Scalebound. That open-world Star Wars game. SimsVille
Thank you!
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
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.
Wildstar
Dota Underlords
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.
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.
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.
PT. Still have it saved on my PS4 I think.
Star Wars 1313 and Battlefront 3.
And for books it's the unfinished Republic/Imperial Commando series by Karen Traviss
Limit Theory. Quite the ambitious space simulator being developed by one dude. I recall seeing their dev log videos on youtube.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Original Lawn Darts. Life is no fun without a bit of risk.
Silent Hills
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.
K.O.L.M.
Star Wars Battlefront III
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!
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.
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.
Prey 2 : https://youtu.be/BPkHZfjK5z4
Some friends and I were so hooked on the gameplay demo (we're big fans of the Mass Effect trilogy), then it was cancelled and replaced by Prey, which was very different (more horror centric and less space opera)
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.
Lawbreakers was my favorite, high skill floor and ceiling games are my favorite. I wish ppl gave it a chance past its artstyle but matchmaking was rouh with barely anyone and the best players were insanely raw because of that high skill ceiling, high floor made it hard to catch up or feel good in early games I think.
Mass Effect Andromeda. I absolutely love the game and have played through it multiple times, wishing for DLC. for an expansion of this wonderful universe that I love to explore.
sucks really bad that it will never come back 😔
The StarCraft FPS.
I'm still mad about it.
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
Fur me, it would be Beyond Good and Evil. I really wanted to see where the story went next
Ghost in the Shell - Stand Alone Complex First Assault
All due to capitalism ruining things as usual...
Silent Hills, it would have been interesting to see what Kojima and Guillermo del Toro would have created... but unfortunately.
Also: Starcraft Ghost, the original Fallout 3, Fez 2, Mother 3 on N64, Legacy of Kain the sixth game (not Dead Sun/Nosgoth), the original Duke Nukem Forever, and probably a bunch of others that I can't remember right now.
There's a lot of games being mentioned here that had a full run. Let's talk about an actually cancelled game - SkySaga: Infinite Isles. Block game in the vein of Portal Knights that was extremely inspired.
The gameplay loop consisted of using "Keys" on a portal at your home island that would randomly generate a floating island with various objectives on it and a boss, all of which was harvestable for materials and blocks to build with back on your home island. There was a social hub city island everyone could access that alowed access to PvP and a few types of guilds with various combat, gathering, and exploration quests. Crafting was pretty good, allowing you to use metals with various properties to mix and match your own gear - some metals did more damage or applied an elemental effect, some had quicker swing speed, some were durable as armor and others not so much but they increased movespeed or jump height.
The game had about a dozen beta access phases then dropped off the face of the earth, with the server (and how it worked) lost forever. Completely lost to time, cancelled before it could release proper. No other block game has come close to the kind of structural appeal it had for me, and I think about it frequently. There's a few reverse engineering projects in the works but they are stagnant.
I love a lot of the games in this thread but they had an actual release and real servers, you could play them for multiple years. Some others promised a bit more than they delivered, and were cut a bit short by EA or other trash publishers. SkySaga was killed before launch and placed in an opaque prison, truly cancelled.
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.
Chromehounds.
64dd, specifically earthbound 64
Concord
Haha, just kidding.
If we're talking straight up cancelled, then I will forever be sad that Scalebound was cancelled.
I'm sure it wasn't going to be as great as I was hoping anyways, but damn the concept looked so cool, and when I saw a dude with headphones jamming out to music fighting with his dragon buddy I was like "I want to be that!" Like it felt like that game was being made especially for me and my interests, and then it got cancelled 😔
Blacklight Retribution was pretty great. I played quite early in its lifespan, during an event which gave me a special nameplate - nothing more than a participation trophy, and at the time, loads of people used it.
Signed in a few years later to.play a few rounds, and some guy begged me to let them use my account because of that now-rare nameplate.
(I also had an extremely cool helmet and some seriously powerful guns I got for free in that game's equivalent of a lootbox)
"The Last Night" looked very interesting, but i dont even know if its been cancelled, just havent heard anything from it in years
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.
Babylon 5: Into the Fire. Killed just months before release after a corporate restructure. The closest we got was some Freespace mods.
Revenant Hill, by one of the Night in the Woods developers. Cancelled due to health problems.
Hellraid! God damnit, I was so ready for a first pirson action dungeon crawler in the style of Dying Light 😥
Technically it was never released, but I was invited to a closed alpha (or beta?) for a game called Chroma, by Harmonix, the OG Guitar Hero people. It was a lot of fun and I'm still sad that it was canceled...
Don't know if it was ever announced to be in development and existed in any form outside of being told there was going be 3 games, but would absolutely love to have seen what the 3rd Sonic book game would have been like. I still need to play the Black Knight game, but would absolutely hop on board the 3rd if it existed.
That, and would absolutely LOVE if Sega uncanceled the Riders series. Best racing game series to ever exists in my opinion. Too bad the 3rd game sucked so hard it caused the beautiful rose that is the Riders series to wither away.
Honestly, I was really looking forward to EverQuest Next. The idea sounded promising before it was cancelled.
True Fantasy Live Online. It sounded amazing.
Chrono Break
Steambot Chronicles 2 and Maximo 3. I can’t believe they never finished the Maximo story. It’s such a good hack and slash collectathon of the PS2 era.
LittleBigPlanet, can't wait for Restitched. At least private servers exist and I can emulate LBP2 on my PC
Marvel Heroes. Hopefully the private servers being worked on will be in a playable state someday.
Probably the Hardsuit Labs version of Bloodlines 2. Playing as a thin-blood and getting to diablerie would have been really fun.
Infinite Crisis. This was a MOBA based on DC comics. It’s the game that got me into the genre and had some very cool alternate takes on some of the DC characters. Sadly it had a lot of balance problems and other issues causing it to close down after only 6 months.
Breach. An asymmetric game of 5 v 1 with the 5 heroes working through a dungeon crawl while the 1 enemy sets traps or controls random AI characters.
i dont understand why nobody has mentioned nosgoth yet. i regularly think about and miss this game so much!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-UsM9qaZ5A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2r8rDBVCN1A
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kum80OStNZY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_betnUPq-uQ
Terra Battle 1, created by the OG final fantasy devs. Best Uematsu soundtrack of that decade and one of the best mobile gachas ever. RIP
This is before my time but I remember reading about a canceled movie tie-in game for Star Trek: First Contact.
Hyper Scape, probably my favorite battle royale. When you died, you could still run around as a ghost and be revived at a dead enemy. It was much more engaging than just sitting there spectating your teammates. Also the loot was a lot more simplified, so you didn’t have to spend time managing inventory or worrying about getting the right ammo type
Reset, a puzzle sci-fi game some little Finnish studio was working on.
TimeSplitters 4. If they'd have stopped baiting us with teaser art and promises of someone new buying the bones of Free Radical every few years then it wouldn't hurt so much.
I wish we could have gotten R6:Patriots.
I really miss Megalith. It was a VR MOBA. The small team had to drop the project to work on contracts that made money.
Back in the day I played a browser game called "Inselkampf". That was way before anybody did the whole monetization and one of the earlier browser games. Totally free, no micropayments. It was awesome: You had a level playground. People formed alliances on their own without the game having such a feature. We hang out in IRC channels. We plotted wars, starting in the middle of the night in order to surprise the other alliances. We had diplomats talking to other alliances. People started alt accounts and snuck into the enemy alliances in order to spy on them. Some rose to top ranks, leading to epic betrayals and epic wars.
Everything from that is gone. The game is long offline. The players dispersed, the IRC channels abandoned, everything never to be repeated
Donkey Kong Racing. Oh what could have been.
So I have three different typ of games from the top of my head.
A game I know was a thing that got cancelled. Life by You I am so pissed it got caned. I was looking forward to it so so much.
Then a game I don't really know if it actually was a thing, I heard about it after it was cancelled, but I can't really find much about it. Is The Sinister Six it was apparently a game about the Spider-man super villain group of the same name, as they appertaining in Insomniac's spider man games. All I really remember is that you were supposed to play as the villains and it sounded good, I however only heard about it after it was caned so I really don't know much more about it.
And then there is this game that was never a thing, but an April fools joke in 2015. There would be a cross over game between The Sims and GTA. I got so excited about it, it still sounds like it could have been awesome.
Those are some different typs of cancelled games that I really miss.
The Last of Us Factions 2, even though it never came out
F.E.A.R. Online
I vaguely remember a game where the focus was creating stuff socially on the ps3, had a very unique artstyle dont think it ever made the full release
I was ecstatic when Phantom Dust was getting a sequel and then I was mildly happy that it was at least coming to PC. I want more.
There was this awesome cooperative programming game called Leap Day from SpryFox. You would login and set up your automated citizens, collecting items, combining items, items with people in neighboring sections to defeat a boss in the middle, but the boss could only be completed by using items from your neighbors. Over time you would gain money for items you brought back to your base and every minute the day on it would resent and everyone go out and collect the same items again. You would have to build and rebuild your area to make enough factories to develop what you needed. I don’t think I’m it justice. I miss it all the time.
Super Mecha Champions on PC.
Yeah, it was a Gacha Battle Royale mobile port. But it was so fun to play. The community was fantastic, except the like 3 cheaters on perpetual ban cycle.
I loved the character design, and the mecha design. The graphics could age really well being cel-shaded/anime styled. And it was unique in its category, no other BR game lets you play as a pilot and call in a mecha, or battle a mecha as a pilot, or vice versa. And the best part was that the F2P economy was pretty good. Paid players got new characters and mecha a week or two weeks before paid players that haven't been playing the game. F2P Barnacle players could use currency earned in-game for characters and mecha and it would take maybe a week or so to get the amount needed. You didn't even have to win, you just had to play. It was great. The cosmetics were well designed too, mostly. Except that one Ventorus skin that made the extra hands a little too big and cover more of the screen than normal.
Sadly, the servers were shut down by NetEase, probably to make more server space for Marvel Rivals.
