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.
Cries in Star Wars: Battlefront 3
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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.
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.
Good pick! I was so bummed when I heard that was cancelled.
PT. Still have it saved on my PS4 I think.
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?
Wasn’t there also a cancelled Darth Maul project?
Oh damn, I forgot about that. I think you’re right. Wasn’t it supposed to be a more mature take on Star Wars?
It’s been a while but I think so. No idea what the genre was supposed to be, a soulslike maybe or something combat/combo based like DMC?
Unreal Tournament series
UE4 movement was buttery smooth
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.
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’m a battle network fan and never played Legends but I feel for you.
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!”
🤦
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!
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.
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
That’s the thing though; it has most definitely entered Duke Nukem Forever / No Man’s Sky levels of development hell wherein the result will never be satisfying. The best we can hope for is a Halo Infinite result where it’s “kinda fun” but inevitably comes nowhere near the hype.
Yeah, you’re probably right on that
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. :)
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
That game was very cool, had a good time even though i was rubish at it
Anthem was a really great idea for a game that had an absolutely terrible execution.
What disappointed you most?
It’s been a minute, but off the top of my head:
- The story was ass.
- Not enough content for a “live service” game.
- Enemy levels scaled heavily with your gear level, so better gear didn’t make you feel any more powerful.
- The stats system for the gear was trash. Like, equipping one piece of high level gear and then keeping your starting gear for everything else was legitimately better than trying to get BiS for all of your gear.
- Gear had randomly generated buffs, and those might buff other gear. But sometimes it would you would get a drop for something your class could equip (not every class could use every weapon, for example) but with buffs to a weapon your class couldn’t use.
- For a game that was essentially “be Iron Man” they included an overheat mechanic so you couldn’t just fly wherever you wanted.
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.
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.
Guns of Icarus, my beloved.
Also, Global Agenda.