Many veteran players may remember that during the booming period of domestic online games, a large number of online games were launched, of course, many of which were classics.
However, there are hot sales, naturally there are stillbirths halfway through, and some of the new works in the online game stillbirth seem to be a very pity. Today we will take a look at what magical experiences these stillborn online games have.
Project Titan
If you have to say one of the most unfortunate game items that have been cut, titans say second, it is difficult to have another game to say first. The game Blizzard began to develop in 2007, invested at least more than 150 employees, spent hundreds of millions of dollars, and wrote more than 4 million pieces of code.
In this game, Blizzard boldly uses the entire earth as the place where the story takes place, and they plan to open up parts and cities in the United States, Europe, and Australia for the first time, and then gradually expand the map to Asia and Africa with the update of the game expansion pack, and finally expand to the world little by little, so as to build a huge open world, so that players from all over the world can play together.
As an epoch-making online game created by Blizzard Entertainment, for a long time, "Titan" was regarded by Blizzard as the successor of World of Warcraft and the benchmark of the next generation of MMORPG games. But in any case, the pie was too big, even for Blizzard, you know, it was still 2007, and neither the development of technology nor the hardware was enough to support the production of this game.
From 2007 to 2013, after spending $100 million on development, the dream finally woke up.
In 2014, Blizzard officially announced the cancellation of the "mysterious" game development project. After 7 years of exploration and development, the game did not even leave an official name, but only a code name called "Project Titan".
Heaven 3
In the early online game circle, the "Paradise" series has a large number of loyal fans, a large number of exquisite CG animations and the graceful posture of the little sisters in the CosPlay circle, which attracts a large number of LSP players to remember it, and many players look forward to the arrival of "Paradise 3".
However, developer NCsoft announced the development of "Paradise 3" in 2008 and was originally scheduled to release it in 2011, but in the process of development, it generated a loss of $1 billion due to the leakage of core technology. The leak caused four core developers, including the former director of the "Paradise 3" development office, and their affiliated company Bluehole Studio to compensate NCSOFT 2 billion won (equivalent to about 11.85 million yuan) in damages.
The subsequent "Paradise 3" development team was dissolved, and the main focus was on "Paradise Eternity", which was currently spending 50 billion won (about 300 million yuan) and was under development. In the end, the game was stillborn, causing a sigh.
Endless Quest Next
I believe that many old players know that "Endless Quest" is such a game, it was born in 1999, developed by Sony Online Entertainment, and today, 20 years later, the game still maintains stable operation and updates.
Blizzard's top brass was also a heavy addict to the game, and many of the inspiration for World of Warcraft also came from this game, so when Sony announced in 2013 that "Endless Quest Next" had been developed for four years, it attracted widespread attention and discussion, hoping that he could once again usher in a new era of MMORPG.
However, in the end, players are not waiting for the game to be listed, but the game project is cut. In 2016, the game developer announced that it would stop developing the game for 17 years, and the reason for cutting it was that "we understand the players' high expectations for Endless Quest NEXT, but in the final review, we still found that the game actually had no way to meet the expectations of players." ”
Seriously, according to this standard, most of the domestic games probably don't need to be online.
Rocky 2
Speaking of "Rocky", I think you are no stranger to it, the MMORPG "Rocky" created by the famous game studio DevCAT under South Korean Nexon has a grand world view and an incomparable rich system, a unique gameplay, and was supported by many players at that time.
Due to the good reputation of "Rocky", "Rocky 2" has also made many players look forward to it. In 2013, when the 17173 reporter interviewed Mr. Kim Dong-ken, the director of NEXON, he also said that the development progress of "Rocky 2" has reached 70%, and will soon meet with players, and at the latest in 2014.
However, when the development was going well, the Rocky 2 development team changed its name and will work with NC to develop it, including Kenmoto Kim Dong, the development director of Rocky 2, and all the developers, at that time, it was said that NEXON and NCsoft would work together to create Rocky 2. In January 2014, NEXON officially announced the suspension of development of the "Rocky" sequel "Lodge 2", which was jointly developed with NCsoft.
Chivalrous 3
In that era when the end game was still in full swing, "Chivalrous Road" can also be regarded as a more special one. "Chivalrous Way" follows the traditional history and martial arts culture as much as possible in terms of world view background, sect setting, martial arts system, etc., and creates an atmosphere of conflict between the jianghu through the confrontation of the chivalrous camp, and the background music is also full of charm and impressive. However, the most commendable thing about it is the combination of character growth and combat with the meridians and mental methods of traditional medicine and martial arts.
In 2007, DreamWorks launched Chivalrous 2. As a sequel, the second generation is still remarkable in terms of gameplay innovation, and has made many improvements and improvements to character attributes, martial arts systems, meridian systems, etc., and the game experience has been further enriched.
However, when it came to "Chivalrous Road 3", due to the lack of 3D online game development experience of the DreamWorks team, the first 3D work "Chivalrous Road 3" entered the testing stage and the feedback was not satisfactory. It was later developed by the acquired Beijing Shenlongyou Company, which had targeted the production of the 3D online game "Dragon World" represented by Baiyou.
In 2013, DreamWorks revealed that Chivalrous 3 was being remade, but the product disappeared.
King of Fighters Online Edition
The famous "King of Fighters" has even produced an online version, I believe that many arcade players are difficult to believe, the reason why "King of Fighters Online Edition" is not well known to the majority of players, mainly because it is completely a stillborn online game.
Back in 2003, KOFONLINE was co-operated by developer UNOTAC and Japan's SNK PLAYMORE. However, the experience has been full of twists and turns, not only during the test period of the game there are various bugs, the official repeatedly updated and modified it, and even in July, there was also a rupture between UNOTAC and SNK, and "King of Fighters Online" can no longer use the name of the KOF series characters.
In other words, due to SNK's recovery of the KOF copyright, the characters in the game such as Kusanagi Kyo, Unknown Fire Dance, and Jin Jiapan have the original portrait, but they cannot be called "Kusanagi Kyo" and "Unknown Fire Dance", which is a dog blood setting that makes it difficult for many players to understand and accept.
Then, the official website issued an announcement, the name of the service interruption, in fact, the official suspension of service, after which the game has not been able to open, completely disappeared, and players can only expect SNK to spend more time on the old line to do not go wrong again.
Mega Man OL
In that era of online game blowout, as long as it was a decent single-player game, or even an arcade game, it was necessary to share in the online game market, but most of them could not escape the fate of failure, and one of the classic cases was "Mega Man Online".
As a casual game with a long history, Capcom (Capcom) launched "Mega Man X" as early as 1987, and won the pursuit of a large number of players, so in May 2010, south Korean NeoWiz company and Capcom signed a high-profile contract to start the research and development of "Mega Man Online".
Unfortunately, the cooperation is less than 3 years, and the two companies officially announced the termination of the project in March 2013, which also means that the online game of this classic side-scrolling arcade game will be completely cut off.
Looking back at the experience of arcade online games such as "King of Fighters Online Edition", and then look at the bowl of cold rice of the "King of Fried Cold Rice" Capcom, which was finally steamed off, and sure enough, the cup of online games is really not so easy to get.
Wonderland Legends 2
"Wonderland RO" is definitely a valuable memory for most post-80s and post-90s players, and the game's excellent gameplay, classic class settings, and diverse interactive mechanics allow players to immerse themselves in it.
As a sequel to RO, the "Wonderland 2" international costume launched in 2009 is extremely poorly produced, a large number of traces of imitation of World of Warcraft, bugs flying around without modification, and a variety of tedious task settings, all of which make players miserable.
In the end, the operation of the international service was suspended after only 2 years, and only Steam can still be downloaded and played (but it seems that there is no one anymore) and the national service was originally scheduled to be represented by the ninth city, and finally failed to go online.
Bubble Hall 2
The game "Bubble Hall" was a game that was not yet popular in the millennium, and games such as "Red Alert 2", "CS" and "Legend" dominated the screen for a long time in Internet cafes, and its popularity was extremely high.
Taking advantage of this momentum, the operator Shanda laid out early and hoped to create another miracle with the Korean game company NEXON through "Bubble Hall 2".
Unfortunately, in the face of this huge "fat meat", major operators flocked to South Korea to negotiate game agency rights with NEXON. Despite the great success of running Bubble Hall, Shanda is not the only option, so it can only increase the weight and compete with each other, and there is no other way.
And the long research and development work led to the continuous postponement of the test schedule, coupled with NEXON's half-heartedness finally in exchange for the disappearance of the popularity of "Bubble Hall 2" and the end of the game's stillbirth, perhaps this is also a kind of luck, at least the perfect image of "Bubble Hall" is still in the player's memory.
Command & Conquer OL
If the previous online games were all due to the developer's own death, then the premature death of "Command and Conquer OL" is the embodiment of the developer's conscience, because the player's "dislike" directly let it GG!
Command & Conquer has always been one of the benchmarks for RTS, but making it an online game is a big challenge for developers.
The Survival Games studios in charge of the Command & Conquer OL project did develop the game with the combined efforts of the team members, but received a lot of negative feedback during the private beta phase, explaining the reason for the cancellation in a blog post by its head of the studio: "Your (test players') feedback in the internal test is clear — we're not making the game you want to play. After a difficult decision, we had to stop working on the game. ”
Following the announcement, the "conscientious" and "responsible" studio also announced its dismissal, meaning the game would never be able to meet with players again.
In the development process, I realized the problem of my own game and let the player decide the fate of the game, this attitude is indeed worth learning from many game companies, after all, the game that is too bad really does not need to take out the titanium alloy dog eyes of blind players.
Fire Falls
The MMO+FPS online game "Fire Falls" developed by the Ninth City was once called "a great game" by Zhu Jun, and did "Blizzard did not make an open world PVP", and dared to compete with Blizzard when the game was not yet filmed.
However, the success of the game's debut was only a flash in the pan, and the competitive game mode that took a lot of time and effort to create later did not buy it by many players, and even attracted a lot of scolding and feedback.
After spending 5 years and spending 100 million US dollars (equivalent to nearly 700 million yuan in 2015), this "Warcraft with Guns" completely consumed the patience of players due to the backward concept of the game itself, the gameplay that could not keep up with the times, and its various bugs.
In the end, "Fire Falls" directly hit the street after the internal test in July 2015, and even the nine cities were lacking in skill.
Halo OL
"Halo" for XBox players is basically a must-have for installation, boot must play the game, because the plot gameplay is very outstanding, but also attracted many PC players, many fans.
With the huge influence of Halo, Microsoft developed Halo OL, a first-person shooter online game based on the Halo 3 engine.
However, after the closed test in the Russian region was carried out in 2015, this masterpiece was directly shut down! As for the reason for the shutdown, Microsoft did not give too much explanation, so it also did not have access to the domestic market.
However, what Microsoft did not expect was that the game was "revived" by the enthusiast organization after 3 years of shutdown, and the emergence of the mod they created called EIDewrito allowed foreign players to play this masterpiece.
Although enthusiastic fan players did not hesitate to develop Halo OL at their own expense, they could not withstand the "copyright" hurdle, and Microsoft did not care whether Halo OL would bring them benefits, and took action to stop Halo OL.
Titanfall OL
"Titanfall OL" can be said to be a product of a powerful combination, the developer is the famous EA plus "Dungeons and Dragons", "Adventure Island" and other gods of the developer Of Korea NEXON, the news shocked half of the game circle.
But this game, which was specially built for the Asian market, was forced to be cancelled after 3 years of development, which makes people wonder but still feel reasonable.
The main problem is that under the combination of the two powers, the game developed specifically for the Asian market is still not suitable for Asian players after a limited time test.
It is reasonable that EA, a company that is good at destroying classics, no matter who develops the game with, the probability of destroying the original work is inherently 100% higher than others.
So if EA really wants to come up with a good online game, it may be more reliable to give all the development permissions to the studio and its programmers.
Nine Yin True Scriptures 2
The last game I want to talk about is the game in which the snail painting cake king once drew cakes - "Nine Yin True Scriptures 2".
At that time, "Nine Yin True Classics" built online jianghu with the concept of true martial arts, gathered 26 gate schools, and took the lead in creating a series of elements of the era of martial arts online games, such as light gong fighting, full free air fighting, non-level offline cultivation, innovative PK, jianghu adventures, etc. There was still a certain reputation among players, so many players were actually looking forward to "Nine Yin True Classics 2". "Nine Yin True Scriptures 2" also won the most anticipated online game of 2019.
Time has passed, 5 years have passed. The development progress of "Jiuyin Zhenjing 2" stopped in 19 years, and Weibo also stopped updating, although in an interview in 2021, it was said that "Jiuyin Zhenjing 2" has changed engines three times in the past few years and is still doing it, but there has been no new news.
Some players expect the game to be suddenly reborn like the previous "Immortal World", but more players are pessimistic. It feels like there is a high probability that there will be no news.
Talked about so many stillbirths in the online game in one breath, in the whole game circle is actually only a rarity, every year there are online games to pounce on the street, but the development company is tirelessly working hard to create, it is not difficult to see the huge commercial value of online games, which can be seen from the publicity of "is a brother to cut me" and "a knife 999 full of dragon slaying knives".
However, the game should still consider the player's preferences, the real good game is addictive, the development of the game not only to the player, but also to keep up with the times, otherwise spend tens of millions of years to spend tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars, and finally can only be stillborn.
What other online games are stillborn?