Fallout: New Vegas developer Obsidian was at one point working on an Xbox One RPG

Stormlands may have been planned as an Xbox One launch game at one point, but we'll never see it.

Obsidian Entertainment, famed for working on Fallout: New Vegas, Knights of the Old Republic, and a key factor in the recent renaissance of CRPGs, was at one point working on an open-world RPG for Microsoft, to be released on the Xbox One.

Called Stormlands, the game was supposed to be a launch title for the console, but the project was eventually canned without anyone hearing about it, until now. Speaking to IGN, CEO Fergus Urquhart explained why it was shutdown.

"It comes down to budget and it comes down to having a champion [at Microsoft]," said Urquhart.

"I can see games that had champions and weren't cancelled until $80 million were spent... There's games that had a $10 million budget and had a champion and ended up the budget was $60 million and it shipped."

The "champion" Urquhart is referring to is someone at the publisher that's willing to talk up the game to the higher-ups, to keep them happy while giving the studio a chance to finish the project.

"There has to be someone with that attitude and the ability to defend the game. Why did Stormlands get cancelled? Stormlands got cancelled because we didn't have an advocate," he added.

This is the first time we're hearing about Stormlands, of course. The news will be particularly disappointing to Xbox fans, especially coming off the recent cancellation of Scalebound.

Obsidian is currently running a crowdfunding campaign for Pillars of Eternity 2.