What's a cancelled game you really miss?
What's a cancelled game you really miss?
What's a cancelled game you really miss?
Two come to mind. Hardware Rivals which I got for free on PSN ages ago. The other is Mass Effect 3 multiplayer. I think I was in top 100 N7 rank percentile at one point. I've never been good at a multiplayer game since.
Any sort of sequel to the Tribes series. Talk about a franchise that had, at one point, a massive amount of potential that was completely squandered!
It has momentum (the franchise, not just the gameplay mechanic. Lol) and the visuals and world lended itself to be turned into something with great storytelling of they really wanted to make it into a story as well. Plus, it was fun a hell!
Ascend is technically still online, but any sequel that gets "announced" every one in a while is a lost cause from the start
Evolve stage 2! Very fun and very unique game. Their battle pass monetization scheme fizzled out and they took down the servers. There may be some community run servers going, but getting onto them for a small player base that's going to beat my ass just doesn't seem worth.
Wildstar
Limit Theory. Quite the ambitious space simulator being developed by one dude. I recall seeing their dev log videos on youtube.
The cancelled suite of Alternate Reality games.
Omfg...
Yesssssss. Our entire family loved The Dungeon so much. My father wrote a letter to the developers and got a response, with excited descriptions of upcoming games in the series that never came to be. The producer or developer, or whoever wrote him back was bragging about how the next game would have characters you could actually see while in combat! (E: referring to The Arena)
The Dungeon already sort of gave up on the original design. Philip Price wrote The City and the extension mechanism that things were supposed to plug into, but the new developers who finished The Dungeon didn't use any of it. So it was a one-way trip... Except you couldn't actually transfer characters, it was broken. :-/
Dota Underlords
Star Wars 1313 and Battlefront 3.
And for books it's the unfinished Republic/Imperial Commando series by Karen Traviss
Prey 2
C&C Generals 2, they got canceled and then made in to a mobile game. I considerd staying 10 hours in line to try it out at gamescom in köln 10-12 years ago, decided to get drunk instead.
Yeah that was a letdown for sure. Still better than releasing it as a mobile game I think.
If you haven't heard they recently released the source code of C&C generals and zero hour and there's multiple efforts working on a community patch.
I've been watching the competitive scene of zero hour for a few years now. It's really exciting and now that the source code's out, sky's the limit on what we can achieve.
I miss firefall. It was very innovative and enormous. The devs were trying new ideas in the alpha all the time.
I never played that game, but I was about to... I literally installed it, but didn't play it, and it got canceled and shut down very shortly after. (I was a bit out of the loop, I guess)
I still have it late in my Steam library, so I think about it a decent bit
The original concept for Bioshock infinite.
man, you just pissed me off reminding me of that game
K.O.L.M.
Unreal Tournament series
UE4 movement was buttery smooth
I really am dissapointed in current gaming, thought wed have a game in each genre that supported custom content, like ue would let ppl make their own maps/weapons, etc. everquest landmark for mmo worlds, etc.
Star wars 1313 was THE game I was waiting for. Got very sad when it got cancelled.
Also all is the in-progress and for some completed content that just got shelved for Disney infinity because the new management at Disney forgot why games mattered. (Same time when they absolutely gutted lucasarts). Just for them to start from scratch again a few years later when they realised they still need a videogame presence. Which makes the losses of what could have been hurt more.
Cancelled or shut down? If you wanted a cancelled game to come out, 99 times out of 100, it was your imagination making it into a great game, and they cancelled it because it wasn't coming together.
For games that were shut down, for me, it was Robocraft. It was only shut down recently, but the version of the game that I loved from about 2017-ish was basically replaced a year later with a version of the game that I was not a fan of, and it stayed that way until the game's and studio's closure. I had to get burned by Robocraft in order to come to some realizations about the rot at the core of live service games, and it informed a lot of where I spend my time and money now.
Yeah. Sometimes we're lucky and get a leak of the cancelled game. Happened with the War Craft adventure game. It was almost finished. And it was really mid. Maybe up to today's Blizzard standards but not back then.
Cries in Star Wars: Battlefront 3
The Cycle: Frontier. It was a pvpve extraction shooter that had such potential. Struggled to keep cheaters at bay, but it felt like they were making progress until one day they announced they were shutting down. Every month or two someone in our group chat brings it up and we're collectively sad that it's gone.
The Original Lawn Darts. Life is no fun without a bit of risk.
I sometimes still think about StarCraft: Ghost.
Also not really a whole game, but I hate that CDPR cancelled the multiplayer stuff for Cyberpunk 2077. I was really looking forward to that.
There it is. Knew Ghost had to be mentioned. I still vividly remember early preview screenshots from a Game Informer magazine.
I sometimes still think about StarCraft: Ghost.
Pfft, I'm sometimes hoping they'll eventually make the WarCraft point-and-click adventure game.
Starwars Galaxies, pretty CU
That's not cancelled, that's just a game that was taken down.
There's a bunch of private servers for it too. My first experience is the game was through one of them and it was pretty great.
Man I miss SWG.
Silent Hills
Honestly, I kind of miss the idea of what "Life By You" could've been, as it had the game designer for The Sims 2 and The Sims 3 behind it. That game could've been a return to form and an actual threat to EA's watered down and extremely pricey Sims Slop. If only the team Rod Humble had assembled were able to gel their concept into a reality, with Paradox's backing, could've created something magical. Alas, it was not to be...I still imagine the potential for player driven storytelling that Life By You was offering!
at least there's Inzoi, from what little i've seen it seems like a good sims game
I lost hope for that game because they use GenAI to power to create a character, clothing, furniture color/pattern customization. I won't play a game that utilizes GenAI, as base requirements are increased, GenAI is a security hazard, and it has a damaging effect on the environment. The fact that InZOI requires a constant internet connection as well due to the game's reliance on GenAI.
This one gets me as well, Paradox had a great history of maintaining and upgrading the base game with money made from DLCs, some of which are content/feature related and others are way cheaper and are cosmetics, all of that while providing mod support. And that model would have been awesome in a sims like game.
It would've been interesting, given that Rod Humble wanted to create a fully fleshed out base game...The DLC for Life By You likely would've been merely outfits, additional hairs made post launch, and possibly furniture/architecture style sets that could be priced at a reasonable rate. Meaning more players would've bought it and those funds would be reinvested in the game for more work to be done! The mod support would've been nice for those that want it; I often don't care for mods (Prepare Carefully, for Rimworld is one of the few that I adore). This situation is truly vexing because the Life Sim scene needs a well funded direct competitor to The Sims that isn't afraid to make a coherent and interesting Simulation game; one that is built with an engine that actual works and in-depth gameplay! The loss of Life By You will irk me for years to come.
The Black Isle version of Fallout 3 (Van Buren).
Bethesda's version had expansive and impressive maps and visuals, but the writing and world-building were subpar compared to Fallout 1/2 and New Vegas.
Black Isle Studios planned to include a dual-combat system in the game that allowed for the player to choose between real-time (Bethesda Softworks' Fallout games and Micro Forté and 14° East's Fallout Tactics) or turn-based combat (Fallout and Fallout 2) but real-time was only included due to Interplay's demands.
I suppose you're most-likely aware of them, but if you wanted more turn-based Fallout, have you looked into Wasteland 2 and Wasteland 3?
I am most probably not good at the game, but in Wasteland 3, it felt like you needed the first round advantage, otherwise you would get blown to pieces before you could even act once. That burned the game for me.
They are on my "to play" list. :)
Thanks to the design documents being leaked back in 2007 (I think) and the original designers being open to contact from some dedicated people, there are actually a couple of fan made attempts at creating what would have been Van Buren. I know of both Project Van Buren and Fallout: Yesterday.
Good pick! I was so bummed when I heard that was cancelled.
But would this game have been successful, given the kind of games that were being released at the time? It would most likely have been the end of the series.
That's a fair point. We did have Arcanum in 2001 and while it's arguably legendary in CRPG circles, I don't think it did all that well commercially.
I think it probably would have been the biggest success of the 3 games. But you're also probably right that it likely would have been the end of the series. Bethesda making them into 1st person open world games was probably the best thing that ever happened to the series. At least in terms of achieveing widespread success.
PT. Still have it saved on my PS4 I think.
Wildstar! It was the best playing mmo I've ever seen. The platforming was neat, the world was varied and cool, there was player housing with almost endless customisation! I miss that game.
I keep hoping Wildstar gets the City of Heroes like revival, just hoping so so much!
I came looking for this comment, glad I'm not alone 🫶
Miss the world of wildstar the most - its was a really creative theme park
Might sound odd to some, but Overwatch.
Early Overwatch was great. Then some updates made it better. The only things wrong with it were design choices that were made for financial reasons. Then they made it much worse. Then they made it worse. And worse. And then they made 2, which turned it into just another 'left-click on the target' game, because those make more money. It saddens me that it died.
Play Marvel Rivals now while it's still fun. It's free.
It plays just like 2016 Overwatch did, because it was made by some of the original OW devs. The same ones who left because they were tired of all the fun metas being made boring to please the hardcore players who have no life outside of video games. That isn't an issue with Rivals yet. Enjoy it while you still can.
I was there gandalf, I hated when they changed the game and balancing around the pro mode, only for their e-sports presence to implode anyway.
I was on the same boat as you forever. I came back to ow2 late last year. I'll say this. OW feels better than it ever has. Very balanced and very fair, while maintaining that very chaotic and energized feeling. They added tiered perks which really break up the monotony of the game, and also brought back loot boxes.
It feels like they realized the game became stagnant, and they're doing as much as they can to bring it back to peak, and past that.
They also are bringing back 'classic overwatch", and I'll say this... After you play classic and go back to regular you can feel the difference. The only thing I miss is 6v6 but it seems like that's coming back soon too
6v6 is already back, in open queue format
Yeah I used to be super addicted to Overwatch 1, but I bailed as soon as 2 came out. I can honestly say I've never played it since.
I liked 6v6, they should've made more tanks and healers.
I didn't like role queue, sure it's a strong team buildup but I don't think it should've been forced. I really liked being able to flex between classes depending on what was needed. Sometimes five DPS and a healer will break through a point. Being a tank or healer with bad DPS makes an already limited role even worse.
Ow2 seems like they just trashed my game ($60aud) and added MTX.
I can't get into marvel rivals, the time to kill seems too low, Overwatch was a bit more lethal.
Agreed. Role queue was dumb. I liked having the ability to look at how things have been going and say 'They're doing X. I'll swap to this character and screw up their plans.' The thing I loved most about OW was that it wasn't locked into the left click first competition. Their Widow is causing trouble? Lucio>wall climb>drop in>boop them out of their safety bubble and get them shredded. Distract them behind a shield to the left so someone on the right can sneak up on them. Or go Sombra and do an invis run/tele to magdump into their head at point blank. Or go monkey and pig meatwall to get close enough to ruin her day. Whatever. Just something with more intelligence than left-click and die repeatedly.
I miss Mayhem too. People complained that it took too long to die/kill but that was what was amazing about it. How many games can you say have ever felt like you were in an epic fight where every thrust, parry, twist, duck, and swing mattered? Where you don't win by the luck of a single shot but have to tactically manipulate enemy attention so you can change the angle of attack so it favors your healer over their Junkrat? Battles won or lost by the timing and precision placement of a Zarya hole catching the targets thrown by a Lucio boop to hold them just off the payload just long enough to get to the next checkpoint?
Man, I miss that game.
Hawken. :(
Edit: Started to read through everyone else's opinions and it dawns on me that this is just going to be a giant list of things I may have never even heard of that I might want to play, and can't. You are a sadomasochist. :)
That game was very cool, had a good time even though i was rubish at it
Could also be someone doing market research/looking for ideas
Heheh.
Well if it helps, a lot of these are sequels the user was anticipating because they loved a predecessor, so you can go and play that :D
Chromehounds.
EverQuest Next. That game would have been the best MMO ever, if they would've stuck with it. Unfortunately, SOE got bought out and the new owners were whackos who didn't care. It's sad because nothing has come close since then. Only GW2 and ESO have even a fraction of the concepts of EQN.
64dd, specifically earthbound 64
Star Wars 1313 is a big one for me. Same with Battlefront 3, both would have been amazing. RIP og Lucasarts, you were a real one.
Also, Retro Studios has had a few concepts that sounded awesome. They were planning a few Zelda spinoffs I would have really liked to see. Heroes of Hyrule and the Sheik project looked cool as hell.
Star Wars Galaxies was such an ambitious MMO at launch.
Crazy in depth crafting system, especially with regards to pets. With how materials were randomly generated and cycled out it created a market that actually experienced booms and scarcity.
Some of the servers went almost a year before all the materials required for certain weapons spawned. And the materials all had random stats that would affect the item you crafted.
Also a surprisingly advanced and customizable... 'class' system, which was really more like a whole bunch of branching skill trees you could mix and match basically various ranks of... allowing many weird, but often effective, hyrbrids of 'classes' that... could either focus on one main 'class', but augment it with certain abilities from other 'classes'...
And then the Combat Upgrade happened, and everything got streamlined.
Also... being a Jedi/Sith used to be... exceptionally rare and difficult to pull off.
IIRC, basically, some kind of insane random seed type thing gave each of your characters a very, very tiny chance of being force sensitive... but you wouldn't even know this unless you also found basically a hidden event/questline, and then that would unlock a whole set of force skill trees, allowing for a range of jedi to sith abilities, with some kind of mix effectively being a 'gray' jedi.
Finally... SWG ... still appears to me to be the only MMO that actually attempted to implement a working, player vs player, bounty hunting and tracking system, within an mmo... as a core game mechanic of a player 'class'.
Though I haven't played all mmos, so I may be wrong about that.
... Also an entire skill tree for basically being a mayor and running your own player built town. A whole skill tree dedicated to like... administrative capacity and zoning laws.
Do MMOs even... do player built cities anymore? Or did they just mostly switch over to 'you have a house in the set aside 'suburb' instance'?
Came here to mention Star Wars 1313.
Haven't played Outlaws, but I guess that's the closes we have come to that. Maybe a non-ubisoft game similar to that?
The original Overwatch. I also know Apex Legends hasn't been cancelled, but they also took away Linux compatibility so it is essentially cancelled for Linux. That's one I miss.
PlanetSide 1, the MMOFPS that was the former record holder of "Most players in an online FPS battle," which was eventually surpassed by PlanetSide 2.
In its heyday it was a fascinating sociology study.
During EU prime time, players would self-organize into squads of about 10 players. They would apply light pressure to the entire map simultaneously. Territorial gains would be made by attacking undefended bases.
During USA prime time, players would self-organize into platoons of about 30 players. They would press a few strategic locations with medium force. Territorial gains came from fixing operations (using a small force in an easy to defend location to keep a large population of opponents busy) and local numeric superiority at lightly defended bases.
During Chinese prime time, players would group up into a singular mass. Everyone just ran face first into the meatgrinder. No territorial gains were made.
I played ps2 heavily for a couple of years. Fun game.
I remember organizing several squads to play tactics when the main zerg pushes were off doing random stuff. There was a lot of planning and tactics that had to happen specifically around guessing what the public players would end up naturally pushing for. Colloquially known as "the zerg". Almost treated like a mass of self-organizing players, but in reality they were just individuals who happen to follow each other to random places.
Eg. leadership comms would be flooded with plans of "The zerg is pushing towards Tawrich, We should send Alpha and Bravo over to Zurvan to split the TR forces (maybe recapture that) and Charlie to crown to intercept backup/vehicle spawns. Delta needs to fuck off with pulling those tanks... get in the fucking building."
I regularly play gw2 and in it there's a mode called world-vs-world that's a three way team "bigger" scale battle (bigger than 5v5 pvp) that often has hundreds of players in (I'm not sure exactly how many, I just looked it up but there's little concrete information because it looks like the devs change it over time, but I'm guessing like 300 total players per map that often gets maxed and you have to queue for).
Players can spend a chunk of gold to enable a toggleable commander status tag on their entire account (you get 1 gold for base dailies, costs 300 gold for tag). In WvW, those commanders often lead larger scale pushes for claiming territory over a ranked "tournament" that ends and resets each month.
I've noticed it's also an interesting sociology study, but from what I've seen, the Chinese commanders do coordinate and split up and do pincers and stuff. It seems like one big zerg isn't as effective since yeah you'll take what you go for no matter what, but it's all about allocation of resources and fighting the actual battle.. and that takes actual work, when a lot of people are just interested in farming out crafting materials, currencies, achievements, or other reasons. Which is fine, but part of me wants to see the game mode go 100% and see what it's capable of.
Depending on time of day around the world and when people are awake or home from work, there are huge spikes in activity.
I never played much PlanetSide 2 because at the time my pc was a potato and I was still wrist deep into counter strike. Would those maps ever end? Or was it also like a perma-sisyphean timeless battle? Was there ever a winner?
In PlanetSide, there's just one big map that never resets.
The team I played with would try to bring the front line to a bridge before logging off for the night. Contested bridges were notoriously difficult to cross, so you could count on no major territorial changes happening while you sleep. The zerg was content to snipe across the bridge all night, and when organized Ops resumed the next day, the bridge would simply be bypassed by mass airlift.
IIRC, there have been a few times when one of the three factions controlled the entire map, but it never lasted more than a few minutes. During the PlanetSide 2 beta test, one side came close to taking the entire map, but the whole game crashed because the entire population of all three factions was trying to pile into the same base at the same time. They eventually implemented a mechanic where if too many people were in the same place, the ones who arrived most recently would be teleported to an adjacent map tile.
Megaman Legends 3.
"We cancelled it because the fans didn't show enough interest or act like they wanted it badly enough!"
I think a sizable fraction of the world's population is still salty about that, and it's been 14 years.
I didn't even know about it until I read this comment, but now I'm one of the salty.
I haven't bought a capcom game since this
Yeah, I came to mention this one specifically. The Legends series was incredible at the time, and there was a lot of potential for a third game with more modern controls. But instead, Capcom has made it clear that they intend to simply sit on the IP and never do anything with it.
“We cancelled it because the fans didn’t show enough interest or act like they wanted it badly enough!”
🤦
titan fall 2. never actually got to appreciate it because by the time i found it the server matching was completely broken. all they need to do is allow private servers or fix the matching system and the game would be playable. seems like plenty of people want to play it. I don't know why they decided let the game die instead. makes no damn sense.
It’s playable now on vanilla servers, but the North Star client also exists, pilot.
interesting if true
Legacy of Kain: Dead Sun
I'm sure it was cancelled for a good reason, but man I really want more Legacy of Kain/Soul Reaver lore!
Star Wars Battlefront III
Bound to Light https://store.steampowered.com/app/711760/Bound_To_Light/ I really liked the idea, but as the studio hade to shut down a few Yeats ago I guess it wont happen
Star Wars Battlefront 3, 1313 Titanfall 3
Titanfall was so goddamn fun. Hey, do you like the combat in CoD: Modern Warfare 2? Do you also want to call in a giant mech suit once in a while? Well buckle up, Buttercup, cause I’ve got a game for you!
Beyond Good and Evil 2.
I’m not even mad that we didn’t get the multiplanetary open world new-tech live-experience cooperative second coming. I’m mad we didn’t even get a simple, short singleplayer experience living off of the charm of the first one.
BGE2 was not cancelled though, it's still in active development
Mother 64
Mother 3 is my favorite game, but I'm still bummed this timeline didn't get a fun quirky N64 graphics Mother game. Would have been interesting to see which style elements came through in 3D, which didn't, and what new spins on things would have added to the series
I'm still waiting for the mother 3 official localization
it'll be out just in time for us to play it in the retirement home lol
vampire the masquerade bloodlines. the classic one had a bumpy release but patches and community work made it fun.
the supposed to be new one got cancelled. i forgot. budget reasons maybe.
It's been a long time, but it's supposed to be coming out this year.
I loved Descent from back in the 90s...
The original team remade it as a VR game with a new name in roughly 2017. I played a demo of it at PAX and felt like it was 1996 all over again.
It was re-released on Steam as "Overload".
Nosgoth. An asymmetrical, team based shooter where you played as either vampires or vampire hunters. The vampires had more health and mobility but were only melee while the hunters had range and utility. It was buggy and imbalanced and I loved it and clocked like 500 hours before they shut it down.
Was a ton of fun, I played it daily til it shutdown, I love when multiplayer games have fun traversal mechanics, tho it leads to many quitting if they do terrible early on.
Exactly what I was here to write, had so much fun with that
StarCraft Ghost
ONI 2
Oni was so much fun: I would love to see how it feels now, but my nostalgia for it is off the charts. Martial art combos, plus sci fi guns: there's just nothing else like it out there, which is a bummer.
Or the C&C3 Renegade game
Woah, what? They were going to make a Renegade-style game with C&C3? That would have been so much fun!
Star Wars galaxies
Kerbal Space Program. Loved KSP1, but still salty about spending $60 on the pre release of KSP2 thinking it would help fund development. Never again. Learned my lesson for sure. Both versions are basically dead now. It was a fun ride while it lasted.
Have to see what happens with Kitten Space Agency.
I'm hopeful but apprehensive for KSA.
The new owners recently shut down the old website and won't accept my proof of purchase so I don't even own the first game anymore :(
Time to sail the high seas. When they leave no other option...🏴☠️
I'm still kinda salty that my computer would crash every time I tried landing something bigger than a probe on Eve.
Orcs Must Die Unchained. Pretty good game overall, was trying to be a league of legends type of game with 3D TD, it didn't get a player base going, so they swapped it over to a solo game, the maps were fun as hell and picking through 10+ characters was fun, it was really dynamic and the endless mode was very fun to push. They ended all support, it's offline. Sucks. OMD 3 came out, it's not even a quarter the game. Theirs 4 different player characters, they are all humans. All enemies are orcs or other bad guy type of mobs, unchained had human enemies and a few other variations, there's no where near the number of maps and most maps play in a really predictable way. In Unchained there were maps you needed to build a kill box, sell it, move it, all to get one wave killed, at least on the first few waves, anyway. It almost scratches the itch, but not well. I'm honestly perplexed on why they didn't just include the characters and maps from unchained.
Anyway. It's a very ''there are dozens of us!'' Game. So. I don't expect much here.
Mostly every Rare game.
I know 3/4 of these sort of got released, but the mode-7 style Banjo-Pilot is fundamentally not interesting to me, Star Fox Adventures is fine but was a lot more ambitious when it was on weaker hardware, and while Twelve Tales looked generic, Conker's Bad Fur Day is the least funny thing to ever attempt humor.
I didn't forget Donkey Kong: Coconut Crackers, I just don't mind missing out on that.
I really wish we had gotten a full release of Dinosaur Planet. Starfox Adventures is still pretty good, but it definitely lost a lot of unique ideas with the change. Not to mention, it probably affected Nintendo's perception of Starfox as a whole. Mucked up a cool game and damaged a franchise with that one. And I say this as a fan of Adventures.
I wish StarCraft: Nova had happened
Also Starcraft: Ghost
Oh shit, that was the name. The character was Nova
True Fantasy Live Online. It sounded amazing.
The StarCraft FPS.
I'm still mad about it.
Really loved Battlefield Heroes as a kid. I’d love to play it again
Damn... Battlefield Heroes... I used to play this game for hours when I was a kid, the game is not without flaws, but damn.
I’d love to play it again
A few years ago, when I last checked, there were fan servers or something like that.
I saw those two when I just searched for them. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2504090/Heroes_of_Valor/ might be easier to deal with though.