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.
Yeah. Sometimes we’re lucky and get a leak of the cancelled game. Happened with the War Craft adventure game. It was almost finished. And it was really mid. Maybe up to today’s Blizzard standards but not back then.
Titanfall was so goddamn fun. Hey, do you like the combat in CoD: Modern Warfare 2? Do you also want to call in a giant mech suit once in a while? Well buckle up, Buttercup, cause I’ve got a game for you!
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.
There was a demo reel of the spy as well that was incredible. I played untold hours of tfc. It is likely what made me a intellimouse fan (thumb buttons for both grenade types?! It was the future).
I truly miss conc grenades. There has never been a more versatile weapon in a game.
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.
But would this game have been successful, given the kind of games that were being released at the time? It would most likely have been the end of the series.
I think it probably would have been the biggest success of the 3 games. But you’re also probably right that it likely would have been the end of the series. Bethesda making them into 1st person open world games was probably the best thing that ever happened to the series. At least in terms of achieveing widespread success.
What was your experience like? Interesting to hear from someone who tried it now as opposed to when it was released. I will add that it’s not merely a matter of nostalgia, but you also have a better grasp of the core gameplay and the general storyline beats if you’ve played it several times since release.
I played the Multiverse Edition which had a bunch of patches and fixes integrated. Including HD I believe.
I think the world building is pretty good, at least parts of it. There is some disappointingly boilerplate Tolkienesque fantasy in there, but the conflict between magic and technology is well realised and interesting and feels grounded in the world. The steampunk aesthetic is cool and I like the Victorian racism angle they’re doing with half orcs and ogres. I liked the newspapers and there are some interesting quests, like the half ogre conspiracy. I thought the peace negotiation was going to end up being absolutely amazing but in the end it is just an anticlimactic stat check.
The combat is absolutely atrocious in every possible way, from balance to animations and whether you play turn based or real time doesn’t really matter, both are horrible. It’s quite possibly the worst AI I’ve ever seen and every fight is just every creature mashing into eachother until one dies. I don’t think anyone or anything has special abilities or different AI behaviour. You can’t use Mage followers because they don’t use their magic, opting instead to charge into melee with their fists or staves.
The tech skills are the most interesting and unique aspect of the game, but involves a horrendous amount of parts collecting, crafting, inventory management and over-encumberance for very little rewards.
The companions feel extremely bare bones by modern standards and it’s extremely disappointing that none of them even get ending slides. I liked Virgil but not even he got any sort of closure at the end.
The main story was okay, it had some twists and funny moments like with Nasrudin. The whole “life was a mistake” angle by the BBEG felt a little tired to me, but maybe if playing Arcanum was the first time I came across that concept it would have blown me away.
The actual writing itself is not bad in terms of the prose and dialogue etc and the game has some funny moments.
The vast freedom you get with character building is probably the best part. I like how varied you can make your characters, although I don’t know that all builds are viable. Props for following the example of Fallout 1 and 2 and including specific “dumb dialogue”, even though I didn’t go for that personally. Having to balance tech and magic with your character build is a fun concept.
Overall I understand why it has its cult following and I’m glad to have played it, but it’s hard to recommend it to people unless they have an extremely high retro game/clunk tolerance.
I mostly agree. The combat is indeed terrible with both real-time and turn based. Turn based just feels off and pure real time is not viable. I play with real-time with pause.
I had the misfortune of playing as a technologist on my first playthrough in the early 2000s. It was really rough. Over time you can figure out strategies/approaches to make it easier, but I would argue many of them almost break the game.
I agree you need a measure of tolerance for retro gameplay/jankyness and honestly combat was subpar even for its time (Fallout 1/2 combat had many issues by modern standards, but it was definitely much more refined than in Arcanum).
To be fair to Arcanum in terms of companions Baldur’s Gate 2 was really the watershed moment in terms of how companions were treated in RPGs. Arcanum released less than a year after it and so while development timelines were shorter back then I doubt they had much time to adjust and get influenced by BG2. Fallout 1&2 doesn’t have it much better in terms of fleshed out companions.
(Fallout 1/2 combat had many issues by modern standards, but it was definitely much more refined than in Arcanum).
I would definitely recommend FO 1&2 easier than Arcanum and with fewer caveats. Maybe that’s just because I think they are fundamentally better and more important games than Arcanum though and so they are more worth suffering through some jank for. They still have a fiendishly retro interface that is quite clunky and the combat is not great, especially without mods. There is some really questionable encounter design in there and they both suffer from tremendous RNG heavy potential misery and loads and loads of reloads. Not least with random encounters.
Also the first few hours of Fallout 2 are absolutely miserable. It’s still one of my favourite games of all time though.
The whole aimed shots thing makes combat magnitudes more fun in the classic Fallouts. Maybe this is telling of when I first played the games (hint: I was a teen), but there is something about taking cheap shots at people’s groin that doesn’t get old. Becoming a Prizefighter by exclusively and indiscriminately punching your opposition in the dick is always going to be funny.
The critical hits and misses are also very entertaining, though definitely add to the notorious RNG. The animations and effects, like disintegrations and splatter, also make combat a lot more satisfying.
Black Isle Studios planned to include a dual-combat system in the game that allowed for the player to choose between real-time (Bethesda Softworks’ Fallout games and Micro Forté and 14° East’s Fallout Tactics) or turn-based combat (Fallout and Fallout 2) but real-time was only included due to Interplay’s demands.
I am most probably not good at the game, but in Wasteland 3, it felt like you needed the first round advantage, otherwise you would get blown to pieces before you could even act once. That burned the game for me.
Thanks to the design documents being leaked back in 2007 (I think) and the original designers being open to contact from some dedicated people, there are actually a couple of fan made attempts at creating what would have been Van Buren. I know of both Project Van Buren and Fallout: Yesterday.
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.
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
After being defeated, Satan joins the party and promises that the way back home lies at the top of the Color Tower, and all Arle would need to do now is scale it to return home.
Hmm.
I think “Satan as a playable character” might be one of those cultural-issue things that would come up when considering localization.
I was one of those people who bought Puyo Puyo Tetris as their first Puyo game, mainly to have a 1v1 Tetris on Switch. Turns out I really like Puyo though, but… “the tetris player is at a slight disadvantage”. Or, as this video essay explains, the problem with PPT is that the two games are fundamentally so different it’s impossible to balance them. Forcing them to play competitive online against each other, will always end up with a monoculture. In this case no one can play the first half of the Frankensteined game.
I’m sure Sega must realize that. Now they just have to care.
I think that was the only full price I’ve bought digitally, because my friend and I wanted to game share and play together.
MMO shooter seems like an undeserved concept. Buy I guess you have the scope of Defiance with the polish of an MMO. Or you have the scope of Destiny and the polish of a normal shooter.
Loadout. It was a casual PvP (and later PvE) game where you can make your own weapons with wacky combos. It was a bit pay-to-win, but I thought it was very fun. The game crashed and burned because the studio wasn’t sure what they wanted to do with it and kept ignoring fans.
I think the PvE spinoff never came out of beta. I was looking forward to it.
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.
I really wish we had gotten a full release of Dinosaur Planet. Starfox Adventures is still pretty good, but it definitely lost a lot of unique ideas with the change. Not to mention, it probably affected Nintendo’s perception of Starfox as a whole. Mucked up a cool game and damaged a franchise with that one. And I say this as a fan of Adventures.
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.
Star Wars Galaxies was such an ambitious MMO at launch.
Crazy in depth crafting system, especially with regards to pets. With how materials were randomly generated and cycled out it created a market that actually experienced booms and scarcity.
Some of the servers went almost a year before all the materials required for certain weapons spawned. And the materials all had random stats that would affect the item you crafted.
Also a surprisingly advanced and customizable… ‘class’ system, which was really more like a whole bunch of branching skill trees you could mix and match basically various ranks of… allowing many weird, but often effective, hyrbrids of ‘classes’ that… could either focus on one main ‘class’, but augment it with certain abilities from other ‘classes’…
And then the Combat Upgrade happened, and everything got streamlined.
Also… being a Jedi/Sith used to be… exceptionally rare and difficult to pull off.
IIRC, basically, some kind of insane random seed type thing gave each of your characters a very, very tiny chance of being force sensitive… but you wouldn’t even know this unless you also found basically a hidden event/questline, and then that would unlock a whole set of force skill trees, allowing for a range of jedi to sith abilities, with some kind of mix effectively being a ‘gray’ jedi.
Finally… SWG … still appears to me to be the only MMO that actually attempted to implement a working, player vs player, bounty hunting and tracking system, within an mmo… as a core game mechanic of a player ‘class’.
Though I haven’t played all mmos, so I may be wrong about that.
… Also an entire skill tree for basically being a mayor and running your own player built town. A whole skill tree dedicated to like… administrative capacity and zoning laws.
Do MMOs even… do player built cities anymore? Or did they just mostly switch over to ‘you have a house in the set aside ‘suburb’ instance’?
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.
I regularly play gw2 and in it there’s a mode called world-vs-world that’s a three way team “bigger” scale battle (bigger than 5v5 pvp) that often has hundreds of players in (I’m not sure exactly how many, I just looked it up but there’s little concrete information because it looks like the devs change it over time, but I’m guessing like 300 total players per map that often gets maxed and you have to queue for).
Players can spend a chunk of gold to enable a toggleable commander status tag on their entire account (you get 1 gold for base dailies, costs 300 gold for tag). In WvW, those commanders often lead larger scale pushes for claiming territory over a ranked “tournament” that ends and resets each month.
I’ve noticed it’s also an interesting sociology study, but from what I’ve seen, the Chinese commanders do coordinate and split up and do pincers and stuff. It seems like one big zerg isn’t as effective since yeah you’ll take what you go for no matter what, but it’s all about allocation of resources and fighting the actual battle… and that takes actual work, when a lot of people are just interested in farming out crafting materials, currencies, achievements, or other reasons. Which is fine, but part of me wants to see the game mode go 100% and see what it’s capable of.
Depending on time of day around the world and when people are awake or home from work, there are huge spikes in activity.
I never played much PlanetSide 2 because at the time my pc was a potato and I was still wrist deep into counter strike. Would those maps ever end? Or was it also like a perma-sisyphean timeless battle? Was there ever a winner?
In PlanetSide, there’s just one big map that never resets.
The team I played with would try to bring the front line to a bridge before logging off for the night. Contested bridges were notoriously difficult to cross, so you could count on no major territorial changes happening while you sleep. The zerg was content to snipe across the bridge all night, and when organized Ops resumed the next day, the bridge would simply be bypassed by mass airlift.
IIRC, there have been a few times when one of the three factions controlled the entire map, but it never lasted more than a few minutes. During the PlanetSide 2 beta test, one side came close to taking the entire map, but the whole game crashed because the entire population of all three factions was trying to pile into the same base at the same time. They eventually implemented a mechanic where if too many people were in the same place, the ones who arrived most recently would be teleported to an adjacent map tile.
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)
So far, I get about 6-8 years out of whatever generation PlayStation controller I get. PS3 controller battery eventually crapped out. PS4 controller got pretty bad stick drift.
Tried an Xbox 360 controller once, it got stick drift after only a year.
Amy recommendations? I’ve been considering getting a new controller, but I use one so rarely. For the longest time I’ve used I think an ancient PS3 controller, or my old Steam Controller (which is great for some things but sucks for others).
While technically true, you will lose the capacitive touch functionality of the sticks (the steam deck knows when your thumbs are touching the sticks) unless you desolder the old thumb caps and resolder them on the new sticks.
Edit: You’re right. It appears newer Hall Effect Sticks for the Steam Deck come with the capacitive caps pre soldered, while the OG Gulikit Sensors required desoldering the original caps and resoldering them on the replacement board. That being said, it was super easy to do, even for my butterfingers that last touched a soldering iron in highschool more than 15 years ago.
Ah ok, so you were even earlier to the Deck modding scene than me, and it has evolved toward being even easier since.
Whew!
I appreciate your pointing this out and explanation, I wouldn’t want to have been unintentionally spreading misinfo.
… Nor would I have wanted to get my own Hall Effect ‘no soldering’ kit and then learned… actually there still is soldering in some other step or on some other component, that the ‘no soldering’ kits actually just mean ‘less soldering’.
I really wanted one of those transparent Atomic Purple shells for mine. Then thought, might as well swap the sticks since it’s already opened up.
Well the transfer into the new shell requires complete disassembly, which was quite bit more involved then I anticipated. The screen is glued to the top half of the shell. Getting a bit impatient, I shattered my screen as I was trying to pry it off. You need to heat the adhesive and remove the screen before it cools. I had done a couple of phone screen repairs in the past, and let me tell you, they use a lot less adhesive and because they are so small, you’ll easily be able to pop it off before the adhesive starts becoming super sticky again. Not so much with the Steam Deck.
Well, the Deck HD (1200p) screen was only like 10€ more than an OEM replacement, so I might as well. (I quite like it, much sharper and more vibrant than the original and FSR can still give you good results in games that can’t hit the resolution, but the battery life did take a small hit).
Long story short, I love my Atomic Purple Steam Deck HD with Hall Effect Sticks, where one cosmetic mod led me to do two hardware upgrades. I don’t regret it, but I doubt I would do it again. I just love how much you can do it.
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