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.
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.