Top 10 ambitious games that were not released for a variety of reasons

The announcement of a cool game from a famous developer is always a holiday for any gamer. True, sometimes it happens that game makers overestimate their strength — and then we either get a trimmed version of the original promises, or we get nothing at all. Unfortunately, the latter also happens quite often. We've put together a top list of potentially cool games that never saw the light of day for stupid reasons.

More than ten years have passed since the announcement of Star Citizen, and the amount spent on it has exceeded $500 million (about 37 billion rubles). The space simulator was presented not only as an MMO with fantastic combat, a complex economic system and complete freedom of action, but also promised a rich campaign for one player. True, little is known about all this now.

As of today, there is no approximate release date or any plot details. Simply put, players do not know what awaits them at all, and pay for a «pig in a poke.» By the way, they are going to publish the project with this money, and not with the help of a publisher.

The reason why this happened is quite simple: the Cloud Imperium Games studio overestimated its capabilities and, after the announcement, admitted that the progress of creating video games had not yet reached the level to realize all its plans. But still, the company assures that the game is in an active stage of development and will sooner or later see the light of day.

Fans of the Fable series were delighted when a new part of their favorite game was announced in 2013. Unfortunately, the joy did not last long, as Lionhead Studios, which was under the wing of Microsoft at that time, announced its closure.

Why did this happen? There aren't many details, but it appears Microsoft didn't think the game was ambitious enough. Dissatisfied fans of the series, alas, were unable to influence the decision in any way.

The funny thing is that after some time, work on the series was transferred to Playground Games, which announced the imminent return of Fable. But the development company is also in no hurry to reveal details, blaming the slow development on the engine, its inexperience, or something else.

Everything here is quite prosaic. In 2012, LucasArts worked hard on the game (the main character of which, by the way, was supposed to be Boba Fett), and in 2013 a deal was made between LucasFilm and Disney.

Alas, Disney not only closed the project, but also disbanded the LucasArts team, wanting to redirect resources to projects that were more interesting to them. Considering the current reputation of the company among fans of Star Wars, this decision can be called reckless.

In 2022, a gameplay video from the canceled game was published, which caused even more regret: the world apparently lost a real hit.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 made a lot of noise upon its release. Moreover, it was even predicted to receive the title of «Game of the Year» according to all gaming publications, if in 2017 Larian Studios had not been prevented by the fresh The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. One way or another, the developers decided not to despair, and therefore soon announced Divinity: Fallen Heroes, which was supposed to continue the story of the main characters. The work began in collaboration with Logic Artists.

And after a while, this is how it turned out: both companies announced that they were overworked, that development was too difficult, and so on and so forth, whatever else they could come up with, and they froze the project, each concentrating on their own affairs. As a result, nothing has been heard about Divinity: Fallen Heroes since 2019. It's a pity.

There are legends about this game. Some have already lost all hope of seeing it, while others continue to anxiously wait for a new trailer at every E3. Since 2018, however, there has been no news.

It is possible that after the release of Starfield some news will appear, but, as practice shows, it is better not to trust Bethesda in such matters. Well, there is no need to despair! At least we can be sure that we will see Skyrim 2 sooner or later.

This game became famous for being developed jointly with Steven Spielberg. Alas, this did not save Electronic Arts Los Angeles from collapse. The fact is that the gameplay was very similar to Mirror's Edge. And if everything was fine there, then everything began to fall out of the hands of the Project LMNO developers. I wanted incredible variety of action, parkour, shootouts, a twisted plot — everything in general. As a result, the publisher gave its vote to Mirror's Edge, and Project LMNO was closed.

The funny thing is that Electronic Arts itself commented that it doesn't want to release new games now (it was 2010). They probably decided then to focus on developing the next catalog for The Sims 3.

Blizzard started developing a shooter based on Starcraft many times — and canceled it just as many times. The game, codenamed Ares, was made on the Overwatch engine — they say it's faster. There were even ready-made gameplay prototypes in 2017, although development did not proceed, let's say, very smoothly.

As a result, Blizzard again decided to close the project for unknown reasons — the company refused to comment. But, it's worth noting that Overwatch 2 was announced quite soon after that, so it's not hard to guess.

The demo of the upcoming Silent Hills, as we know, was a gamble by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro. The demo quickly gained recognition from fans, but the game was still canceled, so much so that P.T. was even removed from the PlayStation games catalog.

The reason for this was the conflict between Konami and Hideo Kojima. There are many versions, one of which claims that Kojima-san did not want to use the Fox Engine, and this became the basis for the cancellation of the game.

It is difficult to say what actually happened there, but the Genius was indeed soon fired from Konami and concentrated on producing his own games. Guillermo del Toro limited himself to unflattering statements towards the Japanese publisher.

Beyond Good and Evil 2 was announced back in 2008, but has not yet been released. However, it has not been cancelled. Ubisoft either abandoned development or denied it and swore that closed alpha tests were even taking place within the company.

Insider Tom Henderson commented: «The game is unlikely to be released in the next two years, the development team does not have a unified creative concept and direction.» Well, at least fans of the first part still have hope of seeing it someday.

The Half-Life series can be called long-suffering. There are countless memes that exist about Half-Life 3, although some fans, even after Half-Life: Alyx, do not stop believing in the best.

However, if no one actually announced the third part, then Half-Life 2: Episode Three had a very specific announcement in 2006. As you might guess, this did not end well: the game was cancelled. There were many reasons and comments: reluctance to do things «just like that» and «for the quarterly report,» dissatisfaction with the developments and the company's decision to move in the other direction. Gabe Newell even clarified what this side is, citing Team Fortress 2 as an example.

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Although this top list includes not only canceled projects, but also those that have been constantly postponed over the years, it is safe to say that none of them would be bad. On the other hand, perhaps the rejection of one or another game gave rise to another development that later became a hit. Which game from our selection were you most looking forward to? Or maybe you're still waiting.