Your favorite game and why you think it got canceled/died

I didn’t read LOTR until well after playing Warlord and so never made the connections. Wasn’t there a Horse Lords faction in the original? I never knew they were modelled on the Rohirm from LOTR.

Oh :( I wish that had been made. I loved their games.

Originally the plan was to have sequels set in different countries like France, but even long before it was released it had gone so far over budget that they were desperate just to get one game shipped before they went bankrupt.

Mercenaries 3. RIP Pandemic, one of the greatest studios of all time.

Was going to post that one myself. Pandemic is probably my most missed studio. Damn shame.

Thank you for the explanation. I didn’t know it had gone that much over budget.

Like others, FPS Football was my first loss. Like others, I was in an online league with rosters and playbooks

My 2nd is the original Neverwinter Nights. Now I know there was a NWN2 and all sorts of DnD after that, but the building tools and DM kit for the original NWN has never been equaled.

I’m sad Lost In Blue appears to be dead. The survival genre seems to have boomed recently, but is mostly in the service of brutal, death filled survival. The Lost In Blue style Hatchet / Robinson Crusoe “fun adventure” survival doesn’t seem to be very popular.

Take a look at Subnautica - Its survival, but not brutal, death filled. In fact, there is pretty much no combat in it at all, @CLWheeljack

OMG yes a million billion times!

The RTS genre…because fuck tower defense, and infinitely more so MOBAs too.

This old thread goes to a link with Arnold Hendrick, the designer of Darklands. In the first part he goes into how it spiraled out of control. Too much of dreaming what it could be, too little of how to actually execute it. Even the main programmer was like “WTF”.

Thanks for the links to the three Darklands interviews. I never watched them before.

If you want to ask him any questions yourself, he’s answering in this Steam thread.

http://steamcommunity.com/app/327930/discussions/0/343788552550787364/

Thank you for the link. It’s good to know Arnold is still around and interested in enlightening those seeking knowledge of Darklands.

If this were a just universe, Sid Meier’s Sim Golf would be a franchise as evergreen as Civilization. The underlying design is rock solid and some of the things it does are incredibly sophisticated. What happened?

Well, first, the engine it’s built on feels like it’s held together with duct tape. I think this is a quality that a lot of Sid’s solo (or mostly-solo) projects have. Transitions in game state and UI appear to be in a competition to be named the Clunkiest Ever. Occasionally, the game just does something inexplicable–hey, Sid, I get why when I’m not on the fairway I can’t select my fancier shots… But why do you sometime let me select one of those shots and then when I try to aim you reset me to the default shot and make a BOING! noise?? UI in general in the game is rarely better than serviceable. Why doesn’t the Escape key do anything?

Then there’s all the bolted-on Sims features. Characters don’t only have golfing skills and attitude bars, they have personality traits. I guess these determine whether they get along with their partners and whether the two end up completing a “story” about dead goldfish or UFOs or wearing women’s underwear? And, dear God, these are the ugliest character portraits you’ve seen since a Might & Magic RPG! Make it stop!

Throw in a passel of bugs and some minor balancing issues, and you’d think SimGolf must be a failure. But it’s not. It will suck away dozens of hours of your life. That’s a testament to the Sid Meier magic. But, boy, does this game need a reboot.

It doesn’t appear to have been mentioned yet in this thread, but

Armageddon Empires.

I weep for the lack of a modern version.

But @Vic_Davis has made clear he doesn’t have time to learn Unity or a modern engine, nor does he care to hire someone. (There was an attempt at an homage version, but as far as I can tell it failed; never tried it).

I get it, I understand. I weep nonetheless.

There was this remake that was published by Matrix whose name I forgot, but it lost most of the charm, and then contents of the original.
But the game is working really fine still, so I challenge your notion that it’s dead!

Edit: haha, so unimpressed by Last Days of Old Earth I failed to link it, sorry XD

I meant dead as a franchise, which I think it could have been. As in, Armageddon Empires 2!

And yes, I link to the “remake” in my post – Last Days of Old Earth.

Maybe I’ll try to make a modern Armageddon Empires engine over the Godot Engine or something if I find the time. And the energy. And then give it to @Vic_Davis so he can do his magic. ;)