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What canceled games disappointed you most?


Fabulously Olivier
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We all have stories of games that we looked forward to, but were not meant to be. Sometimes it's from a favorite franchise, and sometimes it's something entirely new and exciting. Share yours here.

 

I'll start with an odd one. Chroma was a first person shooter / rhythm game developed by Harmonix. A unique combination never before or since seen in gaming. It combined an incredibly catchy trance/dubstep soundtrack with a Tron-like aesthetic. The player would have to synchronize their actions to the beat of the ingame soundtrack, the metronome, or class-based rhythm mechanics for maximum effect. One class wielded twin pistols that sounded like drum beats and were fired by a GH style rhythym board, for example. It was this fascinating oddity that I enjoyed my time playing in alpha, but this loud game was doomed to die a silent death. 

Edited by Etheus
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Fortress.

It was a sequel to Final Fantasy XII, centered around Basch as he wanders Ivalica after the events of that game. It was going to be a third-person action RPG, and it sounded like it would have mixed a lot of elements from previous Ivalice titles, with the core of it sounding similar to a real time Vagrant Story, where placement in combat was key.

It was canceled around 2011, right as this kind of game was taking off(Dark Souls, Dragon's Dogma, and the Witcher 2 all came out around this time).

It was also the last big project we've heard about period in the Ivalice universe.

Edited by Slumber
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3 minutes ago, Slumber said:

Fortress.

It was a sequel to Final Fantasy XII, centered around Basch as he wanders Ivalica after the events of that game. It was going to be a third-person action RPG, and it sounded like it would have mixed a lot of elements from previous Ivalice titles, with the core of it sounding similar to a real time Vagrant Story, where placement in combat was key.

It was canceled around 2011, right as this kind of game was taking off(Dark Souls, Dragon's Dogma, and the Witcher 2 all came out around this time).

It was also the last big project we've heard about period in the Ivalice universe.

Seconded. It looks like a FF Dark Souls

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9 minutes ago, Slumber said:

Fortress.

It was a sequel to Final Fantasy XII, centered around Basch as he wanders Ivalica after the events of that game. It was going to be a third-person action RPG, and it sounded like it would have mixed a lot of elements from previous Ivalice titles, with the core of it sounding similar to a real time Vagrant Story, where placement in combat was key.

It was canceled around 2011, right as this kind of game was taking off(Dark Souls, Dragon's Dogma, and the Witcher 2 all came out around this time).

It was also the last big project we've heard about period in the Ivalice universe.

I suspect that we'll see a lot of Square Enix in this thread, as they love announcing games more than they like finishing them.

Edited by Etheus
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1 minute ago, Etheus said:

I suspect that we'll see a lot of SquareEnix on this list, as they love announcing games more than they like finishing them.

Probably.

I mean, for Fortress at least, this happened right in the wake of FFXIII's tepid reception overseas, the growing budget of XV/XIII-Versus with nothing to show for it, and the abysmal FFXIV launch.

I could have listed the planned FFVII-IX remakes that they had planned before Spirits Within bankrupt Squaresoft and a ton of talent left and upper-management shifted, but at least we already have FFVII-IX.

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1 minute ago, Jingle Bells said:
  • The original Star Wars Battlefront 3 damn you EA.
  •  Star Wars 1313 I wanted to play Uncharted Star Wars, damn you EA.
  • Overstrike, it was too goofy in sea of realistic shooters, damn you EA.
  • Zone of the Enders 3, damn you Konami

 

Screw EA for shutting down Pandemic in general. The original SW BF1 and SW BF2 were incredible.

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Probably Timesplitters 4 at this point. Although there is various articles trying to get my hopes up recently again before they are inevitably dashed.

Also Baldur's Gate III, Fallout Van Buren, Black Isle in general.

Edited by Tryhard
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-Megaman Legends 3, I really would have liked to see that...Megaman feels incomplete enough.

-Donkey Kong Racing Game for Gamecube, the idea looked neat, just never saw the light.

-Zelda (third Oracle of Game). Really a shame, I would gladly have played a third game of those I really liked both games. 

These 3 are at least games I come up with for now. 
 

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I try to make a habit of not looking into what could have been, but that doesn't make me immune to this kind of thing.

Apparently Capcom planned a Resident Evil Outbreak File 3, but it was scrapped because online sucked and that spinoff series didn't garner many fans in its heyday.  Close to fifteen years after those games came out, and I'd still be more inclined to play some kind of remaster/remake of those games than a lot of modern RE, just as long as I get to still play as my favorite slow-ass school girl or the subway agent whose catchphrase is "my life is shit!".  I still prefer B-horror RE over the more recent attempts at telling a serious story.

Star Wars Battlefront 3 from Pandemic.  I'm with Jingle, screaming at EA from the rooftops.  About the only good thing that's come out of Battlefront lately is Disney bringing back online for the original Battlefront 2.

Metal Gear Online 2 - the online mode for Metal Gear Solid 4 - was shut down, which I'd technically count as a cancellation (sort of like when an ongoing TV series gets cancelled).  I kind of wish it wasn't.  I liked that game's roleplay community better than the pissant roleplay communities of G-Mod (stuck up assholes, a good lot of them are).

Dragon Ball Online - another online game whose service was cancelled - only because I would've liked to have seen what it was like and the origin of the two antagonists that keep showing up in DB games lately (Towa and Mira).

And basically anything that was left Japan-only in regards to the Fire Emblem franchise counts.  Though I feel like eventually every one of those games will get a remake, so honestly the only thing that'd count in the end would probably be the un-localized Fates DLC because that's obviously never coming to the west unless they pull a Disney and bring it back from the dead, like, ten years later for whatever reason.

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star wars battlefront 3 from pandemic, just looking at what they had really is what we should have gotten instead of ea.

kotor 3, yeah I know that it had barely started, but I would have loved another entry in the series.

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I could put most of the games from this, honestly. Even the ones I probably wouldn't have played:

I'll echo Star Wars 1313 and Battlefront 3. Especially frustrating since the latter pretty much only needed bug testing before it could have been in our hands.

As for non-Star Wars games, I'd have to say the Star Fox arcade game. The series as a whole could translate extremely well into the arcade format, and since it was part of the same group that made F-Zero A/GX, it meant it we could have also gotten a nice Gamecube game.

In a roundabout way, it would be interesting to see the alternative universe where Star Fox 2 was released when it was finished, if only to observe how it would have affected Star Fox 64 and any future games in the series.

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Steambot Chronicles 2 - Irem basically liquidated it's video game division after losing a lot of its infrastructure in an earthquake.. a real shame because, combining the PS2 game and the PSP game's strengths (Freedom/Sidequests from PS2) and (not lagging constantly and decent combat from PSP) could have made for a really great and unique game. It's especially hurtful because the game seemed to have been really close to release as well.

I guess I should mention several of Mike Hommel's canceled games, although I wasn't quite as devastated as most. The Hellgate: Longdon parody of course would have been the largest of them, but in hindsight he had started development with a very archaic engine, so maybe it's for the best that he moved on.

Creatures 4 - Creatures 1 is one of the best games that people have started to forget about - I think I once saw the series on a list of games with over 10million in lifetime sales, which is kind of shocking considering how obscure it is now. Basically, Creatures was about artificial life, but on a much more ambitious scale than what came before and since. (eg object>verb brain chemistry and body physiolgy encompassing about 14 chemicals). It is true that C2 and C3 need patches to be fully enjoyed today (being too lethal and not lethal enough compared to C1) However. C4 never materilaized, and currently the actual creatures rights are basically dead, while the original developer has  moved on to A-life simulations that are... a little too much simulation..  The real power of creatures 1-3 came from a very happy coincednce in its timing - Steve Grands A-life simulation, community input from people with surprisingly coding knowhow, and the happy accident of the "life as computer file / injector as kit window" sub-themeing - it allowed creatures to change in ways that a thing seen as a "real setting" would have resisted and I think it kept the game from becoming too much of an academic simulation by making use of  some "pet game" genre conventions.

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Dawngate by Waystone Games, published by EA. It was an ambitious free to play MOBA with a custom 2-lane map, capture points that feed your team passive gold, unique role-based gold earning "roles" that were later ripped off wholesale by League of Legends (in the form of several season 3 items), and a flexible but intuitive item system in which all stats were useful to all characters.

Dawngate was the best MOBA ever made, and EA shut it down before or very shortly after launch. It deserved better. 

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Xenogears Episodes 1 through 4 and Xenogears Episodes 6: So you may have heard of Xenogears and while that game is one of my absolute favorites (it has the best story in any JRPG imo), the game itself was just Episode 5 of a six-part series. However, Square Enix (then Squaresoft) basically killed the game. During development, Square took cut Xenogears' budget so that half of it could go into Final Fantasy 8 and this resulted in the second disc being rushed. The story was still told but not in the way Tetsuya Takahashi intended. Regardless, the game released and sold well and was positively received. So that he could continue telling the greater story, Takahashi wanted to do a sequel (which i strongly believe was Episode 6).......and Square no. Why? Because they wanted to focus efforts on Final Fantasy. So Xenogears, a long with most Square IPs during the PS1 era, just kind went to purgatory. Because of this, Takahashi and his team left Square and founded Monolith Soft.

Despite all that, Xenogears Perfect Works was released, which contained lots of details on the story of Episodes 1 through 4. Nothing on Episode 6 though, other than it was supposed to be the finale. I lie awake at night sometimes wondering what exactly Episode 6 was supposed to be, given that Episode 5 ended pretty naturally.

Xenosaga Episodes 4 through 6: So this one's kinda weird because Episode 4 through 6 DID get made, they all just got compressed into Episode 3. The reason behind this was because Episode 2 sold like shit and Namco forced Monolith Soft to shorten the saga. It's Namco's fault, really (though yes, sales were a factor). They removed Takahashi from the project in Episode 2 due to Episode 1's not-so-stellar sales, thinking the new director would be better but it backfired. Takahashi actually had to remake Episode 2 but that DS remake was only released in Japan. It was the second time that Takahashi was unable to tell the story the way he wanted and his whole team just kinda lost a lot of self-esteem. It wasn't until Nintendo bought Monolith Soft and Xenoblade Chronicles was made that they got it back.

I can't be too upset at the cancellation of these games because we did get Xenoblade out of it and Monolith Soft is thriving now (and if Takahashi wanted to do another go at his six-part sci-fi epic, he could actually do it now) but it still leaves me this feeling of "what could it have been if Xenogears and Xenosaga had worked". 

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1 minute ago, Armagon said:

I lie awake at night sometimes wondering what exactly Episode 6 was supposed to be, given that Episode 5 ended pretty naturally.

Being another Xenogears megafan, Xenogears is such a totally complete(I mean as far as the narrative is concerned. Obviously the gameplay side of things got rushed to high hell) package that I'm not too torn up over not getting an Episode 6. Obviously, I'm very curious as to what it would be, but everything needed to understand Xenogears and its world is largely there already, and it's I'm fine if it goes down as a satisfying one-off JRPG.

Obviously I wouldn't complain about more Xenogears, but it doesn't make me ponder the meaning of life that I'm not getting it.

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2 hours ago, Hawkwing said:

I'll echo Star Wars 1313 and Battlefront 3. Especially frustrating since the latter pretty much only needed bug testing before it could have been in our hands.

part that sucks most is that they even asked EA or disney to release it (basically asking them to get it to the consumer, they could give it out for free or sell it, the developer didn't care, they just didn't want it all to go to waste), but they still said no, now that battlefront ea is here for all to see, I can understand why, they wanted their own battlefront so they wouldn't be held to any standards.

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