>>719750559
>Usually there's a reason games get cancelled.
Usually. We can look at the facts here.
It got announced in 2006 (Which was a 3DRealms issue) but Human Head didn't even start development until 2009 (They didn't have any known work in between 06-09, if they did it was either heavily NDA'd or simply undocumented because looking it up gets you nothing). Bethesda didn't pull the plug on them until 2013.
I don't know if it was truly hate for Human Head or more a lust for money, since around the same time they put out the 2011 announcement they were contracting HH to help Splash Damage with Brink and I imagine they weren't dumb enough to do that for free.
Could it have been near done after effectively after that 4 year dev cycle? Absolutely! 4 years is a very normal dev cycle - especially back then when the yearly game release pipeline was in full swing for most of the AAA world. But the fact we didn't get these gameplay/devbuild leaks until a decade after, which is all still demo assets. Besides one screenshot of a cutscene with Tommy leaked a few years prior, there's been no attempt by them to show anything not already revealed. It'd be a slam dunk case to just leak all this shit and go "Yeah Bethesda absolutely screwed us, here's some documents showing it plus some gameplay we didn't get to reveal." CroTeam reused assets from their cancelled Doom game they were working on for Bethesda prior to Serious Sam 3 as well and nothing happened to them so clearly there's no confirmed precedent of any specific behaviors they might engage in with personally made assets.
That said, that doesn't exonerate Bethesda either, they chose to maintain opacity over this for no good reason so clearly they weren't up to any good either.
I think it's somewhere in the middle, Bethesda were being typical corporate jew demons demanding more with less, and Human Head reciprocated because you can take the dev out of the 3DRealms but you can't take the 3DRealms out of the dev.