ITT: Cancelled games or betas that changed dramatically that haunt you when you think of 'what might have been'

Dragon's Dogma could have been so much more.

I think we got too much tbh. It gave me everything I wanted from monhun.

They did. Hate to pull back the curtain but this is how every amercian busniess has run since the 1960's. It started with the beef barons and the securing of large supplies of foodstuffs. Now 4 companies own almost every food production company in america thats making above a certain threshold, subsidiaries of subsidiaries of parents who are themselves subsidiaries.
Film, tv, comics, videogames. Its all become the same. The aim of the businessman is to run the company that buys up all the competition so the consumer only has you to come to.
Don't assume there is a good guy looking out for you goyim. Valve, Bethesda, Capcom, Cdprojekt. They are no different from EA, Activision, Vivendi and so on.

It would have likely still been your run of the mill shooter with a nice coat of paint. QTEs, waypoints, press a button for awesome, hitmarkers, XP, progression etc.

But damn does it still hurt.

You might be thinking of Square Enix and Grin. That's a fun story.

Or the Nintendo Curse. That's one of the best.

Nippon Ichi Software did that, that's while a fuck load of the Disgaea team left the company.

You meant S.T.A.L.K.E.R 4 right? Because

S.T.A.L.K.E.R 1: Shadow of Chernobyl
S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2: Clear Sky
S.T.A.L.K.E.R 3: Call of Pripyat

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That's depressing

I was thinking of Team Ninja and what said on NIS, but I wanna hear those stories, I don't think I've ever heard of those.

Basically the alternate timeline Akira. Imagine that shit.

Story time it is.

Square Enix hired a Swedish game studio known as Grin to make a spinoff FFXII title. The working name was 'Fortress.' It was going to be like how FFXII is based on Final Fantasy Tactics/Advance, but with a focus on action. The studio previously did the Bionic Commando updates and the remake, along with some movie game I can't remember. Taken? It was about a guy who could curve bullets.

Anyway, the developers suddenly stopped being paid. It was Bethesda style (they did what they were told but then the publisher said it wasn't good enough, not communicating at all) and eventually the developers decided to test how much Square cared. They submitted some art of a main character from FFXII, lifted wholesale from the game (think the character concept art, all colored and stuff) and Square said 'this isn't Final Fantasy.' Than Square demanded they fax them all the code to review it. Not even to the team, to the legal department.

Eventually, the developer filed for bankruptcy before they actually went into debt, Square took the assets and tried and failed to finish the game themselves, and the developers created a new studio, Overkill, which is a whole different story of how cancerous the industry can be.

The Nintendo Curse is gonna be a separate post because it's a bit more in depth.

o they did wanted fam? lol, you talkin bout revenant wings? It still turned out pretty gud, so good business decision for SE tbh.

Reminder that they're redeveloping it into a new game.

No, dummy.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R 0: Clear Sky
S.T.A.L.K.E.R 1: Shadow of Chernobyl
S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2: Call of Pripyat

the movie where they curve bullets is called Wanted. Game was shit but the movie had an ok pseudo-Fight Club style.

also that shit is fucked, it pisses me off that Square still has games I'm interested in.

Are you kidding me? That's actually pretty funny that they didn't even know or care about their own game.

I think the implication is that they were fully aware of what was going on, they just wanted to get rid of the studio regardless, since the studio doesn't have the power to fight back regardless.

Never mind, that's more sad.

A lot of people underestimate how smart most big companies are, they didn't get there completely by luck.

what I'm confused about would be that if a studio is capable of developing a game completely independently why would they take a shitty deal like this that literally ended their business despite completing a product.

smfh

It was called S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2 you num nuts.

I recently learned about Densen, a weird as fuck concept by Kiyoshi Sakai, the mind behind Umihara Kawase. Doesn't seem to be a whole lot to it aside from riding from one sky island to another via rails traversed by what appears to be a coat hanger, but it has the trademark surreal quirks of UK. Who knows, this could've been pretty neat, but considering how barebones the gameplay looks in its primitive form it also probably got scrapped for a good reason.

desperation, you forget that people who go into the gaming industry in our current era are bonehead retarded. Lucky fools that made use of their shit degree.

did square pay their lawyer off or something though? like, based on the anecdote you'd think the contract was completely fucking one sided.

Is it fair to call Shattered Memories a remake? Not that I don't agree it's just kinda more complex than that, like calling Chain of Memories a remake of KH1

firefall, the developers were literally making bad updates and ruining parts of the game/wasting time on purpose

So now the Nintendo Curse. There are three parts to this, so stick with me.

The first one is Rare. It's the simplest. Rare made games with Nintendo, some of the best and most creative in the industry, but when Microsoft bought them out, their first few games were decent or remakes, but nothing notable. Now it's just Kinect junk and collections of their old games. They have that fighting game, Killer Instinct, but I don't know enough to say if it's in the competitive scene.

Second curse, the most notable, is the creator of the GameBoy, and also, the Virtual Boy, Gunpei Yokoi. He left because Nintendo basically sat him at an out of the way desk job because of how badly the Virtual Boy did. He went and made the Wonder Swan, which was similar to the GameBoy but an improvement. It was quite popular, but the Gunpei ended up being run over by a car with no witnesses. Quite eerie. Maybe it was the yakuza? Either way, his was the most tragic of the three curses.

Now we get to the most fucked up one. Silicon Knights.

They made two games with Nintendo. Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, and Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes. Regardless of opinions, these were huge for both Nintendo and the developer. It put them on the map, and Eternal Darkness still has a following.

They left Nintendo because they didn't like the Wii, and wanted to make their cross-media movie game things. They went and made Too Human. Long story short, the game sucked, the devs sued Epic for purposefully not finishing the engine before Gears of War released (but still licensing it for development) and ended up losing so bad in court they had to delete all the code from both of their games made in the engine (the other was an X-Men game. According to Denis Dyack, the man in charge of the development team, that game was a mess because Marvel got bought by Disney and Activision had no idea what they could legally do due to licensing. Denis Dyack is important, but we'll get to that later.

So the developer dissolves and a new one rises in their wake, titled Precursor Games. They have a kickstarter to try and raise funds for a spiritual successor, Shadow of the Eternals. The first kickstarter wasn't going to make it, so they cancelled it to work on their pitch for it.

Around the same time, one of the head people of both companies, Kenneth McCollouch, was in a bit of legal trouble. He might be known by some more hardcore gamers. He created Legacy of Kain, and laid out the groundwork for the story.

He was arrested for child pornography.

So he was effectively erased from the developers website altogether.

Combine their previous financial issues, the new legal trouble with one of their leads, and the media constantly smearing them as a horrible developer, I'm surprised Denis didn't kill himself. He formed another studio for multi-media stuff, and he did an interview a bit ago about being pro-GamerGate. The media didn't even listen to his side of the story, they went with anonymous sources instead of hearing allegations and collecting evidence.

So tl;dr the Nintendo Curse is 'don't forget, you're here forever.'

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Its still haunts me that Cyberpunk 2077 is never ever.

They said on their website that they are going to continue, but its going to be a ripoff thats not exactly star wars, so they can get past the ea jews.

You mean Nintendo. Its an ooolllddd family business and old family businesses in urban japan means one thing.
You never notice how many high ups against microtransactions disappear and "die of cancer after weeks of seclusion" nowadays?

Spore.

Oh god, spore.

cdpr never even made a good game and all you got about that one is CGI. You're a faggot

At least you got No Mans Sky now, right? :^)

Reminder that Space Marine was going to be Dark Souls before Dark Souls was a thing.

Inb4 "Teh Bolter
Fucking placeholder you dumb fucks, you even see it having different animations in executions

Wasn't FFXII itself suppose to be a better game, but it was rushed towards the end?

Could be. Japanese game devs tend to make games in segments. Like a bridge, almost.

At this point I'm not surprised.

Anytime I see a murder or death being reported, I always think "OK, what did they do to piss off the kikes?"

Contract was probably fucking solid and they didn't really give a shit about how the contract could fuck them. I'm sure you've done the same thing on a small scale with shit like ToS. People just want what they want when the reward sounds amazing no matter the risk.

Nigga they're still absolutely making it, they're just focusing on the Witcher 3 gravy train. Do you not understand how these types of businesses work? They follow the money, and THEN they focus on something "ground breaking" to renew hype.

it was meh. I still have it, lol.

There's a sweet spot between the xbaux and 360 era that was filled with crazy betas and videos and shit. Honestly one of the best times in gaming, future looked bright.

Do you not see the fear in Reggies eyes every day?

Speaking of Square, the FFVII era is when they started this kind of bullshit. Series like Xenogears which huge potential were just flushed down the drain because the higher ups wanted to ride the FF cashcow rather than continue to support their other franchises.

He doesn't seem afraid to me.

Then again, he hasn't said anything that warrants getting their attention and preparing his murder.

Halo, before it was castrated for the Xbleh.

Are you telling me Miyamoto snuck into Iwata's house and killed him or had some yakuza gangster do it for him?

I wonder if there are any ex Nintendo devs that have ever done well post departure

...

I can agree with this. I don't know what the fuck made Microsoft change around the Xbox 360's middle lifespan that went downhill but they had some nice shit on there

OG Xbox emulation never ever

Where did this meme of Cyberpunk being cancelled come from?

He's fucking Portugese.

Isn't that more Microsoft's curse?

It's probably safer to cross the Yakuza, Triad, or varied mafias than it is to cross a major corporation

Even the Italian Mafia?

Apparently Jackie Chan once stopped a gang war between Italian and Chinese crime families and remains an honorary member of both.

The world is fucking amazing sometimes.

thats the plot to rumble in the bronx

yeah
corporations at the higher levels naturally have more ties to government. If that corporation represents a vital interest to the country, then you can be sure the government will step in to handwave away "problems"

When it comes down to crimegroups v government, always bet on the government as the Triad learned

Based on true events.

always wondered why the movie was so fucking bleak

Web 2.0 didn't didn't start becoming commonplace until 2004, when everyone started getting high speed internet and were going to message boards you underage nigger. Plus, if you read even fucking IGN you could hear about RE 1.5

War of Omens.
It was such a great card game, there is still people playing it but the company abandoned it entirely.

What a waste

Yes, the game basically drove Matsuno to a nervous breakdown, as Square was being bought out by Enix during its development, and when Square executives saw that Basch was supposed to be the main character, they lost their shit because he looked too old to market the game to Japanese teenagers, hence why Vaan was shoved in and plastered all over the marketing material.

Matsuda has gone on record lots of times saying Balthier was the original protagonist and he was "too middle aged" and a sky pirate was "not going to sell in the west so soon after 9/11", i'm not trying to shit on you but i often hear people think it was meant to be Basch instead and i can never find any actual source where this idea came from.

Sorry, I meant Baltheir. Yeah, both Matsuno and even Kawazu have stated he was supposed to be the protagonist.

...

Nigger, you don't know how in the yakuza are major Japanese companies.

To think we could have gotten a manly story makes me sad with what we actually got.

Are there any Konami CEO's not connected to the big familys at this point?

You'd think an RPG about playing as a manly as fuck dude would sell gangbusters, unless people still self insert as the little pussy ass bitch.

Grin was shit anyway. The only semi-decent thing that company produced was Bionic Commando Rearmed. Their Bionic Commando sequel was so bad that it killed the series they were trying to revive.

Pretty sure he's a mexican

Ha.

Inb4 Kojima gets kidnapped by the Yakuza

...

;_;

jojo had yet to go mainstream at the time.

Think it can happen now?

Why do you think he escaped to america?

To crawl into Norman Reedus' ass and find inner peace.

Because he has a hardon for Americans?

He can get burgers anywhere though and we all know thats all he cares about in life.

Look at how people love Nier now.

Give me Wild Arms 6 starring not kurt russel as a grizzled dad fighting an ancient machine empire with his native american mage bro to save his daughters life.

So it's Amnesia in Romania

Blyat of cthamke

Play Shadowrun returns or Satellite Reign

Mainstream amongst normalfag anime watching queers. Jojo was never some obscure ass series. It was obscure only amongst dipshit kids that proliferate the current weeb population.

I just wish the game we got wasn't dead and had an actual server browser

and who has been the SE primary target audience since Kingdom Hearts?

KI on Xbone suffers from the same issue that TvC had. It's on a console that nobody wanted to buy for just one fighting game. KI was still popular enough to be on EVO's main stage the past two years, and it did get a PC port windows 10 exclusive so KI had that going for it.

Pretty dumb they never included servers.

Which translation with EA? It had too much quality and couldn't be sold off as piecemeal DLC.

Only good Shadowrun game was Dragonfall.

The other two aren't necessarily bad but the peak of the series outshone the other two.

Twisted Metal: Harbor City.

It sounded really fucking amazing, free roaming in a city similar to Midtown. I'm still hoping they'll do something similar on PS4, but I'm not expecting anything.

...

I will never fucking forgive

this just looks so fucking fun, I don't understand how somebody at EA thought "let's just ditch this entire concept and release am extremely watered-down battlefield 4 with lasers instead"

also nice trips

probably the exact same reason that LucasArts killed Free Radical:
we don't want the magnum opus of the genre; we want something slightly better than the last one so we can keep milking it yearly

I fucking. I can't even describe how fucking pissed this makes me. The game is out there. The entire game is fucking real. But a few attention seeking faggots have now made it ever releasing to the public absolutely impossible.

Wanna get even more angry? There was a group of guys that picked the project back up and were remaking it in UE4 calling it Galaxy in Turmoil. The thing is though that EA and Lucasfilm found out and made them shut it down. The reason? It was gonna take attention away from their Battlefront game. This only happened a few weeks ago too, Frontwire (the guys working on it) were just about done with it.
please use archive.ism/2016/08/01/lucasfilm-and-ea-shut-down-fan-made-star-wars-battlefront-3-revival-galaxy-in-turmoil/

Holy hell I fucked that link up.

archive.is/I4FDr

...

There is only one game I could think of, that is The Getaway 3 and an action game from Sony, what blew me away with the teaser was the action sequences involved, kinda like uncharted 2. So my wildest guess is that Sony canceled that action game and re-located the programmers into Naughty Dog.

its not cancelled I think, they've got concept art now and all that jazz. If I remember from an interview before The Witcher 3 came out, they basically have concept stage and pimp up the offices so the art department kinda know the feel of the game.
So when the interviewer came he could see some writing in Polish and concept art from cyberpunk2077. Also CDPR announced the game on Polish television at the same day the teaser came out, when The Witcher 3 came out, the real (((journalists))) talked to CDPR about the game, and how its popular and all that jazz.

So I think its coming, but again they have canceled a game before that was the original witcher for ps3 and 360.

The licensing with the first UDK 3 devkit, where more or less a strange.

Midway If you remember before they went down to the dust. They made all their games in UDK 3, so there is a huge reason to believe that Midway sunk also because of the shitty UDK code, the games where so glitchy so it was unplayable.
So they needed a quick cashgrab because they've sunk allot of money into This is Vegas a GTA clone that was a T for Teens game. So one of the last games they released was Mortal Kombat vs dc universe, it obviously failed when it was a T for Teen game also.