The Games That Got Away

[Dirty Duck]

So a little while ago the development team behind Sonic Mania posted stills and a song from a proposed follow up they pitched to SEGA. That dev team ended up not working further on Sonic and instead Sega put out Sonic Superstars. This look at what could have been caused massive waves in the Sonic community and many were lamenting the fact they felt robbed since Superstars was widely regarded as worse than Mania. I felt the same as I loved Mania and the news that the devs wouldn't be making a followup was a big disappointment to me. I didn't even pick up Superstars as I was so against it on principle. I've bought it secondhand now as I'm playing through every Sonic game but haven't gotten around to it yet, but when I do, I know so much of my opinion will be affected by the game that doesn't exist because it does.

This got me thinking about how many great games might have existed had things gone slightly different and I wondered what examples like this make you wish you were in a slightly different timeline? Be it leaked concepts that were never picked up, games that were in development and were cancelled, or games that changed so heavily over the course of their development that you feel that something was lost along the way. Time to get sentimental.

[NateDog]

Final Fantasy Versus XIII the thread for me. Followed the game so closely for so many years despite there being next to no information coming out about it for very long periods at a time. Absolutely loved everything we saw of it and that Nomura said about his aims for it. Characters, themes, music, map and level designs, everything was up my alley. Unfortunately its development was taking place during Square Enix's most challenging period when they struggled with the transition to HD gaming, poor reception for XIII and having to rebuild XIV almost from the ground up after its very poor launch. All of that meant that this got put on the backburner and the low staff numbers assigned to the game were regularly being pulled off it to work on other projects like XIV or Type-0.

In the end Hajime Tabata was charged with taking over the project and changed a lot of things as it transitioned to Final Fantasy XV. I can't blame him for most things given he was told to get out a working game, but I still can't bring myself to forgive him for changing Stella into Luna and giving us a shell of a character in comparison to one that looked like she could be a really interesting one. But apart from that, it's hard to blame Tabata or Nomura. Nomura was juggling this and Kingdom Hearts (a bit like with Kojima and MGS, he made attempts to have a hands off approach and let a new team do most of the work but it didn't really work out) and the project never had the dedicated staff to work on it, and Tabata did well to even finish it off and turn it into something that ended up still being a mess but has its moments. But I still regularly think about what could have been.

[Blueblob]

Years before the Prey reboot I remember reading a bunch of stuff for Prey 2 which looked so good, you were going to be a bounty hunter in an open world alien world. Then it kept being moved to a bunch of developers before being completely cancelled and the Prey reboot was made instead.

[Jassassino]

So many, and undoubtedly so many I'll come back and say at some point. But for now, what comes to mind is:

SWBF3
Darth Maul's untitled action game
Star Wars 1313
LOTR: The White Council
Tekken Vs. SF

Oh man, Star Wars Battlefront 3 (x2 😭), the untitled Darth Maul game with leaked footage and Star Wars 1313 at the top of my list. I'd never felt hype more than I did for those games for a multimedia franchise like Star Wars which I'd so adored.

Before playing TES at all, I'd played Dragon Age Origins over and over, which led me to find out about Lord of the Rings: The White Council, which was to be an open world Middle Earth RPG with all of the makings of a classic. I'd even made an account on their forums to talk about the possibility of things like classes, race selection, companions, etc. I followed up on industry news and leaks on that for about two or three years before it was silently shuttered just before EA lost the LOTR video game rights.

[starschwar]

While I haven't tried the leaked build, the consensus seems to be that the earlier circa 2001 build of Duke Nukem Forever would have been way better than the "finished" version they released a decade later in virtually every way.

Starcraft: Ghost looked really fun.  The idea of any strategy game from the point of view of one unit is such a goldmine for spinoffs.

Half-Life (Episode) 3 needs no explanation.

Now, I don't want to flood this forum with my unending love for the defunct Matrix Online MMO, but I think this is appropriate.  Several months before they shut it down, the last remaining dev and writer posted a synopsis of what -would- have happened had he finished off the year's worth of story.  Wild things were gonna happen.  We were left with several massive unresolved story threads, the biggest being

Spoiler:

Trinity being alive.

Some but not all of the elements that would have played out did kinda appear in the Resurrecitons movie in some form or another, and that's pretty cool.  But those unfinished chapters, my own character's story tied to them, unresolved, forever...

[starschwar]

How did this forum make it this many posts without bringing up the original version of Metal Gear Solid Rising? It wouldn't have been as fun as Revengance, but I still want the story of Dr. Madnar turning Raiden into a cyborg in Area 51!

[Jassassino]

How did this forum make it this many posts without bringing up the original version of Metal Gear Solid Rising? It wouldn't have been as fun as Revengance, but I still want the story of Dr. Madnar turning Raiden into a cyborg in Area 51!

Hahahahahah, I actually think I've brought that up ONCE! That small snippet of the build shown at either Tokyo Game Show or E3 or something looks really interesting. I've always wondered what the approach to stealth would be like in a game like that, especially running on the FOX Engine if it did. Like, how do you present challenge in a stealth mission where the main playable character can literally cut through walls and redefine a new route through the map? Would have to take some mad vertical level design or really interesting AI parameters to make it so you have a chance of being caught out by guards.

[starschwar]

I'm pretty sure FOX Engine wasn't a thing at that point. Maybe very early stages of development? MGSR was announced before even Peace Walker, so I doubt they had anything workable in that regard. It was probably a modified version of whatever engine MGS4 ran on.

[Jassassino]

I'm pretty sure FOX Engine wasn't a thing at that point. Maybe very early stages of development? MGSR was announced before even Peace Walker, so I doubt they had anything workable in that regard. It was probably a modified version of whatever engine MGS4 ran on.

Man it wigs me out that it was announced that long ago. One of those realisations that will make me look in the mirror and suddenly be able to see every wrinkle on my face.

[Dirty Duck]

How did this forum make it this many posts without bringing up the original version of Metal Gear Solid Rising?  It wouldn't have been as fun as Revengance, but I still want the story of Dr. Madnar turning Raiden into a cyborg in Area 51!

It has been discussed in the recesses of vaguely relevant topics (I think one about the future of the franchise). A lot of us were very active on the old forum around the time it was announced and then subsequently changed to Revengeance so we’ve done a good amount of lamenting it. I was so anti-Revengeance after that first trailer…until I played the demo and knew I had to pick it up on release LOL

I've always wondered what the approach to stealth would be like in a game like that, especially running on the FOX Engine if it did. Like, how do you present challenge in a stealth mission where the main playable character can literally cut through walls and redefine a new route through the map? Would have to take some mad vertical level design or really interesting AI parameters to make it so you have a chance of being caught out by guards.

I feel like the risk of cutting through the architecture would work much the same as leaving dead bodies around, except you can’t put a cut down wall in a locker to hide it. Sure, you’ve opened a new route, but the next guard that sees it will phone it in and then your life will be a lot harder. You’ve got to make it count. Will cutting that wall even help you? Or will it just put an eternal CAUTION phase on you?
I feel like if MGSV managed to make open world stealth work, MGSR would have done bits with destructible environment stealth. I’d have loved it if you had the choice between the HF Blade and more traditional MGS2 Raiden stealth with a SOCOM.