Europe, it was revealed that the project was scrapped due to "lack of fan interest", which was "what the Dev Room was there for". This caused an uproar on Capcom's capcom-unity forums, prompting people to ask exactly how much "fan interest" they wanted, when the Dev Room was packed with people voting on polls, giving input, and other various things, leading up to one very famous Twitter post between a user and Capcom of Europe, in which the user asked if Capcom just wanted the fans to make the game for them, to which CoE replied "yeah, pretty much".

 

All in all, to someone who had closely followed the actions of Capcom from the departure of Keiji Inafune (MegaMan Series Creator), the cancellation of MegaMan Legends 3, while shocking and disappointing, is very unsurprising. No more than a month before, Capcom announced the cancellation of MegaMan Universe, an Xbox Live Arcade/PSN downloadable game, which already had a playable demo available, showing that plenty of work had gone into it up to that point, so speculation that the MegaMan Legends 3 project would be dropped was already running around. The most upsetting thing about the entire cancellation is that at no point did Capcom ever bother to take note of communities outside of their own being riled up for the announcement, and how they seemed to only care about the input from Capcom-Unity, even though the bigger named MegaMan fansites can be easily found in one simple google search. The entire failure of the game almost seems to be from a massive amount of miscommunication from Capcom as to how important people joining the Dev Room was, which to the users, seemed to just be something extra and fun Capcom threw out to make the release of the game special.

 

In the aftermath, after the anger died down and people began to think rationally, a spark of user-side support began to well up, trying to convince Capcom to reconsider the development of Legends 3, including a Facebook group: "100,000 strong for MegaMan Legends 3", whose goal is, as it says on the tin, to achieve at least 100,000 likes from fans who support the release of the game, which, to date, has a bit over 44,000. Among the other fan involvements are a petition started on the Capcom-Unity forums, An increased community urge for people to "become a servbot" (a feature of the dev room), and various MegaMan fan websites focusing content on Legends.

 

Though we can't tell what the future will hold for MegaMan Legends 3, or the entire MegaMan franchise for that matter, what we can say is that Capcom, even to this day, has no intention of reviving the project. If it changes due to this fan outbreak, wonderful. If not, the fans tried their best.