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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.
I wish StarCraft: Nova had happened
Also Starcraft: Ghost
Oh shit, that was the name. The character was Nova
I may be stretching the definition of cancelled a bit because we don’t know if it was ever in development to begin with, but I will forever have a chip on my shoulder about Puyo Puyo 30th Anniversary.
The three best games in the series were Puyo Puyo 15th Anniversary (2006), Puyo Puyo 20th Anniversary (2011), and Puyo Puyo Chronicle (2016, this game is 25th in all but name). None of these games were released outside of Japan, but after Puyo Puyo Tetris’s Switch port got localized in 2017 and sold really well, fans had high hopes that the pattern would continue and the next one of these would get localized too.
The pattern did not continue. Instead, Sega responded to PPT selling well by making Puyo Puyo Tetris 2. It’s literally the exact same as the first game, only much buggier. It’s a terrible game and I hate it.
To this day, we still have not gotten a proper mainline game. In fact, Sega just announced they’re rereleasing Puyo Puyo Tetris 2S as a Switch 2 launch title. This is all the series will ever be from now on.
The three best games in the series were Puyo Puyo 15th Anniversary (2006), Puyo Puyo 20th Anniversary (2011), and Puyo Puyo Chronicle (2016, this game is 25th in all but name). None of these games were released outside of Japan
kagis
https://puyonexus.com/wiki/Puyo_Puyo_Chronicle
After being defeated, Satan joins the party and promises that the way back home lies at the top of the Color Tower, and all Arle would need to do now is scale it to return home.
Hmm.
I think “Satan as a playable character” might be one of those cultural-issue things that would come up when considering localization.
Mostly every Rare game.
- Diddy Kong Pilot (the voxel version)
- Dinosaur Planet
- Donkey Kong Racing
- Twelve Tales: Conker 64
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.
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
PT. Still have it saved on my PS4 I think.
True Fantasy Live Online looked like it would have been amazing.
I’d like to play around with whatever alpha build they made for the original concept of Team Fortress 2.
I love the one that came out (it’s probably my most played game of all time), but those first few screenshots before retooling were captivating when we’d already been waiting so long for the release.
I remember those screenshots in the mags back in the day. Yes, I want to play that version, too - and the tank and heli looked so cool back then!
There was a demo reel of the spy as well that was incredible. I played untold hours of tfc. It is likely what made me a intellimouse fan (thumb buttons for both grenade types?! It was the future).
I truly miss conc grenades. There has never been a more versatile weapon in a game.
For me it’s Defiance but good thing some studio got rights to game and they going to bring back server soon.
I think that was the only full price I’ve bought digitally, because my friend and I wanted to game share and play together.
MMO shooter seems like an undeserved concept. Buy I guess you have the scope of Defiance with the polish of an MMO. Or you have the scope of Destiny and the polish of a normal shooter.
I have even more funny story I bought Defiance in PS3 then 2 weeks later game went F2P 🤣
Loadout. It was a casual PvP (and later PvE) game where you can make your own weapons with wacky combos. It was a bit pay-to-win, but I thought it was very fun. The game crashed and burned because the studio wasn’t sure what they wanted to do with it and kept ignoring fans.
I think the PvE spinoff never came out of beta. I was looking forward to it.
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!
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.
I’m still kinda salty that my computer would crash every time I tried landing something bigger than a probe on Eve.
Have to see what happens with Kitten Space Agency.
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…🏴☠️
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 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.
That sounds amazing to have been a part of
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.”
Babylon 5: Into the Fire. Killed just months before release after a corporate restructure. The closest we got was some Freespace mods.
The Black Isle version of Fallout 3.
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.
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.
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 played Arcanum for the first time this year. There are a lot of cool things in it, but it really doesn’t hold up all that well.
What was your experience like? Interesting to hear from someone who tried it now as opposed to when it was released. I will add that it’s not merely a matter of nostalgia, but you also have a better grasp of the core gameplay and the general storyline beats if you’ve played it several times since release.
Did you get the HD patch?
I played the Multiverse Edition which had a bunch of patches and fixes integrated. Including HD I believe.
I think the world building is pretty good, at least parts of it. There is some disappointingly boilerplate Tolkienesque fantasy in there, but the conflict between magic and technology is well realised and interesting and feels grounded in the world. The steampunk aesthetic is cool and I like the Victorian racism angle they’re doing with half orcs and ogres. I liked the newspapers and there are some interesting quests, like the half ogre conspiracy. I thought the peace negotiation was going to end up being absolutely amazing but in the end it is just an anticlimactic stat check.
The combat is absolutely atrocious in every possible way, from balance to animations and whether you play turn based or real time doesn’t really matter, both are horrible. It’s quite possibly the worst AI I’ve ever seen and every fight is just every creature mashing into eachother until one dies. I don’t think anyone or anything has special abilities or different AI behaviour. You can’t use Mage followers because they don’t use their magic, opting instead to charge into melee with their fists or staves.
The tech skills are the most interesting and unique aspect of the game, but involves a horrendous amount of parts collecting, crafting, inventory management and over-encumberance for very little rewards.
The companions feel extremely bare bones by modern standards and it’s extremely disappointing that none of them even get ending slides. I liked Virgil but not even he got any sort of closure at the end.
The main story was okay, it had some twists and funny moments like with Nasrudin. The whole “life was a mistake” angle by the BBEG felt a little tired to me, but maybe if playing Arcanum was the first time I came across that concept it would have blown me away.
The actual writing itself is not bad in terms of the prose and dialogue etc and the game has some funny moments.
The vast freedom you get with character building is probably the best part. I like how varied you can make your characters, although I don’t know that all builds are viable. Props for following the example of Fallout 1 and 2 and including specific “dumb dialogue”, even though I didn’t go for that personally. Having to balance tech and magic with your character build is a fun concept.
Overall I understand why it has its cult following and I’m glad to have played it, but it’s hard to recommend it to people unless they have an extremely high retro game/clunk tolerance.
Thanks for the write up.
I mostly agree. The combat is indeed terrible with both real-time and turn based. Turn based just feels off and pure real time is not viable. I play with real-time with pause.
I had the misfortune of playing as a technologist on my first playthrough in the early 2000s. It was really rough. Over time you can figure out startegies/approach to make it easier, but I would argue many of them almost break the game.
I agree you need a measure of tolerance for retro gameplay/jankyness and honestly combat was subpar even for its time (Fallout 1/2 combat had many issues by modern standards, but it was definitely much more refined than in Arcanum).
To be fair to Arcanum in terms of companions Baldur’s Gate 2 was really the watershed moment in terms of how companions were treated in RPGs. Arcanum released less than a year after it and so while development timelines were shorter back then I doubt they had much time to adjust and get influenced by BG2. Fallout 1&2 doesn’t have it much better in terms of fleshed out companions.
(Fallout 1/2 combat had many issues by modern standards, but it was definitely much more refined than in Arcanum).
I would definitely recommend FO 1&2 easier than Arcanum and with fewer caveats. Maybe that’s just because I think they are fundamentally better and more important games than Arcanum though and so they are more worth suffering through some jank for. They still have a fiendishly retro interface that is quite clunky and the combat is not great, especially without mods. There is some really questionable encounter design in there and they both suffer from tremendous RNG heavy potential misery and loads and loads of reloads. Not least with random encounters.
Also the first few hours of Fallout 2 are absolutely miserable. It’s still one of my favourite games of all time though.
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.
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?
They are on my “to play” list. :)
Good pick! I was so bummed when I heard that was cancelled.
