Pretty much everybody has a game that they were looking forward to, but was scrapped for one reason or another. Whether it be because a developer got ahead of themselves and announced something that wasn't quite ready, or the departure of top-level talent from a studio or publisher, we've seen a lot of promising video games get canned over the years, and gamers have been sharing the ones that hurt them the most.
It was Reddit user Majestic_Snow7613 that put this question to the r/gaming subreddit on Monday, and was bombarded with thousands of replies as a result. We'd be here all day if we went through all of them, but one of the more popular answers appears to be Agent, Rockstar's mysterious spy stealth game that was unceremoniously removed from the company's website in 2021 after years of uncertainty. User Rnilf explains it hit them hard as it would have been "interesting" to see what Rockstar could do with a Cold War setting.
Agent was never officially canceled by Rockstar, though the fact the company stopped renewing the license back in 2018 suggests it's dead and buried.
Half-Life 2: Episode 3 is another good shout, from user Etzell, which was officially canceled after Valve decided to abandon episodic game development and create the Source 2 engine. Another user described Valve's shift away from game development as "the biggest upset of the past 20 years," and while Half Life: Alyx went some way to remedying the lack of new games, it didn't quite cut the mustard that a new mainline Half Life would.
Gamers Share Their Most Heartbreaking Video Game Cancelations
There are plenty of examples in this thread of games that were scrapped due to development struggles or conflict too, one of those being Scalebound. Platinum's Hideki Kamiya explained a couple of years ago that the reason Scalebound was scrapped was because the development team "lacked the necessary know-how" at the time, but at least the desire from Platinum to work on Scalebound is still there, so you never really know.
User Derc_On_Reddit brings up another example of development turmoil getting a game scrapped with Silent Hills. We all know about Kojima's strained relationship with Konami at this point, and what makes Silent Hills' cancelation even worse is that we got a teaser for the full game in P.T, arguably one of the best horror games out there. Another user even admits that it "still hurts me that the game is gone" to this day.
Like I said earlier, we spend all day going through promising scrapped video games, such as titles like Alice: Asylum, the unannounced Deus Ex: Mankind Divided sequel, Star Wars: 1313 (which was scrapped after Dead Space developer Visceral Studios was shut down), and many more. All we can do is sit back, imagine what might have been, and try to keep our faint hopes of a revival alive and well.
