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Scalebound. That open-world Star Wars game. SimsVille
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
Wildstar
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. :-/
I went back and played The Dungeon about 15 years ago and I just about cried because it was so fucking bad by modern standards lol
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.
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.
Limit Theory. Quite the ambitious space simulator being developed by one dude. I recall seeing their dev log videos on youtube.
Star Wars 1313 and Battlefront 3.
And for books it’s the unfinished Republic/Imperial Commando series by Karen Traviss
Thank you!
Thank you!
Uhh you’re welcome?
What are you thanking for?
Probably a fucking bot or lost lemming replying on the wrong thread
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 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 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 strategies/approaches 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.
PT. Still have it saved on my PS4 I think.
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.
According to my friends who worked at Blizzard at the time, there’s a reason Ghost was cancelled. Apparently it wasn’t very good, unfortunately.
C&C Renegade still released. It wasn’t very good, either. 🤷🏻♂️
I don’t know. I enjoyed it. 🤷🏻♀️
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.
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?
