Weekend Question: What canceled game do you wish you could have played?

[PCG Ted]

From over the hills and under the mountains a single unifying cry rings out: "Weekend. Question. Weekend. Question." If you're new, I ask the same question of PCG's staff and forums for a regular feature on the site. I'm actually going to be out of town this coming weekend, so this one will probably be up on Monday.

This week's question is: What canceled game do you wish you could have played?

A little while ago I wrote about Troika Games' canceled post-apocalyptic RPG prototype, a cool-as-hell spiritual successor to Fallout from some of the best who ever did it. That article (and Chris' helpful suggestion) had me wanting to hear about all of your Lost Lenores.

Could be a ghost of a concept that just wasn't meant to be, like Troika Games' pitch for Arcanum 2: Journey to the Centre of Arcanum, or something more substantial, like Troika Games' demo for a Lord of the Rings CRPG. Could even be something not by Troika Games, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it.

 

[Brian Boru]

Oh Command and Conquer Generals 2 is my #1 for sure. Generals Zero Hour was such a fantastic game, my fav of all the C&C games—yes, even above the legendary RA2!

Mind you, my vote is only for a successor to 1-ZH—the monetization shenanigans they were talking about, after shelving the successor idea, was EA at its worst a decade ago.

 

[Zloth]

1. A second Prey game. The first one was great fun, and the baddies were interesting aliens. Unfortunately, Arkane has gone a different direction, and many of the folks central to making Prey have been scattered around the gamedom.
2. A real Crysis 2. The one that got made dumped almost all the first game's story and re-did the technology so the consoles could run the game. I wish we could have a proper Crysis 2 that continued the story from the first game (and its DLC).
3. It already looks unlikely that we'll get a second Midnight Suns game, despite in-game indications. That's a shame - I'm really having fun with that game.

Hmmm, Ted's is a 2, Brian's is a 2, all three of mine are 2's...

 

[Pifanjr]

As a fan of action-stealth games, I really liked the idea of Starcraft: Ghost. Getting some more Starcraft lore would be a nice bonus as well.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

Someone has to say it, Half Life 3 (or even HL2 episode 3)

As that ones pretty much a gimme, probably Baldurs Gate 3 as it was originally intended. Larians BG 3 looks like its going to be great, but I would have played the hell out of that game 20 years ago or whatever it was.

1. A second Prey game. The first one was great fun, and the baddies were interesting aliens. Unfortunately, Arkane has gone a different direction, and many of the folks central to making Prey have been scattered around the gamedom.

Interesting fact, Arkane didnt want to call the 2017 game Prey, Bethesda Zenimax management basically forced it on them because they owned the IP and wanted to use it.

 

[McStabStab]

As a fan of horror and Kojima games, I wonder what Silent Hills could have been. PT made its mark in video game history. Hopefully the upcoming reboot as well as Silent Hill f will live up to the hype.

 

[OsaX Nymloth]

As a fan of action-stealth games, I really liked the idea of Starcraft: Ghost. Getting some more Starcraft lore would be a nice bonus as well.

Ah yeah, that would be cool to see. From the gameplay snippets I've seen over the years, there' was clearly potential in the formula. Shame the management did everything possible for it to crash.

From the not-mentioned games: Van Buren aka proper Fallout 3. Damn I wish I lived in a timeline when this happened and Bethesda never got their dirty hands on the IP.

 

[Brian Boru]

Another I just got reminded of in another thread: there was a planned Half Life 2 spinoff focused on Ravenholm and Father Grigori. Ravenholm is one of the all-time great shooter levels, so I do wish they'd been able to flesh it out into something worthwhile.

 

[Smellincoffee]

SimVille. Around the time that SimCity 3000 and The Sims were such great successes, Maxis was working on a game between those two scales -- one where the player managed a neighborhood, essentially. No choosing between different power plants, no "Bob unplug the toilet", but something in-between. Part of the appeal was the shared universe: at the time, Maxis was allowing for crosspollination between its games, so that Sims from TS1 could be imported into SimCity 4, and SimCity 4 maps could be used to create TS2 neighborhoods, etc.

 

[Nrp211]

I always wanted to play Imperator which was a MMORPG set in a future world where Rome never fell. It looked amazing at the time especially to me who loves Roman history.

 

[DesPaws]

I can't remember the name, or even the developer . . . but I remember reading in the 90s in a gaming magazine about an alternate history World War II mech game. The concept art looked very well done and immersive for mechs done with World War II era (esque, since alternate history) technology. As far as I know, it turned into vaporware and never materialized, but sounded like it had a lot of potential.

 

[Zimbaly]

I think it was Bullfrog that was gonna do this.... hell the article may have even been in PCGamer, but they were suppose to make a super hero game back in the day. I always wondered what that game was gonna be like.