Whats a gaming failure or undeveloped project you wish had a more successful release/was fully realized? For me its tomb raider angel of darkness. There were a lot of problems with the production, ranging from lack of leadership to scrapped concepts to the unpreparedness of the team for the complexity of programming for the PS2. Core design didnt have enough time to iron out the kinks even with all the crunch time, and eidos didnt give them more time because they wanted to release in june.
The game was an unfinished mess, full of bugs and haphazard level design. But its gained something of a cult status within the raider community, with memes centering on its iconic side characters like janice the parisian sex worker as well as lara’s feisty one-liners. Its still being kept alive by a dedicated community of speedrunners and unofficial remasters. I often think what could have been if it had more time to at least be passable at launch. Core planned two sequels that would have continued the story. Obviously they were scrapped, core design went defunct, and tomb raider was handed over to crystal dynamics.
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Prey 2, the original was really cool. It did portals before portal. The e3 presentation was more cyberpunk than cyberpunk.
Star Wars 1313 would have actually been good and couldn’t be tolerated by EA as a result.
Agent would have been cool, Rockstar taking on the spy game genre could have rivaled Alpha Protocol.
There was going to be a command and conquer rpg. Enough said.
Is Star Wars Outlaws or whatever being considered kind of a spiritual successor?
The game advertisers certainly are pitching it in a similar way.
I am Sonicposting once again
There are two possible futures.
One is the one where Sega just gives up on the 15th anniversary, and also has the presence of mind not to pad Unleashed out with medal requirements and beatemup combat. In this reality the 2006 game does not exist and all effort was focused on making Day stages for Unleashed. The game is like two hours long but no way would it not be hailed as a return to form.
The other is where Sega gets a brain and puts stuff like Shadow, Riders, the Hedgehog Engine & etc on ice, and gets all hands on deck for the 2006 game. It’s likely that Sonic 06 never had real physics or good movement, but more developed hubworlds and episodes for each character and ledge grabs and Super Sonic and all of the other cut stuff would have made the game at least better.
A while ago I picked up an old, sci-fi themed city builder for DOS about settling a new planet with a generation ship after Earth gets hit with a meteor. The manual and strategy guide were hundreds of pages long, every technology, building and game mechanic were painstakingly modelled on real experimental technology. The lead designer was an ex-NASA scientist. It had infinite random planets with different environments based on the statistical probability of elements depending on which star you went to, there were monorails, a politics system, you could create an AI which could go rogue, you could build underground, trade or fight with splinter groups elsewhere on the planet, even launch more colony ships with a space elevator. All this stuff was described in the manual alongside the state of real research into the technologies, how feasible it would actually be to live on other planets, what we’d need. It was absolutely captivating. It was called Outpost. I installed it in a VM.
The game itself looked great for it’s age but it was half finished, no monorail, no other factions, no space flight, dozens of buildings in the manual weren’t in the game and to top it all off it was apparently mathematically impossible for the simulation not to death spiral. The box also contained a floppy disk with handwritten label and a patch and a printed page of patch notes starting with an apology for the state of the game and a couple of crash fixes.
Ever since then I’ve wanted to play the actual game they had in mind when they wrote that manual. Surviving Mars has some similarities but the scale is so much smaller.
Also Noctis V. I loved Noctis IV.
Makes me think of Dwarf Fortress. I know that Rimworld kinda-sorta is this, but I feel like there’s space for games like Dwarf Fortress and traditional roguelikes with the backing and polish of a AAA team.
I had a similar feeling playing Legend of Zelda: a Link to the Past for the first time in adulthood. I had played dozens of visually and mechanically similar indie games, but I was struck by it’s depth, interconnectedness, the sense of exploration and adventure and scale. AAA companies are capable of great things when they stick to principles and actually create art, instead of creating products.
And to a lesser extent, the same is true for Metroidvanias and Super Metroid.
I’m still in my honeymoon phase with Bordelands 3 but this is one of the buggiest games I’ve played in my life. I donno if it’s just that I’ve played through the story like 6-7 times now or what but some of the bugs that show up just I press me that it got passed QA.
I try to give it a bit of grace since the game was wrapping up development when COVID hit and just consider a lot of the bigs as charm or quirkiness of the game and most aren’t game breaking. I have to pop out of menu at a vendor and back in occasionally because the gun vendor bugs out and doesn’t scroll or shows my equipped gun(idk even how thst makes sense) but its just a quick menu shuffle.
The shift server disconnect issue that started happening this past month can go fuck itself though. Thought it was a Linux thing but my friends started getting it too.
I guess my what if is “what if they took a few extra months and released a finished game?” This goes for all developers though. I’d rather wait a bit and have a masterpiece painting than be stuck with an NFT.
I wish Squaresoft had given the Xenogears dev team some more time to finish up. They probably would’ve made the game five times as long if they’d been entirely left to their own devices, but I’d have liked to see some more of the gaps in that otherwise amazing game filled in. We might have even gotten the initially planned 6-game series.
I wish they’d listened to Gunpei Yokoi and not released the Virtual Boy in the state it was in. It wouldn’t have flopped and the product designed responsible for some of Nintendo’s greatest innovations wouldn’t have resigned from his position in disgrace, and probably wouldn’t have died in a random auto accident shortly after.
I wish Nintendo hadn’t come down so hard on Rare for their attempts to push the limits of the Nintendo 64 with features such as Banjo-Kazooie’s “Stop ‘n’ Swap.” The company probably wouldn’t have jumped ship.
Right now, I can think of a couple that probably only I care about. The first is that shmup Treasure were supposedly developing for the Xbox 360 that never came out and there’s almost no information on it
The second one is even more obscure, but I wish Taito had stuck with the 2D pixel art for the second game in the Ray* series. There’s a one level prototype called R-Gear which is done in 2D pixel art, which annoyingly isn’t available in the recent collection unless you got some Japanese physical limited edition Switch release. RayStorm is a good game, but RayForce just has such beautiful pixel art and I want more of that
Haze, a completely forgotten FPS from the PS3 era that at first glance was just a shitty Halo clone but it was originally meant to be so much more than that
The game devs were some of the best to ever work on FPS games (same team behind Timespliters, Perfect Dark and Goldeneye) and their idea was to make an anti war FPS where most of the standard conventions of FPS games back then were actually the results of a drug that made the main character not see the atrocities he and his side were committing, so once you got off the drug the corpses wouldn’t disappear anymore and you would start seeing blood and gore
The publisher Ubisoft didn’t like this, they didn’t like the politics, so they sabotaged the development and ruined the whole thing
Had they pulled it off right it may have convinced some kids in my generation that our military is evil and stopped them from joining up but that’s not what military video games are for so Ubisoft killed the game
Timesplitters Rewind:(
If any of the 20 Harvest Moon sequels (the first one was '97!) had gotten their act together and seriously built out a full and complex universe (and released it for the PC), then the equivalent of Stardew Valley would’ve been made like ten years earlier and it wouldn’t have been left up to some single developer to actually fully utilize the potential of that genre.
Imagine all the school holidays I would’ve lost, but also where farm-simulation games would be now. They basically stopped innovating after ~'03 until Stardew Valley in '16, so we had 13 years of ye dark ages.
Gothic 3, all those years later I am still upset about it. The vast open world traversable without loading screens was an impressive achievement, especially for its time, but it got wasted on a rushed and incomplete product.
A reboot or remaster or new anything of Omikron: The Nomad Soul would be cool as fuck
