A follow-up to the legendary Disco Elysium might have been ready to play within the next year—ZA/UM's devs loved it, management canceled it and laid off the team.
That game is a work of art. I haven't finished it, I stopped and moved on, yet it hold a very special place in my mind. That a game I want to go back to when I'll have time for a quiet binge.
Same, I need too much mental space for it, it's so engaging that I want to actually have the room to enjoy it. When I do I love it, but when I don't I kind of don't want to disrespect it and my enjoyment of it with a half attentive state.
Sometimes. But not in this case; what happened to Disco Elysium is a rabbit hole of corruption and backstabbing that could only come out of Eastern Europe.
ZA/UM leadership can eat donkey dicks, and if I had Musk/Bezos money I would hire every single dev that got laid off from there and just let them make games till the heat death of the universe.
But I'm a povo bitch, so best I can offer is a free drink at the bar and a handjob in the back alley.
If you are not familiar with the history of this game, it's understandable to be skeptical. Obviously in most cases that would be a reasonable assumption. But in this specific case, it being cancelled out of spite actually makes way more sense than it being cancelled because it wouldn't have been financially viable.
There have been games that were hyped to hell and back and actually completed that were cancelled/prevented from releasing at the last possible moment. Sometimes because of licensing issues. Other times because some upper management dumbass wanted to move everyone to another project and abandon the one they finished.