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.

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.

PT. Still have it saved on my PS4 I think.

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.

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.

Star Wars Battlefront 3, 1313 Titanfall 3

Star Wars Battlefront III

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.

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.

I wish StarCraft: Nova had happened

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.

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.

Really loved Battlefield Heroes as a kid. I’d love to play it again

I loved Descent from back in the 90s...

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)

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.

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.

StarCraft Ghost

ONI 2

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.

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

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.

Anthem was a really great idea for a game that had an absolutely terrible execution.

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.

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

Guns of Icarus, my beloved.

Also, Global Agenda.

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 😔

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

Mario 35

Concord

Haha, just kidding.

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.

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 😔

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.

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.