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Unfinished Adventures
Obiwan Kenobi writes "Just Adventure has an interesting article on unfinished games that were nixed in mid-development. Amongst the casualties are incomplete trilogies, an off beat 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea game, Blizzard's ill-fated Warcraft Adventures and the Star Trek title "Secret of Vulcan Fury.""
Why no mention of DNF? When it was cancelled earlier this year (early Sept?) it marked the death of one of the most awaited games of all time.
Actually, while everything they said about Warcraft Adventures was true, they did leave out one bit of information: the storyline was too important to the Warcraft mythos to drop entirely. Warcraft Adventures was later reworked and became the book Lord of the Clans by Christie Golden. The events of the book are also referenced in the orcs' backstory in Warcraft III.
Just my $.02...
You obviously don't know your Vulcan history. In the time before Surak, Vulcans were an emotional and extremely destructive species (similar to the Romulans). Surak was able to bring logic and peace to his people but only by burying all emotion.
Although it isn't an Adventure game, Earthbound 64 lingered too long in development and was nixed by Nintendo. MANY fans were anger/saddened/enfuriated and still want it to come back.
They're talking about ADVENTURE GAMES?!
You and the people who posted below obviously never read the article...it's about a weapon, not an emotion. And after all, one doesn't need to be emotional in killing, simply motivated.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
Neither of those games are.
I know a lot of RPG geeks are awaiting a new game in the Lunar series and are still wanting to know if all plans for Lunar 3 are cancelled, or if there will one day be a new Lunar game.
There has been rumor after rumor regarding Lunar 3. After Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete came out for Playstation in the US, there were statements coming from both Game Arts (the Japanese makers of Lunar) and Working Designs (who localized the Lunar games for the Sega CD and PS) that we would soon see work beginning on Lunar 3, probably for the Playstation 2.
It has been 2 years since Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete has come out, and no new information can be obtained about Lunar 3. Working Designs has been silent about the issue, and there doesn't seem to be anything from Game Arts on it.
Lunar Legends for GBA is translated by UbiSoft (probably because WD doesn't have the lisence to do GBA games), but that is a remake of Lunar 1, not a sequel.
It seems like Lunar 3 would be an instant hit, but both Working Designs and Game Arts have been silent about it.
About two weeks ago I saw a message regarding Lunar Legends on the Working Designs message board. It was explained that Working Designs had sold the rights to some of their original Lunar content back to Game Arts (Working designs apparently owned the rights to some of the things they did in their localization, including the name of the White Dragon, Quark) so that this stuff could be included in the US GBA version of Lunar Legend.
Someone on the board asked if this transfer of the rights meant there would be no Lunar 3, to which I did not see an answer.
What was not clear to me was if Working Designs had really SOLD the rights to these things back to Game Arts, or if they had LISENCED these things.
I'm really starting to believe that Game Arts has perhaps abandonded the idea of making Lunar 3. If Game Arts really has abandoned the idea of Lunar 3, then it explains why Working Designs would easily want to sell back otherwise useless IP for some quick cash.
I hope that this is not the case, but it seems like it may be.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
The Sierra chick came in and was showing me some stuff they were working on - a little rendered (Actual Game Screens!) movie about a game called Outpost. It was supposed to be the end-all of simulation/strategy/resource management games. It looked really cool, and the Sierra chick told me about all the things you were going to be able to do in it.
A couple of years passed, and Outpost finally came out. PC Gamer reamed it a new one, and so did this guy. All the features I heard and looked forward to were gone. In their place, a sterile, unfun, buggy pile.
Outpost 2 came out to much better reviews, and there was talk of Outpost 3, but as all the links to it are dead, I believe that this may go in the 'Unfinished Adventures' catagory.
Volition was working on "Descent 4", but it was later revealed to be Red Faction.
So it wasn't given up, exactly... more like a change of focus.
Also another unfinished trilogy, the wonderful Freespace series.
Volition made two of the greatest space sim fighter games with good storylines. They put in a nice cliffhanger at the end of Freespace 2, then that was it.
They said not enough copies were sold of Freespace 2 (Which I would blame on bad marketing) for Interplay to warrant a third. So everyone who was a fan of the game was left with an unfinished story.
Go to fansforultima.com and download the fan created patches for Ultima 9. If you're an Ultima fan, you owe it to yourself to see a proper ending to the great series.
The dialogue patch completely fills in the gaping plot holes of U9, and doesn't treat the player like a complete Ultima newbie. The monster and economy patches help out with game balance.
Best of all, an anonymous fan created a patch that addresses just about every technical problem in the game.
Take a few minutes and download those patches, and you'll see how good Ultima 9 should have been.
SimsVille was a cross between The Sims and Sim City. It offered both a macroscopic view of a town where you could manage Sim life on a neighborhood level and a microscopic one where you could manage Sims and families (although not as granular as you can in The Sims). It died a horrible death sometime in 2001 after Maxis decided it conflicted with what they were already doing with The Sims, Sim City and the upcoming Sims Online. Apparently it was pretty much in a pre-release stage but who knows if anyone will ever see it.
liB
I worked at Interplay at the time of Secret of Vulcan Fury.
:)
DeForest Kelly was too ill by the time of the voice recording to actual record his lines. He never did record SoVF dialogue. They used a voice actor in his place.
The main reason SoVF was cancelled was:
a) Not enough progress had been made on the game due to a couple changes of directions in the design, change in management on the project and the typical delays associated with game development.
b) Budgetary reasons and the decline of the adventure game market. They had spent millions on the project, and it needed millions more to be completed (mostly due to art: lots and lots of animation time, and lots of rendering time). They did a basic P&L (profit and loss statement) and the project was not going to make money.
As cool as the project was, Interplay could not afford to develop a game that would automatically lose money over games that would only potentially lose money...
pax,
-Chris