Will We Ever See A New Lost Planet Game?

During the early stages of the Xbox 360’s life cycle, it really felt like Capcom threw their full weight behind Microsoft’s new console, launching two original IPs on the western console as opposed to the PS3. We’ve already spoken about everyone’s favourite zombie survival jaunt Dead Rising, which went on to achieve moderate success over the next decade, but the other series, Lost Planet, seemed to fizzle out before too long.

Taking place in the future on a far-flung planet where humans are attempting recolonisation efforts in the midst of a hellish ice age, the series sees players taking on the roles of a wide variety of characters, all trying to survive in a hostile world where pirates and aliens are looking to murder you. It’s hardly the most unique premise, but there’s still many out there burning a candle for the series, so we’re asking the question: will we ever see a new Lost Planet game?

 

The History of Lost Planet

The Lost Planet series made its first appearance at an invite-only press conference as Lost Planet: Extreme Conditions, where Capcom detailed the game while announcing Jun Takeuchi as producer and executive producer, Kenji Oguro as the game’s designer and Shin Kurosawa as the original story writer. Between the three of them, there was plenty of experience across Capcom’s back catalogue, with credits on the likes of Onimusha, Mega Man, Resident Evil and more.

One of the big announcements from the initial reveal event was that Capcom had decided to cast South Korean actor Lee Byung-hun as the main character, Wayne Holden, who would be fighting both the alien race of Akrid and some evil humans. Lee was already a successful actor in South Korea anyway, though he’d go on to achieve bigger things in the west by appearing in films like G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra and Retaliation, along with Terminator: Genisys and The Magnificent Seven.

I said bigger things, not better things.

Interestingly, Capcom made the decision to tie Lost Planet to the Xbox 360, with the initial reveal event scheduled to coincide with the launch of the console in Japan. However, the Xbox 360 notoriously flopped in Japan, with the console taking five and a half years to sell just 1.5 million units, which is a staggeringly low amount. Compare that to the PS3, which by 2011, had managed to sell 7,417,148 units, which blows the Xbox 360 out of the water. Heck, the 3DS only launched in 2011, but still managed to shift 4,135,739 units by the end of the year.

Keiji Inafune, legendary developer and executive producer for Lost Planet, spoke about the decision to bring the game to Xbox 360 in an interview with IGN at E3 2006, noting even then that the console was not warmly received in Japan:

“What the Xbox 360 represents is a great balance. When you think about when it was released, what it can do, how much it costs, the type of games it will have, it’s just in a very nice position. The PlayStation 3 being that expensive is going to put it out of the price range of a lot of people, but yet the 360 will still be there. It will still be something that’s affordable for enough people. The one disadvantage, unfortunately, is that it did not succeed in Japan.”

After making various appearances at the other big name conferences throughout the year, Lost Planet would launch in December 2006 in Japan, before launching worldwide a month later. The game earned a respectable 79 on Metacritic, with reviewers commending the visuals and scope of the game, while lamenting some of the controls and general issues with the bland story. The Xbox 360 version alone went on to sell 1.37 million copies by the end of March 2007, before the game was inevitably ported to both PC and PS3 by 2008.

2008 also saw the release of Lost Planet: Extreme Condition Colonies Edition on Xbox 360 and PC, which is quite the mouthful of a name. Try saying it three times fast. This new version sought to expand the game’s multiplayer with a host of new modes while still including the single-player campaign, all at a lower price point than a full price game. It scored okay reviews wise, but some critics hated the fact that it wasn’t compatible at all with the previous game.

While Capcom re-released the first game in the series, they were also toiling away on a follow-up game, the aptly titled Lost Planet 2, which would eventually be revealed in April 2009 through the Xbox Live Marketplace of all things. The game would still launch on PS3 and PC, with Jun Takeuchi confirming in an interview with GamesRadar+ that the decision came from wanting to honor fans of the original game: “We wanted to show the game first and foremost to fans of the original Lost Planet. We talked to Microsoft about doing it this way and they were interested in it as well. Also, I think it was a unique and memorable way to announce the game.”

Lost Planet 2 addressed some of the comments and feedback from the previous game, as it allowed players to create their own persistent character across both the campaign (which now featured 4-player co-op) and multiplayer modes. Players could equip these characters with new weapons, skills and emotes, along with customising their looks with new outfits and costumes, making them more personalised as a result.

LP2 also varied up the environments from just snow-capped wastelands, with deserts, jungles and even space stations to kill people and aliens in, while retaining popular aspects like huge mechs and alien battles. On paper, it sounds like an exhaustive improvement over the original game, but critics just didn’t get on with the game in the same way they did with the original, scoring 10 points lower on Metacritic. Essentially, Lost Planet 2 is an excellent co-op game, but trying to play the game solo is like pulling teeth.

Before launching what would be the final game in the Lost Planet series, Capcom took the series to the PS3 and 3DS with E.X. Troopers, a spin-off from the LP series that only launched in Japan. The game featured more manga-influenced action than the regular series, with players able to use a mix of firearms and melee combat to defeat the Akrid. Its limited release means there’s not a lot of reviews out there, but Japanese outlet Famitsu were impressed with the game, so it’s a shame that E.X. Troopers didn’t come to the West in any form.

 

What Happened To Lost Planet?

The last game in the series, Lost Planet 3, saw development duties move from Capcom’s internal studios to a western studio in the form of Spark Unlimited. Historically, this move hasn’t exactly gone well most of the time for Capcom, with the likes of Grin developing Bionic Commando, or Slant Six developing the accursed Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City. At least Blue Castle’s work on Dead Rising was commendable, up until it wasn’t. Thanks, Dead Rising 4.

Spark themselves were something of an odd development studio to go with, considering the fact that they hadn’t quite set the world on fire. Debuting with the decent Call of Duty: Finest Hour in 2004, follow-up games Turning Point: Fall of Liberty and monster shooter Legendary were less than stellar. These were sentiments that were raised by GamesBeat’s Sebastian Haley during an interview with Capcom producer and Lost Planet 3 project lead Andrew Szymanski, who shared those concerns initially, but defended the studio, stating:

“I was the one who chose to go with Spark as the developer. […] I was very skeptical going in. I’m going to be honest with you. When I first went to visit them, I thought the same things that you’ve mentioned. I looked at the track record. I looked at the review scores for the games, and I’m like, can these guys bring the goods? But between some of the in-the-works stuff that they showed me, prototypes that they had for stuff that didn’t end up getting released, as well as some team arrangements that they had made in terms of trying to build on their past to change what needed to be changed in order to move forward. That was a good indicator.”

A prequel to other games in the series, Lost Planet 3 saw players take on the role of Jim Peyton, one of the first people to land on the snow-covered planet of E.D.N. III, trying to survive, gather precious Thermal Energy and ultimately colonise the planet. The gameplay pivoted away from the massive scale that the previous games championed, instead confining gameplay to smaller corridors and interior environments.

Truth be told, Lost Planet 3 earned a lot of comparisons to Dead Space, due to the camera moving closer behind the protagonist’s shoulder, the claustrophobic environments and just an overall move towards scares and horror. These comparisons weren’t helped by the fact that Dead Space 3 launched before Lost Planet 3, with DS3 focusing on a snow-covered planet, much like the LP series. In fairness though, Szymanski noted that Lost Planet had been doing snow and aliens much longer in an interview with Siliconera (archived by GamingBolt):

“When I saw the coverage coming out of E3 for Dead Space 3, the first emotion was flattery. I felt flattered, because we’ve done snow and ice since 2006 with the first Lost Planet game and we felt we kind of own that space, and […] one of our core concepts was to push that even further. […] All of a sudden, we see Dead Space 3 come in with the ice planet setting, and it’s kind of like, ‘OK, well, thanks for the nod!’ You know, that’s cool.”

Despite the Lost Planet series playing around in the snow and aliens space before Dead Space, it didn’t stop critics from harshly reviewing LP3, earning the lowest scores in the entire series on Metacritic. Reviewers had kind words to say about the game’s voice work, but lambasted LP3 for some weak gameplay design and an over insistence on backtracking. Perhaps the most damning review came from Eurogamer, who proclaimed that LP3 “manages to make third-person shooting feel like work”. If nothing else, Spark Unlimited went on to greater success with Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z.

Oh. Oh no.

 

The Future of Lost Planet

Is there even a future for a game like Lost Planet? I hope so, if only because its bombastic spectacle, particularly with regards to the second game, made it one of the most enjoyable Xbox 360 games on offer. Finding a team of players to work together and man a massive railway cannon, which requires other players to help defend the gunner or reload the weapon, made for an inventive and thrilling co-op experience that other games weren’t really experimenting with back in 2010.

As for if we’ll ever see a new game in the Lost Planet series, we’re rather predictably returning to the old Capcom datahack from 2020, in which the publisher’s plans for the next few years were maliciously spread across the internet for all to see. Plans for new games in the Resident Evil, Street Fighter, Onimusha, Mega Man and Monster Hunter franchises have all been cited, with many even being independently corroborated by various games media outlets, but Lost Planet has been resigned to history.

At one point though, an idea for a new Lost Planet game was formulated. We mentioned Blue Castle before, who developed Dead Rising 2 and would ultimately go on to be branded as Capcom Vancouver. Journalist Liam Robertson did a deep dive in 2020 into how the Dead Rising series fell apart at Capcom Vancouver, and he revealed that the studio pitched to revive other classic Capcom franchises, including Onimusha, Dino Crisis and, most importantly, Lost Planet.

The team’s pitch for Lost Planet, subtitled Broken Horizon, would have been somewhat similar to Lost Planet 2 in terms of its gameplay. The game would feature four player co-op, along with huge mech suits that’d allow you to fight giant aliens and protect a base from bandits. Vancouver pitched this game at the end of 2016, but Capcom Japan rejected it as according to them, it would require too much budget to reboot this “relatively niche” franchise.

That might be the sticking point for whether or not we’ll ever see a new Lost Planet game. If they already see one of their own properties as a “relatively niche” franchise, which is hard to argue with given the success of Monster Hunter, Resident Evil, Street Fighter, Mega Man and Devil May Cry, why would they bother allocating development resources to it when they can just crank out another guaranteed sales win and call it a day?

The issue with that logic is that Monster Hunter wasn’t also the mainstream success it’s become over the past few years. Before Monster Hunter World, it was also a “relatively niche” series in the eyes of many, but after the success of World, it’s now one of Capcom’s most lucrative franchises. If Lost Planet was given another chance to shine in the same way that Monster Hunter was, it could be incredibly successful too. Maybe if Lost Planet follows the Resident Evil 2 and RE3 remake trend, leveraging the PS5 and Xbox Series X | S for some truly epic Akrid fights, it could be another winner in Capcom’s ever-growing portfolio of fantastic games.

Admittedly, it’s wishful thinking, considering that Capcom seem to have a lot on their plate with their supposedly leaked line-up of games, as well as titles like Pragmata on the horizon. Finding room for Lost Planet in that tight schedule might be tough, but I’ll be crossing my fingers nonetheless. I don’t have a choice. My last trip to E.D.N. III left them frozen together.

READ MORE: Will We Ever See Dino Crisis 4?