What's a cancelled game you really miss?

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.

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?
- They are on my "to play" list. :)
- 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.
Good pick! I was so bummed when I heard that was cancelled.
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 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.

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. 🤷🏻‍♂️
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?

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 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."
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.

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.
- Legends was such a weird series. It felt like a Mega Man take on something like Ocarina of Time.
I haven't bought a capcom game since this
- To be fair, they haven't managed to put out a whole hell of a lot that's actually compelling in the intervening years that weren't rereleases. "Hey guys, DAE remember Resident Evil 4? The good one? We just re-re-re-released it. And some old Megaman games you already have. Full price!"
I didn't even know about it until I read this comment, but now I'm one of the salty.
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!”
🤦

Unreal Tournament series

UE4 movement was buttery smooth

I really am dissapointed in current gaming, thought wed have a game in each genre that supported custom content, like ue would let ppl make their own maps/weapons, etc. everquest landmark for mmo worlds, etc.
- Garry's mod/source games is about the closest we have to that. Or i guess Roblox too...?
- maybe with desktop tools being so fleshed out well see better in game tools for creation, tho now I use blender and want more games to support mods and custom content.

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.

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!

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.

Yeah I used to be super addicted to Overwatch 1, but I bailed as soon as 2 came out. I can honestly say I've never played it since.
I liked 6v6, they should've made more tanks and healers.
I didn't like role queue, sure it's a strong team buildup but I don't think it should've been forced. I really liked being able to flex between classes depending on what was needed. Sometimes five DPS and a healer will break through a point. Being a tank or healer with bad DPS makes an already limited role even worse.
Ow2 seems like they just trashed my game ($60aud) and added MTX.
I can't get into marvel rivals, the time to kill seems too low, Overwatch was a bit more lethal.
- Agreed. Role queue was dumb. I liked having the ability to look at how things have been going and say 'They're doing X. I'll swap to this character and screw up their plans.' The thing I loved most about OW was that it wasn't locked into the left click first competition. Their Widow is causing trouble? Lucio>wall climb>drop in>boop them out of their safety bubble and get them shredded. Distract them behind a shield to the left so someone on the right can sneak up on them. Or go Sombra and do an invis run/tele to magdump into their head at point blank. Or go monkey and pig meatwall to get close enough to ruin her day. Whatever. Just something with more intelligence than left-click and die repeatedly.
  I miss Mayhem too. People complained that it took too long to die/kill but that was what was amazing about it. How many games can you say have ever felt like you were in an epic fight where every thrust, parry, twist, duck, and swing mattered? Where you don't win by the luck of a single shot but have to tactically manipulate enemy attention so you can change the angle of attack so it favors your healer over their Junkrat? Battles won or lost by the timing and precision placement of a Zarya hole catching the targets thrown by a Lucio boop to hold them just off the payload just long enough to get to the next checkpoint?
  Man, I miss that game.
I was on the same boat as you forever. I came back to ow2 late last year. I'll say this. OW feels better than it ever has. Very balanced and very fair, while maintaining that very chaotic and energized feeling. They added tiered perks which really break up the monotony of the game, and also brought back loot boxes.
It feels like they realized the game became stagnant, and they're doing as much as they can to bring it back to peak, and past that.
They also are bringing back 'classic overwatch", and I'll say this... After you play classic and go back to regular you can feel the difference. The only thing I miss is 6v6 but it seems like that's coming back soon too
- 6v6 is already back, in open queue format
Nah, it's pretty good now. Feels better than OW1 was, personally.
- Marvel Rivals is better
I was there gandalf, I hated when they changed the game and balancing around the pro mode, only for their e-sports presence to implode anyway.
Play Marvel Rivals now while it's still fun. It's free.
It plays just like 2016 Overwatch did, because it was made by some of the original OW devs. The same ones who left because they were tired of all the fun metas being made boring to please the hardcore players who have no life outside of video games. That isn't an issue with Rivals yet. Enjoy it while you still can.

That game came out. I still miss it though, but it isn't a cancelled game.
Still keep hoping for a private server. That game ruined other mmos for me.
- If an online only game comes out and is shut down sooner than the developer intended, it's accurate to say it's been cancelled.
- wildstar came out??
I keep hoping Wildstar gets the City of Heroes like revival, just hoping so so much!
Miss the world of wildstar the most - its was a really creative theme park
I came looking for this comment, glad I'm not alone 🫶

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
Could also be someone doing market research/looking for ideas

Star wars 1313 was THE game I was waiting for. Got very sad when it got cancelled.

Also all of 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.

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.

Have to see what happens with Kitten Space Agency.
- I'm hopeful but apprehensive for KSA.
I'm still kinda salty that my computer would crash every time I tried landing something bigger than a probe on Eve.
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...🏴‍☠️

vampire the masquerade bloodlines. the classic one had a bumpy release but patches and community work made it fun.

the supposed to be new one got cancelled. i forgot. budget reasons maybe.

It's been a long time, but it's supposed to be coming out this year.
- Thanks for this, I was confused cause I thought it was still being released.
- oh my god it's going to be a disaster
  can't wait
- ohhh, good to know they didn't stop development!
  i had thought the project got shelved from that change in dev teams.

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.

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.
It was re-released on Steam as "Overload".

I wish StarCraft: Nova had happened

Also Starcraft: Ghost
- Oh shit, that was the name. The character was Nova

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.

Mother 64
Mother 3 is my favorite game, but I'm still bummed this timeline didn't get a fun quirky N64 graphics Mother game. Would have been interesting to see which style elements came through in 3D, which didn't, and what new spins on things would have added to the series

I'm still waiting for the mother 3 official localization
- it'll be out just in time for us to play it in the retirement home lol

Honestly, I kind of miss the idea of what "Life By You" could've been, as it had the game designer for The Sims 2 and The Sims 3 behind it. That game could've been a return to form and an actual threat to EA's watered down and extremely pricey Sims Slop. If only the team Rod Humble had assembled were able to gel their concept into a reality, with Paradox's backing, could've created something magical. Alas, it was not to be...I still imagine the potential for player driven storytelling that Life By You was offering!

This one gets me as well, Paradox had a great history of maintaining and upgrading the base game with money made from DLCs, some of which are content/feature related and others are way cheaper and are cosmetics, all of that while providing mod support. And that model would have been awesome in a sims like game.
- It would've been interesting, given that Rod Humble wanted to create a fully fleshed out base game...The DLC for Life By You likely would've been merely outfits, additional hairs made post launch, and possibly furniture/architecture style sets that could be priced at a reasonable rate. Meaning more players would've bought it and those funds would be reinvested in the game for more work to be done! The mod support would've been nice for those that want it; I often don't care for mods (Prepare Carefully, for Rimworld is one of the few that I adore). This situation is truly vexing because the Life Sim scene needs a well funded direct competitor to The Sims that isn't afraid to make a coherent and interesting Simulation game; one that is built with an engine that actual works and in-depth gameplay! The loss of Life By You will irk me for years to come.
at least there's Inzoi, from what little i've seen it seems like a good sims game
- I lost hope for that game because they use GenAI to power to create a character, clothing, furniture color/pattern customization. I won't play a game that utilizes GenAI, as base requirements are increased, GenAI is a security hazard, and it has a damaging effect on the environment. The fact that InZOI requires a constant internet connection as well due to the game's reliance on GenAI.

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.

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)

The game was basically finished too. It was never released because of a pay dispute. The beginning of the Bethda heel turn.

StarCraft Ghost

ONI 2

Or the C&C3 Renegade game
- Woah, what? They were going to make a Renegade-style game with C&C3? That would have been so much fun!
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.

EverQuest Next. That game would have been the best MMO ever, if they would've stuck with it. Unfortunately, SOE got bought out and the new owners were whackos who didn't care. It's sad because nothing has come close since then. Only GW2 and ESO have even a fraction of the concepts of EQN.

The original concept for Bioshock infinite.

man, you just pissed me off reminding me of that game

Nosgoth. An asymmetrical, team based shooter where you played as either vampires or vampire hunters. The vampires had more health and mobility but were only melee while the hunters had range and utility. It was buggy and imbalanced and I loved it and clocked like 500 hours before they shut it down.

Was a ton of fun, I played it daily til it shutdown, I love when multiplayer games have fun traversal mechanics, tho it leads to many quitting if they do terrible early on.
Exactly what I was here to write, had so much fun with that

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.

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!

Starwars Galaxies, pre CU

That's not cancelled, that's just a game that was taken down.
There's a bunch of private servers for it too. My first experience is the game was through one of them and it was pretty great.
- I completely forgot private swg servers exist. Maybe I'll try to find one and give it a try
Man I miss SWG.
- I'm hoping the new Dune Awakening game will be good. It gives me some SWG vibes.

For anyone wondering, the game is Silent Hills. It was cancelled 10 years ago and you can still find people on eBay selling PS4s with the P.T. demo loaded on it for way too much money.
That would have been quite something. I've seen P.T. being played and that was fucking scary.

City of Heroes, everything by Atari Games, the Wizardry series, the Ultima series, many others. I'm old, and I remember some of the games, and developers, we've lost.

City of Heroes
Are you aware of the legit servers running right now? I've been playing off and on for a few years now, and they keep adding stuff / fixing bugs!!
https://forums.homecomingservers.com/getting-started/
- I've heard of them, I might consider trying one someday, but the research and effort to set it up is an obstacle. Plus I don't run Windows any more, and I don't even know what Linux support for it is like.
- Your comment made me finally get around to setting up Homecoming (hooray WINE!) and I just got to the character creation screen... I haven't played since before it went to free to play what is all of this stuff? Oh well, I'm sure I'll feel like I've come home once I'm running sewers, lol.

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.

And Junji Ito! It would've been epic.

Babylon 5: Into the Fire. Killed just months before release after a corporate restructure. The closest we got was some Freespace mods.

Guns of Icarus, my beloved.

Also, Global Agenda.

Obligatory “fuck Notch” but I really liked the idea of 0x10c when it was announced.

You mean Mars Effect?
Omg, i had completly forgotten about that one! I recall being so hyped about it...

Silent Hills

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 😔

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.

I gave it a chance, and I remember the objective design being different for the sake of it to the point of being worse. They had a capture the flag mode involving charging a battery, but it could be charged to 99% at one base and then scored at the other base at the last second, making everything except the final play meaningless. It had a point control mode, but the points were only active in certain intervals, creating a real stop and go feeling that made the inactive periods as meaningless as the aforementioned first 99% of CTF.

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)

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.

Prey 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZh6vTxRDnw

Dota Underlords

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.

I was one of those people who bought Puyo Puyo Tetris as their first Puyo game, mainly to have a 1v1 Tetris on Switch. Turns out I really like Puyo though, but... "the tetris player is at a slight disadvantage". Or, as this video essay explains, the problem with PPT is that the two games are fundamentally so different it's impossible to balance them. Forcing them to play competitive online against each other, will always end up with a monoculture. In this case no one can play the first half of the Frankensteined game.
I'm sure Sega must realize that. Now they just have to care.
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.

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 😔

Hellraid! God damnit, I was so ready for a first pirson action dungeon crawler in the style of Dying Light 😥

I miss firefall. It was very innovative and enormous. The devs were trying new ideas in the alpha all the time.

I never played that game, but I was about to... I literally installed it, but didn't play it, and it got canceled and shut down very shortly after. (I was a bit out of the loop, I guess)
I still have it late in my Steam library, so I think about it a decent bit

Concord

Haha, just kidding.

For me it's Defiance but good thing some studio got rights to game and they going to bring back server soon.

Thattruly is a story I didnot see coming. I'm interested in where it will go
Never played the game, but was sad when the show got cancelled.
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 🤣

The Original Lawn Darts. Life is no fun without a bit of risk.

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.

The StarCraft FPS.

I'm still mad about it.

The Culling

Before the devs ruined it by throwing away the movement and combat system.

Wasn't canceled but they might as well have because they lost 99% of their playerbase from that one change in Beta.

Mario 35

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.

It’s playable now on vanilla servers, but the North Star client also exists, pilot.
- interesting if true

Ghost in the Shell - Stand Alone Complex First Assault

All due to capitalism ruining things as usual...

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.

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...

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.

I thought that game came out?
- It was a must have online servers game and they stopped all support, so it's gone, canceled, over. Idk. That's the way I think of it at least.

Fur me, it would be Beyond Good and Evil. I really wanted to see where the story went next

Star Wars galaxies

EverQuest next

Are you playing Pantheon?
- I'm not familiar, I was really hopeful for a lot of systems that were described in EQN

Revenant Hill, by one of the Night in the Woods developers. Cancelled due to health problems.

Honestly, I was really looking forward to EverQuest Next. The idea sounded promising before it was cancelled.

Marvel Heroes. Hopefully the private servers being worked on will be in a playable state someday.

Chrono Break

I wish we could have gotten R6:Patriots.

i dont understand why nobody has mentioned nosgoth yet. i regularly think about and miss this game so much!!!

Mag

There's something so special about the command structure, having your own squad v squad, while a whole other battle is taking place around you. But also that you could be pulled for extra resources if needed.

I tried Hell Let Loose, but it's too chaotic and open.

LittleBigPlanet, can't wait for Restitched. At least private servers exist and I can emulate LBP2 on my PC

True Fantasy Live Online looked like it would have been amazing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Fantasy_Live_Online

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.

Prey 2

Reset, a puzzle sci-fi game some little Finnish studio was working on.

Forgot starhawk not technically cancelled but they never dropped a 3rd game

middle sxhool me peaked at that game, building, jetpacks, exosuits, mechs, transformers, hoverbikes, etc.

Scalebound. That open-world Star Wars game. SimsVille

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

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

I really miss Megalith. It was a VR MOBA. The small team had to drop the project to work on contracts that made money.

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. :-/

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.

Probably the Hardsuit Labs version of Bloodlines 2. Playing as a thin-blood and getting to diablerie would have been really fun.

Thrill Kill

Oh damn I remember getting a bootleg copy of this game for PSX!

K.O.L.M.

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

"The Last Night" looked very interesting, but i dont even know if its been cancelled, just havent heard anything from it in years

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

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

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.

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.

GunZ

StarCraft Broodwar (need to make a Blizzard account now apparently)

My word, I remember playing this when I was a teenager (and I'm in my mid-30s now).
I remember doing all those trick movements, the slash and dash, wall climbs, weapon switching for quick dash etc.
Then several months into playing, I found out people were using macros for those instead of... Pressing all the keys manually...
My hands hurt so much until that discovery.
- Very small minority use macros. You can watch videos of people playing and watch their keystrokes on both physical keyboard and virtual. I recommend kujo on YouTube.
  But yeah, very nice memories indeed. Apparently, it's making a comeback on Steam.

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

True Fantasy Live Online. It sounded amazing.

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.

C&C Generals 2, they got canceled and then made in to a mobile game. I considerd staying 10 hours in line to try it out at gamescom in köln 10-12 years ago, decided to get drunk instead.

Yeah that was a letdown for sure. Still better than releasing it as a mobile game I think.
If you haven't heard they recently released the source code of C&C generals and zero hour and there's multiple efforts working on a community patch.
I've been watching the competitive scene of zero hour for a few years now. It's really exciting and now that the source code's out, sky's the limit on what we can achieve.

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.

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.

The Last of Us Factions 2, even though it never came out

Rainbow Six Patriots.

Instead we got another MMO game…yay…….

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.

Star Wars 1313 and Battlefront 3.

And for books it's the unfinished Republic/Imperial Commando series by Karen Traviss

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.

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.

Limit Theory. Quite the ambitious space simulator being developed by one dude. I recall seeing their dev log videos on youtube.

This is before my time but I remember reading about a canceled movie tie-in game for Star Trek: First Contact.

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.

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.